Fidel Castro, the once aspiring baseball player turned revolutionary leader turned Communist dictator who singlehandedly brought the United States and Soviet Union to the brink of war in 1962 and outlasted every American President from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush, has died at the age of 90:
Fidel Castro, the fiery apostle of revolution who brought the Cold War to the Western Hemisphere in 1959 and then defied the United States for nearly half a century as Cuba’s maximum leader, bedeviling 11 American presidents and briefly pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war, died Friday. He was 90.
His death was announced by Cuban state television.
In declining health for several years, Mr. Castro had orchestrated what he hoped would be the continuation of his Communist revolution, stepping aside in 2006 when he was felled by a serious illness. He provisionally ceded much of his power to his younger brother Raúl, now 85, and two years later formally resigned as president. Raúl Castro, who had fought alongside Fidel Castro from the earliest days of the insurrection and remained minister of defense and his brother’s closest confidant, has ruled Cuba since then, although he has told the Cuban people he intends to resign in 2018.
Fidel Castro had held on to power longer than any other living national leader except Queen Elizabeth II. He became a towering international figure whose importance in the 20th century far exceeded what might have been expected from the head of state of a Caribbean island nation of 11 million people.
He dominated his country with strength and symbolism from the day he triumphantly entered Havana on Jan. 8, 1959, and completed his overthrow of Fulgencio Batista by delivering his first major speech in the capital before tens of thousands of admirers at the vanquished dictator’s military headquarters.
A spotlight shone on him as he swaggered and spoke with passion until dawn. Finally, white doves were released to signal Cuba’s new peace. When one landed on Mr. Castro, perching on a shoulder, the crowd erupted, chanting “Fidel! Fidel!” To the war-weary Cubans gathered there and those watching on television, it was an electrifying sign that their young, bearded guerrilla leader was destined to be their savior.
Most people in the crowd had no idea what Mr. Castro planned for Cuba. A master of image and myth, Mr. Castro believed himself to be the messiah of his fatherland, an indispensable force with authority from on high to control Cuba and its people.
He wielded power like a tyrant, controlling every aspect of the island’s existence. He was Cuba’s “Máximo Lider.” From atop a Cuban Army tank, he directed his country’s defense at the Bay of Pigs. Countless details fell to him, from selecting the color of uniforms that Cuban soldiers wore in Angola to overseeing a program to produce a superbreed of milk cows. He personally set the goals for sugar harvests. He personally sent countless men to prison.
But it was more than repression and fear that kept him and his totalitarian government in power for so long. He had both admirers and detractors in Cuba and around the world. Some saw him as a ruthless despot who trampled rights and freedoms; many others hailed him as the crowds did that first night, as a revolutionary hero for the ages.
Even when he fell ill and was hospitalized with diverticulitis in the summer of 2006, giving up most of his powers for the first time, Mr. Castro tried to dictate the details of his own medical care and orchestrate the continuation of his Communist revolution, engaging a plan as old as the revolution itself.
By handing power to his brother, Mr. Castro once more raised the ire of his enemies in Washington. United States officials condemned the transition, saying it prolonged a dictatorship and again denied the long-suffering Cuban people a chance to control their own lives.
But in December 2014, President Obama used his executive powers to dial down the decades of antagonism between Washington and Havana by moving to exchange prisoners and normalize diplomatic relations between the two countries, a deal worked out with the help of Pope Francis and after 18 months of secret talks between representatives of both governments.
Though increasingly frail and rarely seen in public, Mr. Castro even then made clear his enduring mistrust of the United States. A few days after President Obama’s highly publicized visit to Cuba in 2016 — the first by a sitting American president in 88 years — Mr. Castro penned a cranky response denigrating Mr. Obama’s overtures of peace and insisting that Cuba did not need anything the United States was offering.
To many, Fidel Castro was a self-obsessed zealot whose belief in his own destiny was unshakable, a chameleon whose economic and political colors were determined more by pragmatism than by doctrine. But in his chest beat the heart of a true rebel. “Fidel Castro,” said Dr. Henry M. Wriston, president of the Council on Foreign Relations in the 1950s and early ’60s, “was everything a revolutionary should be.”
