SERIES - After sixty-six years of revolution, Cuba is sinking deeper and deeper into poverty. The only thing that works is state repression.

He stands on the balcony of City Hall, surrounded by rebels in their olive-green uniforms and men in shirts. The people below in the square cheer. Everyone looks happy and liberated. Only he, Fidel, looks serious and shouts: "The revolution begins now!"

On this New Year's Day 1959, a new era began in Cuba. The country woke up that morning to find dictator Fulgencio Batista, who had ruled the country for almost seven years, gone. He had fled overnight by plane to Santo Domingo with his wife, his entourage, and suitcases full of money. His last words were: "Gentlemen, that's it." Batista was succeeded by Fidel Castro. With his revolution. Another dictatorship.

Fidel has been dead for nine years, but his brother Raúl (94) is still alive and is ensuring that democracy and freedom do not come to Cuba under any circumstances. The Castros' dictatorship has now lasted sixty-six years. Ten times as long as Batista's. And longer than the previous era, when Cuba had been a democracy for fifty years – a young and fragile one, with flaws and mistakes, but also with considerable successes.

Cuba's democracy began in the early 1900s, after four hundred years of colonialism, slavery, piracy, and wars. The final, decisive war against Spanish rule was costly—and would hardly have been won without the support of the United States. However, historians still disagree on this point.

What is undisputed, however, is that the Americans' aid was not selfless. They had concrete interests and briefly occupied Cuba twice to pursue them. Their conditions were: You rebuild your country in a way that also benefits us; you try democracy, and we will keep an eye on you and intervene if it doesn't suit us. Cuba signed the treaties reluctantly. They chose the lesser of two evils: better a life of semi-freedom than living with a foreign master in the house again.

Fifty eventful years followed. The building of a nation. America watched over the small island like a big, stern brother, buying sugar, rum, and cigars at preferential prices and delivering progress: railroads, telephones, cars, television, refrigerators. Cuba always had modern goods from the USA first, before they were exported to other countries. A diverse civil society grew: political parties, unions, entrepreneurs, intellectuals, a free press. During these fifty years, the people elected a dozen presidents of various political stripes, both decent and corrupt.

In 1940, the country set a milestone. It adopted a new constitution, one of the most progressive in the world, with civil, political, and economic rights unmatched by many other countries. The democratic process of creating the Carta Magna was an event in itself. Representatives of all parties, from the Liberals to the Communists, sat on the Constitutional Council. Their debates were broadcast live on radio.

One of the pioneers of this constitution was Fulgencio Batista, known as "el mulato," or "the mulatto." The stenographer from a poor background had a distinguished military career and had long been involved in politics. He was elected president in the year the new constitution was created. After four years, he stepped down as an exemplary democrat.

The young republic suffered from the vices of the colonial era: corruption, violence, gangsterism, and rural poverty. The cities, the middle class, large landowners, and the United States benefited most from this progress. American and other foreign companies did good business on the island, as did the Mafia in thriving Havana. But Cuba was not foreign-owned. By 1958, two-thirds of the economy was in the hands of locals.

At the beginning of the 1950s, Havana was once again in turmoil. Elections were approaching, and rumors of fraud and a military uprising were circulating. A man with a good reputation made his comeback: Batista. He tried to form a new governing coalition, but failed, so the military persuaded him to stage a coup. Batista's coup in 1952 marked the beginning of the end of the republic.

A young lawyer sued Batista for violating the constitution. To no avail. But the 25-year-old plaintiff persisted and devised a plan to oust the "mulatto" by force. The lawyer's name was Fidel Castro. The son of a large landowner, he grew up in the east of the island and graduated from the University of Havana. A clever, articulate man who had made a name for himself as a student leader with inflammatory speeches.

He saw his hour had come. In the summer of 1953, he and his men struck for the first time. They stormed two military barracks. The attacks ended in a bloodbath and a fiasco for Fidel and his gamblers. Many were executed upon arrest, the others sentenced to prison terms: Fidel to fifteen years, his brother Raúl to thirteen.

