Adiós, el Comandante
A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past: Castro in 1959
I began revolution with 82 men. If I had to do it again, I do it with 10 or 15 and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and plan of action
Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro died on Friday aged 90. One of the longest-serving rulers in modern history, the charismatic Castro defied 11 US administrations and several assassination attempts
FIDEL Castro, who died aged 90 late on Friday, established a communist regime in Cuba that survived the collapse of the Soviet Union, inspired revolutionary movements and brought two superpowers close to nuclear war before stepping down after 49 years in power.
The world’s longest-serving political leader, Castro led rebel forces that wrested control of Cuba from Fulgencio Batista in 1959. As prime minister and then president, Castro boosted literacy and healthcare for the poor, while imprisoning thousands of dissidents, seizing private property and sparking an exodus of Cubans, who braved dangerous waters on rafts to reach US shores.
He claimed a place on the world stage at the height of the Cold War by making Cuba an outpost of the Soviet Union. He pushed the superpowers towards nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and gave military and political support to revolutionary groups and Marxist governments in Latin America and Africa, cementing his reputation as a foe of the US.
Bay of Pigs
“Starting in the 1960s, Cuba has been a huge player, disproportionate to its size, on the world stage and that’s largely because of Fidel,” said Geoff Thale, of the Washington Office on Latin America. “Cuba and Fidel are the symbol of the little guy standing up against the hemispheric giant. People still have this romantic image of Cuba as a symbol of revolution.”
His regime withstood a US-sponsored invasion, known as the Bay of Pigs, in 1961, and survived at least eight assassination plots by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Castro always defended the Cuban revolution.
“I have not one iota of regret about what we’ve done in our country and the way we’ve organised our society,” he told author Ignacio Ramonet for
Fidel Castro: My Life, an oral history published in 2006.
That year, he started to ease his grip on power when he ceded temporary control to his younger brother, Raul, while recovering from surgery. He resigned as president and commander-in-chief in favour of Raul in 2008. The switch of leadership led to reform, though not the democracy that successive US presidents and generations of Cuban-Americans had hoped for.
In 2014 President Barack Obama announced plans to restore diplomatic relations and ease the five-decade embargo on the island, steps many Cubans and Cuban-Americans thought would never occur in Fidel’s lifetime.
The following month, Castro lent his support to a thaw in relations while remaining sceptical of US motives.
“I do not trust the policy of the United States, nor have I exchanged a word with them,” he wrote in a letter published by state media. “This does not mean, however, that I would oppose a peaceful solution to conflicts or threats of war.”
In March this year Obama visited the island. “I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas,” he said.
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born on August 13 1926, in Biran, Cuba, one of seven children.
Law School
Castro was sent to schools run by the Roman Catholic Marist and Jesuit religious orders. He was passionate about baseball and was an outstanding player.
He told Ramonet that his rebellious streak developed early. “I didn’t like authority, because at that time there was also a lot of corporal punishment, a slap on the head or a belt taken to you,” Castro said.
In 1945 Castro enrolled in law school at the University of Havana and took his first steps into revolutionary politics.
While still at university, he joined 1 200 men who set out to invade the Dominican Republic and overthrow dictator Rafael Trujillo. The Cuban navy turned the expedition back.
In 1952, two years after receiving a law degree, Castro ran for Cuba’s Chamber of Deputies. The race ended when Batista, then a general in Cuba’s military, staged a coup and cancelled elections.
Castro led about 165 men in an attack on an army barracks the following year, hoping to spark a popular uprising. The troops killed eight of his men and executed scores when the fighting was over. The survivors were later captured and put on trial.
In Exile
Representing himself at the trial, Castro gave a two-hour speech that ended with an often-cited declaration: “History will absolve me.” He was sentenced to 15 years and released after two as part of a general amnesty.
Castro went into exile in Mexico, where he joined forces with Argentinian communist revolutionary Che Guevara.
In 1956 the two crossed the Caribbean with about 80 men on a yacht called the Granma to start a guerrilla campaign against Batista.
