On October 1983, President Ronald Reagan launched a U.S. military invasion of the small Caribbean island of Grenada, with token forces from some client states in the region.

The immediate provocation, it seemed, was a military coup that installed a Marxist as prime minister. There was also this lingering provocation: the ongoing construction of a large airport on the island to boost tourism, the mainstay of the country’s economy.

The Reagan administration claimed the airport was designed to serve as a Communist beachhead into the region and to the Americas. It did not matter that the airport was designed by Canadians, and funded in part by Libya, Algeria, and the UK.

The presence of dozens of Cuban construction crews on the project site was conclusive evidence, Reagan said, of a Soviet- Cuban military build-up that the United States could not countenance. The island’s Marxist government, Reagan further claimed, posed a threat to an estimated 1,ooo Americans on the island, most of them students at a medical school.

It was of no consequences that no such threat was ever established.

The invasion ran its desultory course within a week, leaving some 64 Cuban construction workers stranded. The Reagan administration dangled before them every blandishment if only they would denounce Cuban President Fidel Castro and defect to the United States.

Their families and dependents would be spirited out of Cuba to join them in the United States in a life of comfort beyond their wildest imagining. All they needed to do was to denounce Castro and defect. Uncle Sam would take care of the rest.

Not one among the 64 fell for the offer.

This incident contrasted sharply with images of all sorts and conditions of men, women and children fleeing from the horrors of life in Cuba in dinghies and all manner of contraptions and risking everything in quest of freedom and a better life 93 treacherous miles across from the Florida Straits – images that had become a staple of television news.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, perished in the quest. And yet the exodus continued.

Back in Granada, the Cuban construction workers, all 64 of them, had spurned an offer that hundreds of thousands of their compatriots would have accepted on the threshold. What was going on?

It may well be that accepting Reagan’s offer carried much greater risk than setting out from Cuba on the treacherous passage to Florida. Still, I found it intriguing that not one among the Cuban workers stranded in Grenada accepted it.

The occasion for these reminiscences is the death last Friday of Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz, architect and leader of the Cuban revolution, From the moment he entered Havana in January 1959 at the head of a column of his comrades-in-arms to finish off the corrupt dictator Fulgencio Battista and his regime, cheered on by thousands of admirers, until he transferred power to his brother Rául on account of his failing health in 2006, he dominated Cuba by the sheer force of his personality and by his symbolism.

His enjoyed a global stature that seemed improbable for the leader of a Third World nation with a population of just 11 million

That stature stemmed from many factors: His personal charisma, emblematised by his military bearing, his regulation combat fatigues, and the lush beard and sideburns that framed his strong, masculine visage.

Among my generation, Castro conferred revolutionary credentials of sorts on beards. Full disclosure: I myself kept one for more than a decade. I shaved it off on the eve of my nuptial in 1975. Everyone said I looked much better without it, and I could not muster the confidence to re-grow it, except for the six months in 1996 that I was homeless. But I digress.

Castro’s global stature also stemmed from surviving not a few attempts by the CIA to assassinate him, from taking personal charge to rout, at the Bay of Pigs, an army of Cuban exiles and volunteers trained and equipped by the United States, to overrun Cuba and oust him.

It derived from his defying and outliving nine American presidents and weathering the blockade they instituted or tightened against Cuba, with the aim of grounding its economy and thereby stirring up a mass revolt against the island’s communist government ,

It has to be said that it also derived from his simple lifestyle, devoid of ostentation and vainglory. He was never tainted by allegations of corruption.

In the face of the blockade and other hostile acts directed at Cuba chiefly by the United States, Cuba under Fidel Castro’s leadership, sought to build a new society to supplant the one that always had to reckon with the economic calculations of the United Fruit Company even as the country catered to the fancies and fantasies of American playboys.

Within one generation, Cuba wiped out illiteracy. Today, it has one of the highest literacy rates in the world. It built a health care infrastructure that makes up in efficiency and effectiveness what it lacks in sophistication. Education and health care, regarded as fundamental rights, are provided free.

While many countries grapple with an acute shortage of doctors, Cuba produces far more doctors than it needs, and sends the rest to needy countries. It is instructive that throughout his long illness, Castro never sought medical treatment abroad. Some doctors were brought in from Spain to examine him, and that was that.

He established a sports programme that produced and continues to produce world-class athletes.

But for the decisive intervention of the Cuban military, in Cutie Cuanavale, and in Cunene Province to the south, apartheid South Africa’s forces would have overrun Angola. Namibia’s march to independence would have been halted, and apartheid in all its debauchery would have lived on much longer.

A large segment of the Cuban population took great pride in the gains of the revolution. Was it these gains, then, and the pride that flowed from them that made the 64 Cuban military engineers trapped in Grenada spurn Reagan’s invitation to denounce Castro and defect to the United States, there to enjoy life on a scale Cuba could never provide? Were they in effect saying that there is much more to life than material comforts?

Let no one romanticise the Cuban revolution, however. It led to crippling deprivations. It upended, as all revolutions do, careers and projects and ambitions. It led to an abridgement of fundamental rights. It brought in its wake a massive flight of capital and talent. It created a fundamental leveling, above which there is scant opportunity to rise.

But it taught the world the meaning of self-reliance. Even in the midst of deprivations, even after subsidies vanished with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was no mass starvation in Cuba, no begging in the streets, no prostitution, no epidemics.

Amidst the decrepit buildings and on the streets that make Havana look like a junkyard for American automobiles from the 1950s, life goes on at a rhythm that says to the over-curious visitor: If you are looking for the unhappiest place on earth, go elsewhere.

In death as in life, Castro remains a polarising figure. Millions of Cubans and across the world venerated him almost to the point of deification. Millions in Cuba and less so across the world loathed him to the point of execration.

I am reminded of the latter phenomenon by this headline from the 1970s, spread across the front page of one of the Miami newspapers:

Too, Too, Too, Too, Too, Too, Too Bad. Castro Narrowly Escapes Drowning.

But there is no denying that Castro was a singular personage, and that history will count him among the greatest figures of the 20th century.