In court, Castro defended himself with a speech he refined in prison and then had smuggled out page by page and circulated. His plea was a declaration of war on Batista's rule. His promise: all power to the people, a life of freedom, dignity, and prosperity for all. He invoked the 1940 Constitution. His final line was: "History will absolve me."

Fidel was not yet thirty at the time and already known nationwide. Many admired him. The elite, however, feared that this man's aura might be even greater behind bars than in freedom. The government granted an amnesty. After almost two years, Fidel and his comrades were free again. Batista's act of clemency was his political death sentence.

Fidel and his followers retreated to Mexico and prepared their next move: return and rebellion. One who joined the Cubans was an asthmatic doctor from Argentina: Ernesto Guevara. His friends called him Che.

At the end of 1956, Fidel, Raúl, and Che set sail with eighty men in a much too small ship. After seven days at sea, they landed on a peninsula in eastern Cuba. Batista's troops greeted them with cannons and incendiary bombs and hunted them for days. The world believed the bearded rebel was long dead. But he and twenty of his men had survived. They entrenched themselves in the mountains and began their guerrilla war.

Fidel knew: war and victory mean nothing if the world doesn't hear about them. Even in prison, he wrote: "You can't neglect propaganda for a single minute, because it is the soul of the entire struggle." Skillful staging, the right words at the right time: Fidel Castro was a public relations pro. He had his own radio station in the jungle, Radio Rebelde, wrote manifestos, and called on the people to disobey and use violence against Batista's henchmen. Fidel's fighters set fire to the fields of large landowners, stole their livestock, and gave it to the peasants. Anyone with a shotgun was allowed to join the rebels.

The few rebels, armed like field guards, won the guerrilla war against Batista's military superiority thanks in part to their leader's outstanding PR work. With feints, tricks, and deceptions, he deceived his opponents and the world into believing that a vast rebel army was hiding in the thicket of the Sierra Maestra. It consisted of less than five hundred men.

After two years, their triumph was complete. The victorious rebels drove across the island in jeeps and trucks for seven days. People flocked from all over, cheering the "Barbudos," the bearded men. In Havana, they were greeted by crowds. Not only the poor from the slums applauded, but also people from the middle class. Batista had completely ruined his former reputation during the years of his despotic rule. Washington had also abandoned him.

Those who didn't trust Fidel and his rebels from the start packed their bags and boarded a plane to Miami. Thousands left their homeland, believing the nightmare would soon be over. They were mistaken, lost everything, and were never allowed to return. Fidel called them scum of the bourgeoisie, worms, scoundrels, and traitors to the fatherland.

The Cuban revolution was Fidel Castro's revolution. He was the leader, the Máximo Líder, the Comandante en Jefe. Barely in power, he threw everything upside down. Not just the prevailing conditions, but often even his own words. The 1940 constitution, which he wanted to implement to the letter: Seven days after he took power, it was nothing but dead paper, replaced by a new one. One to his liking. The land he promised the farmers: After two agrarian reforms, 70 percent of it belonged to the state. His state.

Before his revolution and in the months that followed, Fidel never tired of emphasizing that he was neither a socialist nor a communist. He had nothing to do with either ideology. His government rejected any kind of association with dictatorial states like the Soviet Union. The USSR, he said, had created the worst example of despotism in the world and was oppressing a dozen European states.

Immediately after the revolution, Castro repeatedly asserted that the United States was not his enemy and that he wanted to get along well with his neighbor. He traveled to Washington and promoted his government. The door to private investment was open, he said. It was completely impossible for Cuba to make progress if his country did not get along with the United States. Fidel wanted to meet President Eisenhower, but he preferred to play golf.

As soon as Castro returned to Cuba, his government nationalized the Americans' assets at lightning speed, starting with the Americans. They wouldn't take kindly to this. Washington responded with the first sanctions. Fidel told his people this meant war. The war he wanted. Years earlier, he wrote to his comrade-in-arms, Celia Sánchez: "When this war is over, a much longer and greater war will begin for me, the war I will wage against them, the United States. I realize that this will be my true destiny."

