For a man who had been reported dead so many times before, and whose vision of the world had shrunk long ago to the size of a T-shirt, Fidel Castro triggered a remarkable commotion when he died last weekend at age 90. Nowhere were the paeans more heartfelt than in Latin America

“A great one has died,” wrote Ecuador’s president and fast Cuban ally Rafael Correa. Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro declared three days of public mourning. “All who dreamed of a less unequal world, we all woke up saddened on Saturday,” wrote former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.

Perhaps this was only to be expected. Revolutionary Cuba’s success – in thwarting Washington, inspiring generations of political rebels, raising literacy and public health – won the island nation a lasting aura of strength and respect in latitudes accustomed to neither.

In college, my coolest classmates spent their spring break in Cuba, cutting sugar cane for the Venceremos Brigade. Confined to chilly New England, and later as a reporter based in Brazil, I contented myself with tales about Fidel and Ernesto “Che” Guevara and their Davidic efforts to face down the hemisphere’s major power.

No matter that the Cuban economy was already perilously dependent on another world superpower or that Fidel’s supremacy was built on stifling dissent, free assembly and speech and other “bourgeois” luxuries. Back then you chose your side – “everyone in the world has to be communist or anti-communist.” Thus did Castro’s champions lecture African-American poet LeRoi Jones, as Jones wrote in his essay on the revolution’s fevered aftermath, “Cuba Libre.”

What’s harder to explain is how the reverence has endured. Never has Latin America been so democratic. The vast majority of people in the 34 nations of Central and South America and the Caribbean choose their leaders in open elections, say what’s on their minds, and buy and sell things in market economies.

It’s not that Latin leaders were blind to the excesses of Castro’s Cuba. In his memoir, former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso recalls the pasting Fidel received in a closed-door meeting of Iberian and Latin American leaders in 1999. “Damn it, Fidel! What are you going to do about this lousy, piece-of-(expletive) island of yours?” one summit leader demanded.

And yet such reproach hardly ever was made public. “Even today it’s difficult – at least in Latin America – for someone who identifies with the left to publicly condemn Cuba’s political regime,” writes Argentine political scientist Claudia Hilb.

Hilb attributed that diffidence to a political blind spot: the conceit that Castro’s excesses were just unfortunate byproducts of an otherwise beneficent model of government when in fact tyranny was the foundation of the Cuban revolution.

If Castro got a pass from the left, he had help. From attempted assassination by exploding cigar to the half-century economic embargo, Washington’s permanent offensive against the Cuban dictator only played to Fidel’s hand, camouflaging the disasters of the command economy and ennobling his every move against dissidents.

It’s telling that the most expansive tributes to Castro came from the region’s struggling left, whose leaders – Rousseff in Brazil, Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner – either have been replaced by market-friendly conservatives or cling to office (Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia) against rising dissent, failing economies or political improbity.

One of Fidel’s neatest tricks was to have helped Cuba veer before it crashed. He stepped aside when he was ailing, and let his brother Raul change course. Even as allies in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia railed against Yanqui meddlers, the younger Castro warmly welcomed a visit by President Obama and helped nudge the guerrillas it once urged into battle to make peace with the Colombian government.

Cuba’s rebranding may have begun, but Latin America’s Cuba distraction lingers. I can still hear those who counseled me not to move to Brazil. After all, the story in Latin America back then was not a chronically underachieving capitalist democracy, but the Central American Cold War, which thanks to Fidel Castro’s outsize presence was enjoying a robust afterlife.

It didn’t matter that Cuba had the same population as Sao Paulo and less than half the Brazilian metropolis’ gross domestic product. “Cuba is the black hole in the Americas,” Eric Farnsworth, of the Council of the Americas once told me. “It sucks up all the attention in the hemisphere.” One of the opportunities in Fidel Castro’s passing could be to help restore a much-needed sense of proportion to hemispheric affairs. That’s a resizing I welcome.

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