Mr. Castro was perhaps the most important leader to emerge from Latin America since the wars of independence in the early 19th century. He was decidedly the most influential shaper of Cuban history since his own hero, José Martí, struggled for Cuban independence in the late 19th century. Mr. Castro’s revolution transformed Cuban society and had a longer-lasting impact throughout the region than that of any other 20th-century Latin American insurrection, with the possible exception of the 1910 Mexican Revolution.
His legacy in Cuba and elsewhere has been a mixed record of social progress and abject poverty, of racial equality and political persecution, of medical advances and a degree of misery comparable to the conditions that existed in Cuba when he entered Havana as a victorious guerrilla commander in 1959.
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[B]eyond anything else, it was Mr. Castro’s obsession with the United States, and America’s obsession with him, that shaped his rule. After he embraced Communism, Washington portrayed him as a devil and a tyrant and repeatedly tried to remove him from power through an ill-fated invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, an economic embargo that has lasted decades, assassination plots and even bizarre plans to undercut his prestige by making his beard fall out.
Mr. Castro’s defiance of American power made him a beacon of resistance in Latin America and elsewhere, and his bushy beard, long Cuban cigar and green fatigues became universal symbols of rebellion.
Mr. Castro’s understanding of the power of images, especially on television, helped him retain the loyalty of many Cubans even during the harshest periods of deprivation and isolation when he routinely blamed many of Cuba’s ills on America and its embargo. And his mastery of words in thousands of speeches, often lasting hours, imbued many Cubans with his own hatred of the United States by keeping them on constant watch for an invasion — military, economic or ideological — from the north.
Over many years Mr. Castro gave hundreds of interviews and retained the ability to twist the most compromising question to his favor. In a 1985 interview in Playboy magazine, he was asked how he would respond to President Ronald Reagan’s description of him as a ruthless military dictator. “Let’s think about your question,” Mr. Castro said, toying with his interviewer. “If being a dictator means governing by decree, then you might use that argument to accuse the pope of being a dictator.”
He turned the question back on Reagan: “If his power includes something as monstrously undemocratic as the ability to order a thermonuclear war, I ask you, who then is more of a dictator, the president of the United States or I?”
After leading his guerrillas against a repressive Cuban dictator, Mr. Castro, in his early 30s, aligned Cuba with the Soviet Union and used Cuban troops to support revolution in Africa and throughout Latin America.
His willingness to allow the Soviets to build missile-launching sites in Cuba led to a harrowing diplomatic standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union in the fall of 1962, one that could have escalated into a nuclear exchange. The world remained tense until the confrontation was defused 13 days after it began, and the launching pads were dismantled.
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Mr. Castro faced one of his biggest challenges: surviving without huge Communist subsidies. He defied predictions of his political demise. When threatened, he fanned antagonism toward the United States. And when the Cuban economy neared collapse, he legalized the United States dollar, which he had railed against since the 1950s, only to ban dollars again a few years later when the economy stabilized.
Mr. Castro continued to taunt American presidents for a half-century, frustrating all of Washington’s attempts to contain him. After nearly five decades as a pariah of the West, even when his once booming voice had withered to an old man’s whisper and his beard had turned gray, he remained defiant.
Mr. Castro continued to taunt American presidents for a half-century, frustrating all of Washington’s attempts to contain him. After nearly five decades as a pariah of the West, even when his once booming voice had withered to an old man’s whisper and his beard had turned gray, he remained defiant.
He often told interviewers that he identified with Don Quixote, and like Quixote he struggled against threats both real and imagined, preparing for decades, for example, for another invasion that never came. As the leaders of every other nation of the hemisphere gathered in Quebec City in April 2001 for the third Summit of the Americas, an uninvited Mr. Castro, then 74, fumed in Havana, presiding over ceremonies commemorating the embarrassing defeat of C.I.A.-backed exiles at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. True to character, he portrayed his exclusion as a sign of strength, declaring that Cuba “is the only country in the world that does not need to trade with the United States.”
