I will speak briefly from experience. To wit, that experience is spending some weeks eating and staying with working-class Cuban families; in fact, I just returned last night (Castro died while I was on the airplane). I stayed with families primarily in the central and western parts of Cuba, with some time spent with families at the actual beaches of the Bay of Pigs.

Along the way I spent a good time talking politics with these families (all of whom were, by Cuban standards, working- to middle-class; some spoke some English, some spoke only Spanish). To a one they all had the utmost respect for Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, particularly regarding the 1959 revolution and overthrow of the Batista regime.

The attitudes seemed to be that Castro was indeed a father figure to the country. During the later years (1990 on) he became more dictatorial, but Cubans generally feel as if this was a good thing to keep the CIA from perpetrating more slights (real or imagined: The official stance is that the CIA introduced dengue fever to Cuba in the 1980s, which seems unlikely) against the country.

From a non-academic but instead a real-world perspective, if I had to choose between "hero" and "tyrant" with regards to assigning a value based on popular Cuban opinion I'd lean more towards "hero." Cubans have long memories, and they have much institutional and personal regard for the Cuban Revolution and then the successful defense against actual threats from the US (e.g. the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961).