Castro far from wanted his people to prosper. He used revolutionary language, violence, and scare-tactics to rise to power, and then tortured dissidents who merely disagreed with him. Castro converted Cuba into a one-party, pro-USSR, socialist state under the rule of the Communist Party. He argued for using nuclear weapons against the United States and initiating a nuclear holocaust. Those who disagreed with his regime were thrown in prison or shot. He was an evil man who turned the island nation of Cuba into an island prison, creating prison camps for undesirables and suppressing the press.
Castro established a fraudulent education system that served as a system of indoctrination, deceit, and fear. He created a twin-tier health-care system, where the vast majority of Cubans were given substandard and disastrous health care while keeping the decent health care available for himself and the ruling oligarchy. He claimed that his despotic rule was to preserve these free social welfare projects. Castro basically established an apartheid state by giving foreign visitors rights forbidden from his own people.
He wiped out Cuba’s middle class and turned his citizens into slaves of the state by banning private enterprise and labor unions, taking control of the means of production, claiming all property for himself, persecuting gays, minorities and the religious, and by censoring communication and expression. Over 1.5 million Cubans have fled the island ghetto into exile in the United States with many dying at sea in their attempted escape. With his concentration camps and prisons, Castro incarcerated a higher percentage of his own people than most modern dictators, Stalin included.
All in all, Castro was a Dictator, unworthy of the praise his supporters give him.