From The Washington Post:
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born at Las Manacas, his family’s plantation in the village of Biran in eastern Cuba’s Oriente province, on Aug. 13, 1926.
His father, Angel Castro, was born in Spain and went to Cuba as a soldier in the Spanish army. He became a laborer on a railway owned by the United Fruit Co. Soon he was clearing land for himself in the wilds of Oriente and growing sugar cane, which he sold to the fruit company. In time, Las Manacas comprised 26,000 acres, of which almost 2,000 were owned by the elder Castro.
His son Fidel was well off, but nowhere near as wealthy as some of the boys at the schools to which he was sent, including the prestigious Colegio de Belen, a Jesuit school in Havana.
Behind his back, he was sometimes called guajiro, or peasant. In his authoritative 1986 biography of Mr. Castro, author Tad Szulc quotes this assessment from Enrique Ovares, an old Castro friend: “I think that the worst damage Fidel’s parents did him was to put him in a school of wealthy boys without Fidel being really rich . . . and more than that without having a social position. . . . I think that this influenced him and he had hatred against society people and moneyed people.”
In 1945, Fidel Castro entered the University of Havana. Apparently applying his first-hand experience of social and economic inequality, he immersed himself in the legacy of Cuba’s bygone revolutionaries.
In a country that had often tumultuous relations with the United States since the 1898 sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor sparked the Spanish-American War, Mr. Castro concluded that casting off the hegemony of the United States was more important than mere prosperity.
He joined the Insurrectional Revolutionary Union, and carried a pistol. In 1947, he signed up for an aborted expedition to free the Dominican Republic from the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. In 1948, he went to Colombia to protest a meeting of the Pan-American Union, which was reorganizing into the Organization of American States.
Mr. Castro earned his law degree at the University of Havana and set up a practice in the city in 1950. Two years later, he ran for a seat in the Cuban congress on the ticket of the Ortodoxo Party, a reform group. Mr. Castro’s campaign was cut short on March 10, 1952, when Batista staged a coup and retook the presidency.
Even as a young man, Mr. Castro showed a remarkable ability to persuade people to join him in seemingly impossible tasks — such as his wild scheme to take over the army’s Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba.
Mr. Castro’s plan was to distribute arms from the barracks to the people and overthrow Batista. Mr. Castro was not deterred by the fact that the garrison numbered more than 1,000 soldiers and that he fielded only about 120 followers.
The July 26, 1953, assault went off with almost comic mismanagement. The contingent with most of the arms got lost in the city’s old quarter, and Mr. Castro’s men rushed into what they thought was an arsenal, only to discover that it was a barbershop. Having fired not a single shot himself, Mr. Castro called a retreat. He and most of the others were captured.
Through the intercession of a bishop who was a friend of his father, he was spared immediate execution and put on trial. Although the court proceeding was held in secret, it gave Mr. Castro, who acted as his own attorney, the chance to make what became the most famous speech of his life. Smuggled out of prison, it concluded with the words that became known to generations of Cuban schoolchildren: “Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me.”
Mr. Castro was sentenced to 15 years but was released after less than two under an amnesty declared by Batista. He then moved to Mexico City, where he continued his work with a group calling itself the 26th of July Movement, commemorating what became known as the opening salvo of the Cuban revolution.
The Moncada debacle and its aftermath also ended Mr. Castro’s first marriage. In October 1948, he had married Mirta Diaz-Balart, the daughter of a well-to-do family with close ties to Batista and U.S. business interests. In 1949, they had a son — Fidel Felix Castro Diaz-Balart, known as Fidelito.
On Dec. 2, 1956, Mr. Castro and 81 followers returned to Cuba from Mexico aboard a second-hand yacht called “Granma,” whose name was later adopted by the Communist Party newspaper in Cuba. All but 12 in the landing party were killed or captured almost immediately. Mr. Castro, his brother Raúl and an Argentine physician, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, escaped into the mountains and began organizing a guerrilla army.
