The episode hasn’t aged well for a lot of reasons, the chief one being that the real Fidel Castro lived a long, seemingly happy life. He died of age-related natural causes in 2016, with the government he’s built still in place even sixty years after this “Twilight Zone” episode aired. It’s also become increasingly clear that any paranoia he might’ve had about assassinations was fairly justified. The United States, which has a long history of interfering with Latin American governments, did indeed try to kill the guy on plenty of occasions. Yet “Mirror” depicts these assassination attempts as the feverish paranoid fantasies of Clemente; either that, or the direct results of an unhappy country being tortured by his tyrannical rule.
The other issue is that, as time goes on, it seems more and more like Castro was not quite the crazy evil dictator that American media presented him as. He still did plenty of terrible things worthy of condemnation, like his now-reversed criminalization of homosexuality in the ’60s and his general inclination towards authoritarianism. On the other hand, he did raise the average quality of life in the country, initiated a successful literacy program, and implemented a healthcare system that’s more efficient and humane than our own. Since Fidel took over, the country’s infant mortality rate also fell from 37.3 to 4.3 per 1000 live births, lower than it is in America.
Considering Cuba accomplished all this while putting up with an economically suffocating 60+ year trade embargo from the United States, we’re forced to admit that Fidel’s revolution wasn’t a total disaster. Despite the “Twilight Zone” episode’s smug certainty that Fidel would crash and burn, his government has already outlived the majority of the episode’s cast and crew.