Cuban revolutionary who defied the might of 11 US presidents
He was the iconic cigarsmoking revolutionary who pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war.
On this day 59 years ago, Cuban leader Fidel Castro declared that he was a Marxist-leninist and that Cuba was to adopt Communism.
In a televised address, Castro said: “I am a Marxist-leninist and shall be one until the end of my life. Marxism, or scientific socialism, has become the revolutionary movement of the working class.”
Castro came to power in 1959 after leading a successful revolution against the dictatorial regime of Fulgencio Batista.
Almost from the start, the US worried that Castro was too leftist in his politics. He redistributed land, seized foreign oil company holdings, and eventually took over all foreign-owned property in Cuba. He also established close diplomatic relations with the then-soviet Union, and the Russians were soon providing economic and military aid.
By January 1961, the US had severed diplomatic relations with Cuba. In April of that year, the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion involved hundreds of rebels armed and trained by the US attempting a landing with the intent of overthrowing the Castro government.
The attack ended in a dismal military defeat for the rebels and an embarrassing diplomatic setback for the US. Castro defied the might of the US and bedevilled 11 American presidents over 50 years.
And it was his obsession with the US, and America’s obsession with him, that shaped his rule. His defiance made him a beacon of resistance, and his bushy beard, Cuban cigar and green fatigues became universal symbols of rebellion.
But his willingness to allow the Soviets to build missile-launching sites in Cuba led to a frightening diplomatic stand-off between the US and the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1962; one that could have escalated into a nuclear exchange. The world remained tense until the launch pads were defused.
Castro faced one of his biggest challenges when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. Without massive Communist subsidies the Cuban economy neared collapse. But he rallied, legalising the US dollar, only to ban it again when the economy stabilised. Relations with the US continued to deteriorate.
On becoming president, Barack Obama used his executive powers to dial down the decades of antagonism between Washington and Havana by moving to exchange prisoners and normalise diplomatic relations.
And in March 2016 he became the first sitting American president to visit
Cuba since Calvin Coolidge in 1928.
But after Obama left, Castro – by now frail and rarely seen in public – remained defiant, belittling in writing his overtures of peace and insisting that Cuba did not need anything the US had to offer.
Castro, 90, died a few months later on November 25, 2016, having a decade earlier ceded power to his younger brother and fellow revolutionary Raul.
By that time he had become a towering international figure whose importance went beyond everything that might have been expected from the head of a small Caribbean island nation of 11 million people.
Castro had held on to power longer than any other living national leader except our own Queen.