In the summer of 1958, Batista launched a major offensive against Mr. Castro’s ragtag group. When it failed, it was clear that Batista’s days in power were numbered. But his announcement to a few close colleagues at a New Year’s Eve party in 1958 that he was leaving the country came as a complete surprise. Mr. Castro and his followers took control of Cuba on Jan. 1, 1959.
He drew support from many intellectuals during the early years of his rule. Among them were Ernest Hemingway, a Castro hero and longtime resident of Cuba; authors Jean-Paul Sartre and Gabriel Garcia Márquez; and Bob Dylan, the troubadour of the American counterculture.
When Mr. Castro took power, he preached democracy and reform. He sought to assuage his critics, insisting that he was not a communist. A wary United States cautiously offered economic aid, which Mr. Castro refused. Economic and political relations grew increasingly more difficult, particularly as his executions of opponents came to light. And within two years, Mr. Castro had expropriated $1.8 billion in U.S. property without compensation and turned Cuba into a bastion of Marxism-Leninism.
In May 1960, Cuba established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, which was soon supplying most of the island’s petroleum needs (and a constant flow of weapons and other military hardware). The government nationalized U.S. and British oil refineries and U.S.-owned banks. In October, the U.S. government imposed an embargo on all trade with the island except for food and medicine.
On Jan. 3, 1961, diplomatic relations with the United States were broken. This set the stage for one of Mr. Castro’s greatest triumphs, the defeat of the CIA-organized invasion by Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs, which U.S. intelligence officials thought would set off a popular revolt against Castro.
The invasion by about 1,350 CIA-trained fighters was put down by Mr. Castro’s forces, and about 1,200 of the invaders were captured.
The following year, Mr. Castro abetted the nuclear confrontation between Washington and Moscow, which ended when Khrushchev agreed to withdraw his missiles and promised not to use Cuba as a base for offensive weapons. In return, the United States pledged not to invade Cuba and to remove missiles it had stationed in Turkey.
The U.S. promise to forgo force after the Cuban Missile Crisis was a major victory for Mr. Castro, but for years he lived under the threat of various CIA assassination plots.
Mr. Castro cited U.S. threats to justify a massive military buildup, and he tried to export his revolution to countries across Latin America, including Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia (Guevara was killed leading an uprising in Bolivia in 1967).
In the mid-1970s, Mr. Castro sent thousands of troops to wars in Angola and Ethiopia. In addition, Cuban military training missions and thousands of physicians and teachers operated in more than a dozen other countries, from West Africa to North Korea.
In the early 1980s, he gave economic and military assistance to the leftist government of Grenada. President Ronald Reagan argued that an airport under construction on the island would be used to support communists in Central America and, in 1983, ordered an invasion. Nineteen Americans and 24 Cuban soldiers were killed, the only time that U.S. and Cuban troops fought each other.
The Miami Herald also has an extensive obituary, but the real story out of Miami, of course, is the reaction of the Cuban-American community to a long-anticipated day:
Fidel Castro died, and Cuban Miami did what it does in times of community celebration: It spilled onto the streets of Little Havana — and Hialeah, and Kendall — to honk horns, bang pans, and set off more than a few fireworks, saved for exactly the sort of unexpected special occasion that proved worthy of their detonation.
The scene across Miami-Dade County, the cradle of the Cuban exile community, was one of pure, raw emotion. This time, after decades of false alarms, Castro’s death was real.
“I wish my dad was here to see this,” 27-year-old Abraham Quintero cried just before 2 a.m. Saturday.
Wearing an “I love Hialeah” T-shirt, he stood on West 49th Street and Ludlam Road, where police quickly set up watch posts to make sure impromptu revelers stayed safe.
“Beautiful madness,” 29-year-old Christopher Sweeney said, describing the scene.
Passing cars honked incessantly. People waved huge Cuban flags. Parents carried their children and puppies. A few people appeared clad in pajamas and, in one case, flamingo slippers, jolted out of bed — and out of their homes — by the late-night news.
Shortly after midnight, Cuban leader Raúl Castro announced on state television, his voice trembling, that his older brother had died at 10:29 p.m.
“Toward victory, always!” he said.
