AFP, HAVANA:  Cubans will likely forever remember where they were when Fidel Castro’s death was announced. The music stopped across the dance-happy city and people rushed to awaken loved ones with the news.
Parties shut down and the bustling streets emptied after President Raul Castro, Fidel’s 85 year-old younger brother, made the announcement on state television around midnight Friday.
“Everyone was stunned. It was a very sad moment,” said Yaimara Gomez, who was working in a hotel at the time.Unlike various occasions over the years, this time it was not a hoax: the man most Cubans grown up with as their country’s leader had died.“With great pain I appear before you to inform our people and our friends in the Americas and the world that today, November 25 at 10:29 pm, the Commander in Chief of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, passed away,” the president said.He gave no details of the cause or circumstances of the death. It was assumed Castro died at his Havana home where he lived after stepping aside from power in 2006 following intestinal surgery. Car washer Marco Antonio Diez, 20, was out at a party when the music suddenly stopped.“I went home and woke up everyone, saying: ‘Fidel has died,’” he told AFP. “My mother was astonished.”
As the news spread, crowds danced and celebrated in the streets of Miami, home to the largest Cuban exile community and their descendants.
But in Havana, locals mourned.“Losing Fidel is like losing a father—the guide, the beacon of this revolution,” said Michel Rodriguez, a 42-year-old baker.
He was still in his shop late at night when he heard the news on the radio.The government decreed nine days of mourning and ordered flags to be flown at half-mast.
Castro’s ashes will be buried in the historic southeastern city of Santiago de Cuba on December 4 after a four-day procession through the country, it added.
Santiago was the scene of Castro’s ill-fated first revolution attempt in 1953.As the news spread around the world, local media seemed taken by surprise: even the state newspaper Granma took about five hours to put the story on its website.Castro was loathed by many for stifling dissent, but loved by many others for providing free universal healthcare and education.
He came to power in 1959 as a black-bearded, cigar-chomping 32-year-old in a revolution against former dictator Fulgencio Batista.Seventy percent of people in this island of 11 million people have known no other leader than Fidel.
“I was born under this revolution and I am truly sad,” Micaela Consuegra, a street-sweeper of 55.“He was a unique man, with his faults and his virtues. It is a great loss. He is a man who will never be forgotten, by his friends or his enemies.”Blanca Cabrera, a 56-year-old housewife, came out into her garden to smoke a cigarette after hearing the news.
“It is hard to believe that Fidel has gone,” she told AFP, her face clearly showing her distress.She recalled Castro’s last public speech, to the Communist Party congress earlier this year, when he forecast that his “turn” to pass away was coming.“Soon I will end up like everyone does,” Castro said at the congress in April.“He prepared the people for this moment,” Cabrera said.“But he will still be with us for years to come. That soothes the pain.”

A hero or a tyrant?

For opponents, he was a tyrant who locked his people in a socialist prison and threw away the key. To his supporters (and around the world they were surely as numerous), he was a revolutionary, an anti-imperialist and a hero. Indisputably however Fidel Castro was one of the most remarkable political figures of his age, according to independent.co.uk.
For better or worse Castro, who died late on Friday local time aged 90, belonged in the company of Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-tung, Nasser and Nehru, as an embodiment of 20th century nationalism. His power base was no more than a lush island in the Caribbean. But there in Cuba he created the first communist state in the western hemisphere, important enough to be the epicentre of our closest brush with nuclear conflagration.
In the process he became the world’s longest lasting head of government, for 50 years successfully defying the United States. Indeed like his country, Castro was defined, at least as much as by anything he did, by the sheer proximity of the  superpower 90 miles to the north on the other side of the Straits of Florida.
For him, like his countrymen, there was no escaping the shadow of America. The National Archives in Washington even contain a 1940 letter from Castro to Franklin Roosevelt, in stiff, slightly florid handwriting, asking the president to send him a $10 bill. For his pains, the 13-year-old Cuban schoolboy received a reply but, alas, no money.
Then there was Castro’s love of baseball, a sport that Cubans to this day adore. At Havana University, he was a decent player, but no more. Reports that Castro had trials in the US with two major league teams are false – inventions  to go with the surely apocryphal report of an American baseball scout, that as a pitcher, the future El Comandante had “lots of enthusiasm, but not much of an arm. Suggest he go into another business.”
He did indeed. Into the business of Marxism and insurrection. Quickly, Castro emerged as a leader of the leftwing, mainly student radicals who sought to overthrow the US-supported dictator Fulgencio Batista. The struggle would seven years, and begin with not a victory but a defeat, the failed attack on the Moncada military barracks on July 26 1953.
Castro was tried and sentenced to 15 years in jail but released after only two – deemed by Batista, absurdly, to constitute no threat to the regime. In 1955 he travelled to Mexico to enlist support for the cause, and became friends with an Argentinian medical student named Che Guevara who was keen to join the Cuban revolution.
The rest is the stuff of legend: the return to Cuba with 81 fellow insurgents on the rickety ship Granma, the establishment of a rebel stronghold in the mountains, and the guerilla campaign that eventually toppled Batista in January 1959. By then Castro and Che were international celebrities, lionised, romanticised and vilified according to taste. They have remained so ever since.