The great survivor survives no more

There was once a joke about the longevity of Fidel Castro: On his 80th birthday, he was presented with a Galapagos tortoise (who can live to a century or more).  While welcoming the present, he lamented that owners tended to outlive their pets.  As it turns out, 90 years old was Castro's terminal destination, despite all those cigars (the Cuban variety fabled to have been rolled between the thighs of virgins), which he eventually cut out on doctors' orders.
Castro outlasted most of friends and foes.  His passing means that the last remaining titan (who was a world leader) of the Cold War is Mikhail Gorbachev (George H W Bush would have a very tenuous claim to being a titan of the Cold War) and Castro was most active at the very height of this exercise in competing ideologies and power politics.  There was the simple fact of establishing a socialist (later communist) government on an island 90 miles from the American mainland, the Bay of Pigs debacle for the USA, the Cuban Missile Crisis (a debacle in public relations for the USSR) and sending of troops and advisors to parts of the world courted by East and West, notably Angola and Mozambique.  All this while running a ruthless dictatorship at home, raising an outstanding healthcare system and surviving numerous assassination attempts by the CIA and Cuban exiles.  The pro-Republican Miami-based Cuban exiles have decided at least one US presidential election.
Castro didn't care much for nominal landmarks, handing over power to his brother Raul after 49 years as leader, rather than make the magic but meaningless half century.  Like with North Korea, Communist Cuba kept it in the family.  Castro's charisma and sheer force of personality means he will be more than a footnote in history, even if it was his close collaborator, the Byronic Che Guevara, who adorned countless students' walls.  El Comandante is dead though he seemed like he would go on forever, but the current Comandante has been in post for the past eight years.  Thus Fidel's death is not a landmark in any important sense but it's another burying of the Cold War.