Today Is..When Fidel Castro Kickstarted The Cuban Revolution

Nobody seemed to split opinion quite like Fidel Castro who survived a reported 600 plus attempts on his life only to die of old age in his own bed. Nobody would disagree that the Batista Government that Castro and his cohorts removed was a brutally oppressive dictatorship, even John F Kennedy said that he approved of Castro's call for justice to rid Cuba of Batista, saying 'Fulgencio Batista murdered 20,000 Cubans in seven years and he turned Democratic Cuba into a complete police state—destroying every individual liberty. Batista was destroying the last vestiges of freedom, and stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the Cuban people. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries'.
The Cuba in the pre-Castro years was corrupt and repressive and Batista opened his country to the American Mafia who controlled the drug, gambling, and prostitution businesses.
With high unemployment and falling living standards while he siphoned off millions to his personal bank account, growing discontent amongst the populace was met with widespread violent and oppressive crackdowns including torture and public executions resulting in the 20,000 death toll and hundreds of mangled bodies left hanging from lamp posts or dumped in the streets to serve as a warning against further insurrection.
Some of the first laws Castro introduced was to provide equality for black Cubans and greater rights for women but the problem seems to be what he did next.
Castro resented the backing that the US Government gave to the Batista Government and when he nationalised all U.S. property in Cuba, the Americans responded by freezing all Cuban assets on American soil, severed diplomatic ties and launched its long running sanctions on Cuba and backed an armed counter-revolutionary assault with the aim of ousting Castro.
All this forced Castro into the arms of the Soviet Union and cemented him and his regime as America's enemy on its doorstep.
Castro undoubtedly raised living standards, reduced infant mortality and massively improved education, literacy and health care for all while the Cuban economy tanked but while raising living standards, in other ways he failed the very people he was freeing from tyranny with increasingly repressive tactics to enforce his grip on the country. 
His regime locked up thousands of homosexuals and dissenters in camps so it is hard to argue that what he replaced Batista with was much better.
That is for Historians to argue over but the bottom line is at the end of his time did he improve things for his countrymen and in some ways he very much did but in some other ways he toppled a nasty, repressive regime only to replace it with another nasty, repressive regime.
To many on the left he is a hero purely because he continually foiled and thumbed his nose at the overbearing Americans but that is to overlook his many failings but to many of the right he was an evil villain but that overlooks the many successes and improvements he bought to his countrymen.