The Evening Standard phoned me for a comment on Castro’s retirement yesterday. This is what they printed today.

Fidel Castro should be remembered as part of the Stalinist tradition: the antithesis of authentic socialism. Within a year of his coming to power in Cuba, workers had been denied the freedom to form their own organisations.
Since the fall of the USSR, Cuba has developed into a military state capitalist society along the lines of China, securing investment from countries such as Spain and Canada.
Raul Castro has been central to this project, and as power transfers formally to him little is likely to change immediately. The repression of the Castro years will remain.
The banana plantation unions in central America, worker-occupied factories in Argentina and the trade union movement in Bolivia, which deposed two governments within three years, show that the independent Left tradition is alive in Latin America. The hope for Cuba must be that a labour movement, independent of both the Castro regime and of the US, emerges against all the odds.