PROGRESSIVE Latin American leaders have slammed US president-elect Donald Trump’s “ignorant” comments about Fidel Castro in which he condemned the late Cuban leader as a “brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades.”

The billionaire tycoon tweeted that Mr Castro’s death on Friday gave members of the influential Cuban-American population of Florida “the hope of one day soon seeing a free Cuba.”

Mr Trump’s comments were also echoed by mainstream media across the world and thousands of Cuban exiles in Miami took to the streets to celebrate the revolutionary’s death.