The US imposed a trade, economic, and financial embargo. The neighbors became archenemies. The CIA and Fidel's compatriots in exile, who hated him, tried for years to kill him. Without success.

In Miami, anger at Castro grew faster than in Washington. In April 1961, 1,500 Cuban exiles attempted to recapture their homeland with an invasion. They failed miserably. Their amateurish attempt was a gift to Fidel. He told the world that his small Cuba had won a great victory against the US empire. Even though it wasn't US soldiers or marines who landed in the Bay of Pigs. There was no order from Washington either, just tacit complicity and support from CIA agents. Yet Fidel's narrative was a good one. David versus Goliath. It always served as a legend for Fidel's Cuba.

In the midst of this triumph, Fidel declared, almost as an aside, during a speech that his revolution was socialist. His "liberated" Cuba entered into total economic dependence on the Soviet Union – a dependence that lasted almost 30 years and was far greater than that previously imposed on the United States.

So now, suddenly, socialism. Cuba on the side of the communists. The Caribbean island in the middle of the Cold War. Many say that's what Fidel wanted and needed from the beginning: to be constantly at war. Himself: a major figure on the world stage, on equal footing with the most powerful. At least he managed this. He almost triggered World War III. In October 1962, if it had been up to him, the Soviets would have fired their missiles stationed in Cuba against the USA. But the two leaders of the divided world, Kennedy and Khrushchev, came to their senses at the last minute. Fidel was furious.

Even today, there are voices that say the US policies drove Cuba into the arms of the Soviets. A gross distortion, like so much about Fidel and his revolution. He was a master at twisting the truth and rewriting history. He claimed that before the revolution, Cuba was nothing but a corrupt swamp, that Havana was a brothel for the Americans and the Mafia, that politics and the economy were in the hands of the Yankees, and that most of his countrymen were penniless and illiterate. All exaggerated or false. And well-documented refutations.

For a few years, everything went quite well. Cuba even became a minor global power in the fields of education, healthcare, and sports. Everyone in Cuba had a roof over their heads, highly subsidized, albeit rationed, food was guaranteed, and everything else they needed for life was available. The communist sister countries supplied almost everything they needed.

Not for free, but almost. Cuba paid with sugar. Fidel no longer had to worry much about the economy, nor did he ever want to. He, Che, and their cronies had other interests. For example, world revolution. Cuba went on the offensive, especially in Latin America and Africa: sometimes diplomatically supple, sometimes armed with infiltrated agents or troops, with training in guerrilla tactics and support in liberation wars and coup plots.

For a while, at least, the people had the feeling and belief that the radical change and all the new ideas could work. Enthusiasm, commitment, and confidence were immense. Not only on the island. Cuba became the dream of the left and a model for the poor, the disenfranchised, and the oppressed.

Jean Paul Sartre said in the early 1960s (he later turned away from Fidel and the revolution, like many others): "It is impossible for an intellectual not to be on Cuba's side." Wolf Biermann praised Comandante Che Guevara as "Jesus Christ with a gun." Mandela described the Cuban revolution as "a source of inspiration for all freedom-loving peoples."

Fidel was quietly admired even by his opponents. His charm and charisma. The myth of the island people who wouldn't be brought to their knees by the US. Castro was also respected because he often aptly expressed everything that was wrong in the world. He called the injustices and the painful truths by their name.

But in his Cuba, there could only be one truth: his. This required radical measures and a system whose name, especially the left, had long been afraid to utter in connection with Cuba: totalitarian dictatorship.

Fidel Castro subjected everything to his total control: the state, politics, the military, the courts, the economy, culture, sports. Everything and everyone. Even the people. He destroyed and banned everything his country had painstakingly built: democracy, freedom of speech and the press, political party diversity, independent unions and associations, and free enterprise. He eliminated the last remaining freedoms in 1968. He nationalized the last 55,000 small businesses: bars, hair salons, chip shops. From then on, not even shoe shiners were allowed to work independently.