The streets in Havana, where a nine-day mourning period was announced, appeared to remain quiet. Not so in Miami, the city across the Florida Straits shaped by exiles who fled Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution.
Calle Ocho remained closed to traffic, from Southwest 35th to 37th Avenues, to accommodate the elated crowds gathered at Versailles Cuban restaurant, the iconic exile hangout, to cheer and wave signs — no matter how unseemly it might be to revel in an old man’s death.
Some even yelled profanities about Castro.
“Fidel, tirano, llévate a tu hermano,” they chanted outside Versailles. Fidel, tyrant, take your brother. There was also a variant: “Raúl, tirano, vete con tu hermano” (Raul, tyrant, go with your brother).
Someone outside the restaurant brought a portable karaoke system, and the crowd sang Cuban star Willy Chirino’s exile anthem, “Nuestro día ya viene llegando” (Our day is coming), as the scent of long-saved Cuban cigars burned at last.
“Libertad!” young and old yelled. Liberty.
People were still popping champagne bottles in the middle of the street after 4 a.m. — an eruption of jubilation that remained peaceful throughout the night and into Saturday morning.
“I don’t think we’ve made any arrests and don’t expect to have any violence due to this long awaited day,” said Miami Police Officer Rene Pimentel.
Pimentel, a Cuban-American whose family tried for 15 years to leave the island, said he awoke early Saturday to text messages alerting him of Castro’s death — news he was eager to share with his father, who moved the family out of Cuba on Sept. 29, 1975.
“It was a great feeling to wake my dad and tell him that the day so many of us had been waiting for was finally here,” he said. “Fifteen long years to get to this great country.”
Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado deployed himself to Versailles after midnight and was there when the sun came up, chatting up the crowds and conducting interviews in what has become the unofficial media staging ground for capturing Miami’s reaction to major Cuban news.
The Cuban-born mayor, whose father served 14 years in prison under Castro, said there was little use in trying to steer the celebration toward any sort of official venue or event.
“Everything has been spontaneous,” said Regalado, 69, who came to the United States in 1961 under the Pedro Pan program. “The only thing that the city has done is accommodate the people.”
“The written plans are no good because people do what they want,” he continued. “I’ve gotten calls from some organizations saying how they want to organize an event. But to tell people to go to a specific place, you can’t. People go where they want to go.”
A relative hard-liner on U.S.-Cuba relations — Regalado opposed putting a Cuban consulate in Miami but didn’t object to the idea of running Havana-bound ferries out of Port Miami — the mayor said the Cuban people should feel a sense of unity in the celebrations on Miami’s streets.
“I think what’s happening right now is a sign of solidarity with the people of Cuba,” he said.
As the crowd swelled to hundreds outside Versailles’ cafecito window in the predawn hours, a panoply of Latin American immigrants who have followed Cubans to Miami, including Venezuelans, Colombians and Puerto Ricans, turned out in a show of support.
The mood was festive, with periodic outbursts of anger at Raúl Castro.
“One down, now comes the other,” yelled Enrique Rodriguez, 58, to cheers. “He can go to hell just like his brother.”
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t speak ill of the dead, even people I disagreed with vehemently. I tend to make exceptions, though, for someone like Castro, a dictator who modeled his regime in the footsteps of Josef Stalin through his maintenance of a vast system of political prisons where opponents of the regime were tortured and held for decades on non-existent charges all for the “crime” of opposing the Castro regime or protesting government policies. The brutality of that regime was perhaps best captured in Against All Hope, the autobiography published thirty years ago by Armando Valladares, perhaps the best-known dissident from Castro’s regime of his era. In the book, Valledares describes the early years under Castro and his activity as a dissident which led to his arrest and imprisonment in one of Cuba’s notorious political prisons, where he was held, usually in horrible conditions, and tortured repeatedly until his release in 1982. The parallels to Stalin’s Gulags is unmistakable. Through this and other accounts of life in Cuba after Castro came to power, it is clear that his passing is no more of a tragedy than the passing of Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu or Libya’s Gaddafi. Like those two men, Castro was at the end a bad man who brought little but pain and misery to his people, much of which he justified by claiming that any suffering the Cuban people experienced was due to the U.S. embargo. His passing, which comes after a life that was far longer than he deserved and rumors of death in the past that had proven to be untrue, won’t necessarily lead to the immediate liberation of the Cuban people — that won’t happen until Castro’s brother Raul and the cronies that the two men have put in power over the past 56 years have passed from the scene, at least not yet. However, it does bring that day closer and for that reason alone it’s something worth celebrating.
