Also, both were socialists. And both wanted to improve the lives of the unfortunate, although their methods differed.
With a cigar in his mouth, Alatas, a former vice-chancellor of Universiti Malaya, could easily be mistaken for the Cuban leader.
And this is exactly what happened in 1964 in Kuala Lumpur.
Writing in Counterpunch, his daughter Masturah Alatas recollects the time when this uncanny resemblance startled Robert Kennedy, the brother of assassinated US president John F Kennedy.
Robert, then US attorney-general, was at the radio station in Kuala Lumpur in 1964 when he saw “Castro” sitting in a corner, smoking a cigar, trying to mind his own business.
Masturah writes that Kennedy whispered into the ear of the radio station director asking who the person sitting in the corner was.
Alatas and Robert Kennedy, she writes, were brought together to shake hands and exchange a few words.
She notes that even the famous writer and academic Edward W Said, having seen her father in pictures, had been amused by his striking resemblance to Fidel.
And how, in 1983, while the family was in Washington DC, youngsters, pointing make-belief machine guns as he walked by, would shout: “Yo Fidel!”
“But beyond similarities in appearance and private jokes, my father was never considered to be a Malaysian Fidel Castro in any political sense, and with good reason, too.”
Alatas (1928-2007) was one of the founders of Gerakan which was formed in 1968, then a multiethnic, opposition party, and served as senator for a short while in the early 1970s.
“But he was a sociologist and an academic for most of his life, not a revolutionary leader like Fidel Castro. And he hardly influenced social and public policy.
“Alatas was one of the first, and remains one of the few Malaysians, to have written extensively about the social evils of corruption.”
Both Alatas and Castro were anti-imperialist and socialist.
Alatas considered the assimilation of socialism into Islam as something good, writes Masturah, the author of The life in the Writing.
“While Castro’s revolution was mainly about feeding the people, the revolution Alatas felt Malaysia most needed was principally an intellectual one against the doltish, backward, reactionary thinking that afflicted the ruling class,” writes Masturah who teaches English at the University of Macerata in Italy.