Ten years after taking power, everything was brought into line. Following Fidel's line. His supreme law was: Everything for the revolution, nothing against it! This still applies today. Anyone who violates this rule, rebels, protests, or otherwise steps out of line is persecuted, harassed, exiled, or imprisoned. In 1958, there were 14 prisons in Cuba; today, there are over 200.

Fidel Castro not only built a surveillance state modeled on Stalinism, with a Stasi as efficient as the one in East Germany, but also transformed his country into a parasite. During the Soviet Union's lifetime, this worked somewhat successfully. As the Soviet Union's demise approached with Gorbachev, Fidel said: "Perestroika is another man's wife. I want nothing to do with it."

After the death of its breadwinner, Cuba plunged into a severe crisis. At the time, people thought things couldn't get any worse. After eight grim years, Fidel discovered a new friend to whom he could tie his ailing country: Hugo Chávez and his oil-rich Venezuela. Chávez dreamed of 21st-century socialism. Cuba could breathe a sigh of relief and once again had more or less enough electricity and food. When Chávez became terminally ill and died in 2013, Fidel, who was also terminally ill, had already made provisions. The new despot in Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, is also a political protégé of Fidel.

The two countries need each other more than ever today. However, they are so devastated that there is increasingly less to help each other. Almost ten million people have fled Venezuela and Cuba in recent years.

Cuba is sinking ever deeper into misery. We keep hearing that the US and its embargo are to blame. This is false, official Cuban propaganda. Not even the Cubans believe it anymore. Undoubtedly, the embargo is making life difficult for the country. But Fidel Castro's revolution has made it miserable and inhumane. His Cuba has always had enough allies, both politically and economically.

The list of countries and companies that have supported Cuba, or still support it, is long and were willing, despite the US embargo, to do business with and in Cuba, to grant loans, operate hotels, and provide aid. But sooner or later, almost all of them lose their patience and their nerve—and their money. Cuba reliably alienates even its best friends, almost never pays its debts, makes promises it cannot keep, and offers not the slightest legal protection.

Fidel's rigid system has nothing left to offer. Neither to the outside world nor to his own people. In the countryside, people have to live without electricity most of the time and cook on fires again. Many people suffer from hunger, search through the mountains of garbage for something to eat, knock on doors, and beg, including children. Countless die every year from emergencies and illnesses that could easily be cured with medication and a halfway decent health care system.

Like so many other things, the economy has virtually collapsed. Once the world's largest sugar exporter, Cuba now produces virtually nothing. Cuba has to import over 80 percent of its food, including from the United States (because of the embargo). Before the revolution, the country was virtually self-sufficient.

Cuba is slowly bleeding dry. Young people no longer want children; they just want to leave. The country is becoming a retirement home. The population has shrunk from eleven to less than nine million in recent years. There are no prospects. Protests are few. The first and last nationwide demonstrations took place four years ago. The regime cracked down harshly, arresting hundreds and putting them in overcrowded prisons.

Many were sentenced to long prison terms, up to twenty years. Opposition is virtually impossible in Cuba. The regime tolerates nothing. People no longer have any idea how democracy works or what civil society is. The last free elections were held in 1948. Not even the oldest people remember them. The only thing that still works in Cuba is state power and its repression.

If Fidel Castro had truly cared about his country and his people, he would have changed things. But even Raúl and the last remaining dinosaurs of the revolution, all over ninety, still don't want to make any fundamental changes. Neither do Raúl's hand-picked heirs. The people of Cuba have long known: He, and they, cared only for one thing: power and privilege.

After sixty-six years of revolution, millions of Cubans feel lied to and betrayed. And abandoned by the world. They sit in the dark on their island and see no light anywhere.

Oscar Alba is a freelance journalist. He lives and works in Havana.