The eldest son of late Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart, committed suicide on Thursday aged 68 after being treated for months for depression, Cuban state-run media reported.

Castro Diaz-Balart, also known as “Fidelito” because of how much he looked like his father, had initially been hospitalized for depression and then continued treatment as an outpatient.

“Castro Diaz-Balart, who had been attended by a group of doctors for several months due to a state of profound depression, committed suicide this morning,” Cubadebate website said.

Fidelito was born in 1949 out of his father’s brief marriage to Mirta Diaz-Balart before he went on to topple a US-backed dictator and build a communist-run state on the doorstep of the United States during the Cold War.

Through his mother, he was the cousin of some of Castro’s most bitter enemies in the Cuban American exile community, US Representative Mario Diaz-Balart and former US congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart.

A nuclear physicist who studied in the former Soviet Union, Castro Diaz-Balart had been working as a scientific counsellor to the Cuban Council of State and Vice-president of the Cuban Academy of Sciences at the time of his death.

Previously, from 1980 to 1992, he was head of Cuba’s national nuclear programme, and spearheaded the development of a nuclear plant on the Caribbean’s largest island until his father fired him.

Cuba halted its plant plans that same year because of a lack of funding after the collapse of Cuba’s trade and aid ties with the ex-Soviet bloc and Castro Diaz-Balart largely disappeared from public view, appearing at the occasional scientific conference.

His death came just over a year after that of his father on Nov. 26, 2016, aged 90.

No means no. That cannot be said often enough. No means no.

But if you mean ‘no’ then it follows that you also have to say ‘no’. If you want someone to hear your ‘no’, then you need to say it out aloud. Non-verbal cues do not cut it. Nor do verbal cues. Nor does less than ‘enthusiastic’ participation.

That’s because all of the above rely on someone else to receive a message that you have not actually articulated. It requires your sexual partners to intuitively pick up on a discomfort that you have not voiced. It enjoins them to be mind readers (trigger alert, all you ‘woke’ millennials!) even when they may not know you well enough to be able to read your mind.

And that is putting a lot of responsibility for your safety and well-being on the shoulders of someone else.

Yes, I know, this is where a lot of you will pause reading to shoot off tweets asking me to stop ‘victim blaming’. To tell me that I am putting the onus on women not to get raped or sexually assaulted or abused instead of putting the men who rape, assault or abuse them on notice.

But no, I am not blaming the victim. Mostly because I don’t see women as disenfranchised victims with no agency of their own. I don’t see them as passive participants who have no control over what happens to them. And any movement, feminist or otherwise, that seeks to turn women into hapless creatures who cannot stand up for themselves, who cannot speak for themselves, does not have my support.

As you can probably tell by now, this column was triggered (there’s that word again!) by the Aziz Ansari case. (No, I’m not going into that whole controversy; I’m sure you’re fully up to speed by now.) So, what I am writing about today applies only to urban, educated, emancipated, sexually-active women with jobs and lives of their own – like the woman, dubbed ‘Grace’ to grant her anonymity, who sought Ansari out and went on a date from hell with him.

I am on the side of the generational divide that does not believe Ansari’s awful sex moves amounted to sexual assault or even sexual abuse. And I have difficulty understanding my millennial friends who insist that ‘Grace’ was coerced by Ansari. Her own account of the evening, in my reading, suggests otherwise.

But what is clear to me is that in this age of Tinder, when casual hook ups with people you barely know are the rule rather than the exception, women need to be empowered to navigate this sexual minefield instead of being infantilised and told that they bear no responsibility for their own actions.

It goes without saying that consent is essential in every such encounter and that it is the responsibility of men to ensure that they secure it before initiating any kind of sexual contact. (And yes, ‘enthusiastic’ consent is the very best.) But I baulk at the thought of casting women as helpless creatures who cannot even say ‘no’ when they mean it.