“I believe that one has to be consistent right up to the end,” Fidel Castro wrote in his resignation letter  Tuesday, and he was. The world may long argue whether he was a communist or a social reformer, a mad tyrant or a visionary savior, but no one will ever doubt that he was a shrewd survivor who left power just as he ruled: on his own terms.

Defying the expectations — and, in many cases, the hopes — of an eternally bemused world, Castro bowed out not a step or two ahead of an enemy tank or a mob of angry voters, but on a timetable of his own choice, handing Cuba over like a family heirloom to his little brother.

He outlived the Soviet Union, the nation that inspired him, succored him and sometimes betrayed him. He outlasted nine U.S. administrations that tried, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to topple him. He outstayed dozens of unelected dictators, from Augusto Pinochet to Saddam Hussein, who came and went while he ruled in Havana.

Aside from his aversion to elections — the bullets fired on his behalf were better than ballots, Castro always said, for “it is not only with a pencil marking a ballot, but also with blood, that a people can take part in a patriotic life” — he was anything but rigid in his ideology.

If economic times were hard, he might crack the door to permit private restaurants and small businesses, then slam it shut with a two-hour speech denouncing the creeping revisionism of Havana hot-dog vendors. If there was a current of political restlessness, he might allow dissidents to speak up a little, then jail them. If he needed a favor from Washington, he might reach out, then lash back with something like the Mariel boatlift. Castro was so flexible when it came to political tactics that scholars and journalists argue to this day whether he’s really a Marxist-Leninist or simply a guileful practitioner of “wily political opportunism,” as one historian put it.

But of his survival skills, there was no dispute. Castro withstood Mafia hitmen, CIA-backed invasions, the collapse of world communism, a four-decade U.S. economic embargo and the mortal hostility of millions of his own countrymen. If he had regrets, as Frank Sinatra used to sing, they were too few to mention. “I distrust the seemingly easy path of apologetics or its antithesis of self-flagellation,” he wrote in his farewell letter.

Hardship, he explained, was the lifeblood of the revolution. “I feel my belief in sacrifice and struggle getting stronger,” Castro told his countrymen. “I despise the kind of existence that clings to the miserly trifles of comfort and self-interest.”

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