Cuban forces killed all but 12 on landing. Castro retreated into the Sierra Maestra mountains with the survivors. There he grew the beard that would become his trademark. “Everybody just let their beards and hair grow, and that turned into a kind of badge of identity,” he told Ramonet.
Castro’s rebels rallied public support, and on January 1 1959, drove Batista into exile. Castro was 32.
Over the next two years, transforming Cuba into a communist dictatorship, Castro seized land and nationalised sugar mills, ranches and oil refineries owned by US interests. His government imprisoned or killed political opponents, declared the country atheist and closed 400 Catholic schools.
Three months after seizing power, Castro travelled to New York, invited by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. There he delivered anti-US speeches and met the political left. Yet the press loved Castro and he did not disappoint his journalist hosts, regaling reporters with the tales of his time as a fighter in the Cuban guerrilla war.
President Dwight Eisenhower had refused to meet Castro, handing the job to Vice-President Richard Nixon.
Castro took full advantage of his 11-day stay. He hired a public relations firm, ate hot dogs, kissed women like a rock star and held babies like a politician. He even placed a wreath on George Washington’s grave.
In 1962 new US President John Kennedy imposed a trade embargo, which was continued under successive US leaders, depriving Cuba of its largest trade partner and starving the economy of dollars.
In 2014, the government claimed the US embargo had cost the island $117-billion.
Kennedy had authorised the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Cuban refugees, armed by the CIA, staged an amphibious landing on the island’s southwest coast. Castro’s forces killed more than 100 invaders and captured more than 1 100. He released the prisoners after securing a ransom from the US of $53-million worth of food and medicine.
Missile Crisis
Eighteen months later, photographs showed that Castro had allowed the Soviet Union to build nuclear-missile bases in Cuba. The discovery marked the start of the missile crisis, 13 days during which the world stared down “the gun barrel of nuclear war”, in the words of Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorensen.
Kennedy imposed a naval blockade on Cuba and ordered that US aircraft be loaded with nuclear bombs.
After almost two weeks of crisis, Kennedy offered to secretly withdraw US missiles from Turkey and Italy if the Soviet Union withdrew its missiles from Cuba. The next day, Radio Moscow broadcast a statement by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that the weapons would be dismantled.
While Cuba’s economy stagnated over the next decades, Castro sent military forces to support guerrilla movements in developing countries throughout the ’70s and ’80s, often clashing with US-backed governments.
During Castro’s period in power, tens of thousands fled Cuba, mainly to the US, where they established anti-Castro communities in south Florida and the New York area.
The largest decampment took place in 1980. After groups of Cubans tried to leave the country, Castro responded by announcing that Cubans were free to go. He invited émigrés in the US to pick them up at the port of Mariel. The harbour was soon clogged with boats that helped ferry more than 125 000 people to the US. Included among the “Marielitos” were criminals whom Castro had released, mentally ill people and others he found undesirable.
Papal Visit
The loss of Soviet aid after 1991 sent Cuba’s economy into depression. Castro generated foreign exchange by allowing Spanish-built hotels, filled with European tourists, to line the country’s resort beaches.
The Communist Party lifted its ban on membership in religious organisations in 1991. Castro invited Pope John Paul II to visit in 1998, responding to the pope’s call for a prisoner amnesty by releasing 300 inmates.
In 1999, a new patron emerged when Hugo Chavez became president of oil-rich Venezuela and reached out to form political and economic partnerships with Castro. Under Chavez and his successor, Venezuela provided Cuba with 100 000 barrels of oil a day in exchange for the services of 30 000 healthcare providers and sports coaches.
It emboldened Castro to implement a new crackdown on dissidents in 2003.
But as Castro’s health deteriorated, Raul dismantled some restrictions on home ownership, travel abroad and private businesses.
When Raul and Obama in December 2014 announced plans to improve ties, Fidel didn’t offer any comment.
Castro, who divorced his wife Mirta Diaz-Balart, in 1955, married teacher Dalia Soto del Valle in 1980. They had five children and Castro had a son from his first marriage.