For the first time in the 47 years since he seized power, Fidel Castro is not in control of Cuba. Power passed last week — temporarily at the moment — to his brother Raul. Rumours are flying around Havana and among Cuban exiles in Florida that “Comandante Fidel”, as he likes to be known, will not recover, or that if he does it will be for only a short time.

Market stall holders across the western world are no doubt grinning from ear to ear, as the man whose image has long sat alongside Che Guevara as the leading T-shirt icon for twentysomethings now looks likely to have the added allure of departing this earth. Death has always been a good marketing tool for revolutionaries.

The hero worship accorded to Castro among left-liberals has always owed more to mythology than reality. The romantic notion of the revolutionary might once have had some credibility, but Castro has proved himself to be as brutal a leader as any other South American caudillo, ruthlessly imprisoning dissidents and impoverishing his countrymen. Fans of Castro praise him for the high literacy rates among Cubans, as if this somehow exculpates his human rights abuses. But a combination of high literacy and an iron rule of censorship was all too familiar among other tyrants from behind the iron curtain.

Indeed, just as the benighted people of North Korea are denied access to outside ideas and forced to endure non-stop propaganda from their leader, so Cubans are long used to a uniquely mind-numbing form of torture, the six-hour-long Castro speeches piped into their houses.

Cuba has so many natural riches — not least cigars –— that it is a standing rebuke to communism and dictatorship that it remains so backward. But it will take more than the end of Fidel Castro’s rule to turn Cuba around. If his brother’s earlier record as a friend of the communist East Germans is any guide to what he will be like as leader, things could even get worse for Cuba. But at least the politburo meetings will run on time.