So long, then, Fidel Castro. Never mind the revolutionary policies, he was a tyrant and a dictator. What good was the eradication of illiteracy if writers and journalists are jailed, books and newspapers banned and libraries shut down?Here's what the exiled Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante wrote of Castro in his 1992 collection, Mea Cuba: "Cuba, sad to say, has become a Latin American Albania, a deadly oxymoron. But few foreigners know this. Political hell is paved with the ignorance of strangers. The Holocaust was fully known only after the war. The gulags were publicised only after the death of Stalin. The atrocities of Castro, not all of them literary, will be known in full only after his demise, whenever that may be. Then people not only in England but everywhere, those of the Right as well as those of the Left, will know the true nature of the regime led by a man of infinite cunning and deceit, a beastly power-hungry egomaniac who is the bearded white double of [Ugandan dictator Idi] Amin."Infante was once an ardent Castro supporter, and with the revolution's triumph in 1959 was appointed director of the country's Instituto del Cine and made editor of the literary magazine Lunes de Revolución, which was banned by Castro in 1961. He went into exile in 1965. A year later, his best-known novel, Three Trapped Tigers, appeared. It has been compared favourably to James Joyce's Ulysses.In addition to the perhaps predictable titles - Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea - there is a wealth of Cuban-flavoured fiction worth exploring, including Dirty Havana Trilogy by Pedro Juan Gutierrez, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos, and Leonardo Padura's "Havana" crime novels, Havana Gold, Havana Blue, Havana Red, Havana Black and Havana Fever.Recommended non-fiction includes Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause by Tom Gjelten, Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Lost it to the Revolution by TJ English, Before Night Falls: A Memoir by Reinoldo Arenas, Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boyhood by Carlos Eire, and Cuba: A New History by Richard Gott.ANOTHER ISSUEFrom one sort of tyrant to another. The news that the British Library has acquired the legendary comic writer PG Wodehouse's vast archive has prompted The Observer to remind its readers of this bon mot from Bertie Wooster, one of Wodehouse's more enduring characters: "It's no use telling me there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner of later, out pops the cloven hoof." (From 1938's The Code of the Woosters)THE BOTTOM LINE"We don't have to be the hero when we join. You become the hero through practice." - The Black Panthers: Portraits From an Unfinished Revolution, edited by Bryan Shih and Yohuru Williams (Nation Books)..