Not everyone is celebrating the passing of a dictator, of course. Even in death Castro still has his defenders, most especially in Europe, where it has never seemed as though anyone was willing to recognize the truth about Castro’s regime. Additionally, some forces on the political left in the United States have been noting the supposed ‘good’ things about Castro, such as the fact that he overthrew an authoritarian leader in 1959 and the manner in which he modernized Cuba’s economy and health care system. As a result, there’s been something of a bizarre debate on social media where an entire group of people are willing to ignore the evil that Castro did in order to score political points. Yes it’s true that Fulgenico Batista was a horribly authoritarian leader who used Cuba to enrich himself and his cronies, but that does not justify anything that Castro did once he came to power, nor does it remove from history the fact that Castro was orders of magnitude worse than a Batista, Pinochet, or any other Latin American dictator that apologists have been mentioning online today. Additionally, the comments about the Cuban health care system are the equivalent to the old line about Mussolini making the trains run on time. The fact that there may have been something “good” about Cuba under Castro does not, and cannot, justify his tyranny.
The fact that there may have been something “good” about Cuba under Castro does not, and cannot, justify his Stalinist rule or the oppression that the Cuban people continue to suffer in his name. The only good thing that can be said on the occasion of his death is that, hopefully, it will hasten the day when the Cuban people will finally be free to choose their destiny and the truth will come out about Castro’s brutal reign of terror. In the meantime, these people who struggle to find the ‘good’ in Castro, or criticize those of us who are happy he’s dead, are mourning a Stalinist dictator who operated an extensive system of political prisons where people were tortured, and are still being tortured, for decades for no reason other than the fact that they oppose his Stalinist regime. For some reason, there are millions of idiots in Europe and elsewhere who consider this monster a hero. They are entitled to their opinion, as stupid and ill-informed as it might be. those who know the truth, or at least as much of it as has been made public, are entitled to consider them to be no better than someone who would have defended Hitler, Stalin, Ceausescu, or Gaddafi. Fidel Castro was a dictator just like these men were. He hated individual freedom and feared even the smallest expression of dissent. He imprisoned people who opposed his regime, along with homosexuals, AIDS victims, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and followers of various Afro-Cuban faiths that had been part of the island’s culture from the time that Spain first began colonization.
The fact that there may have been something “good” about Cuba under Castro does not, and cannot, justify his Stalnist rule or the oppression that the Cuban people continue to suffer in his name. The only good thing that can be said on the occasion of his death is that, hopefully, it will hasten the day when the Cuban people will finally be free to choose their destiny and the truth will come out about Castro’s brutal reign of terror. In the meantime, these people who struggle to find the ‘good’ in Castro, or criticize those of us who are happy he’s dead, are mourning a Stalinist dictator who operated an extensive system of political prisons where people were tortured, and are still being tortured, for decades for no reason other than the fact that they oppose his Stalinist regime. For some reason, there are millions of idiots in Europe and elsewhere who consider this monster a hero. They are entitled to their opinion, as stupid and ill-informed as it might be. those who know the truth, or at least as much of it as has been made public, are entitled to consider them to be no better than someone who would have defended Hitler, Stalin, Ceausescu, or Gaddafi. Fidel Castro was a dictator just like these men were. He hated individual freedom and feared even the smallest expression of dissent. He imprisoned people who opposed his regime, along with homosexuals, AIDS victims, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Afro-Cuban priests and others he considered threats to his hold on power. He used American opposition to his regime to justify oppression. And, he ruled a nation that still longs to be free like it was a prison camp. For all of that, he deserves neither respect nor honors in his passing, even though he will sadly get both.
