Fidel Castro, Cuban revolutionary who defied US
Castro brought the Cold War to the Western Hemisphere, bedeviled 11 American presidents and briefly pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war
ANTHONY DEPALMA
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 Cubas 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 Ral, now 85, and two years later formally resigned as president. Ral Castro, who had fought alongside Fidel Castro from the earliest days of the insurrection and remained minister of defense and his brothers closest confidant, has ruled Cuba since then, although he has told the Cuban people he intends to resign in 2018.
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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 dictators military headquarters.
A spotlight shone on him as he swaggered and spoke with passion until dawn. Finally, white doves were released to signal Cubas 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 islands existence. He was Cubas Mximo Lider. From atop a Cuban Army tank, he directed his countrys 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.
American leaders have long confused the nationalist agenda as represented by Fidel Castro with communism, just as they did with Ho Chi Minh...
My three days with Fidel
Richard Eder, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, recalls when he interviewed Fidel Castro in 1964.
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 Obamas 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. Obamas 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, Jos Mart, struggled for Cuban independence in the late 19th century. Mr. Castros 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.
That image made him a symbol of revolution throughout the world and an inspiration to many imitators. Hugo Chvez of Venezuela considered Mr. Castro his ideological godfather. Subcommander Marcos began a revolt in the mountains of southern Mexico in 1994, using many of the same tactics. Even Mr. Castros spotty performance as an aging autocrat in charge of a foundering economy could not undermine his established image.
But beyond anything else, it was Mr. Castros obsession with the United States, and Americas 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. Castros 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. Castros 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 Cubas 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 Reagans description of him as a ruthless military dictator. Lets 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 Washingtons 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 mans 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.
Personal Powers
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born on Aug. 13, 1926 1927 in some reports in what was then the eastern Cuban province of Oriente, the son of a plantation owner, ngel Castro, and one of his maids, Lina Ruz Gonzlez, who became his second wife and had seven children. The father was a Spaniard who had arrived in Cuba under mysterious circumstances. One account, supported by Mr. Castro himself, was that his father had agreed to take the place of a Spanish aristocrat who had been drafted into the Spanish Army in the late 19th century to fight against Cuban independence and American hegemony.
Other versions suggest that ngel Castro went penniless to Cuba but eventually established a plantation and did business with the despised, American-owned United Fruit Company. By the time Fidel was a youngster, his father was a major landholder.
Fidel was a boisterous young student who was sent away to study with the Jesuits at the Colegio de Dolores in Santiago de Cuba and later to the Colegio de Beln, an exclusive Jesuit high school in Havana. Cuban lore has it that he was headstrong and fanatical even as a boy. In one account, Fidel was said to have bicycled head-on into a wall to make a point to his friends about the strength of his will.
In another often-repeated tale, young Fidel and his class were led on a mountain hike by a priest. The priest slipped in a fast-moving stream and was in danger of drowning until Fidel pulled him to shore, then both knelt in prayers of thanks for their good fortune.
A sense of destiny accompanied Mr. Castro as he entered the University of Havanas law school in 1945 and almost immediately immersed himself in radical politics. He took part in an invasion of the Dominican Republic that unsuccessfully tried to oust the dictator Rafael Trujillo. He became increasingly obsessed with Cuban politics and led student protests and demonstrations even when he was not enrolled in the university.
Mr. Castros university days earned him the image of rabble-rouser and seemed to support the view that he had had Communist leanings all along. But in an interview in 1981, quoted in Tad Szulcs 1986 biography, Fidel, Mr. Castro said that he had flirted with Communist ideas but did not join the party.
I had entered into contact with Marxist literature, Mr. Castro said. At that time, there were some Communist students at the University of Havana, and I had friendly relations with them, but I was not in the Socialist Youth, I was not a militant in the Communist Party.
He acknowledged that radical philosophy had influenced his character: I was then acquiring a revolutionary conscience; I was active; I struggled, but let us say I was an independent fighter.
After receiving his law degree, Mr. Castro briefly represented the poor, often bartering his services for food. In 1952, he ran for Congress as a candidate for the opposition Orthodox Party. But the election was scuttled because of the coup staged by Mr. Batista.
Mr. Castros initial response to the Batista government was to challenge it with a legal appeal, claiming that Mr. Batistas actions had violated the Constitution. Even as a symbolic act, the attempt was futile.
His core group of radical students gained followers, and on July 26, 1953, Mr. Castro led them in an attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba. Many of the rebels were killed. The others were captured, as were Mr. Castro and his brother Ral. At his trial, Mr. Castro defended the attack. Mr. Batista had issued an order not to discuss the proceedings, but six Cuban journalists who had been allowed in the courtroom recorded Mr. Castros defense.
As for me, I know that jail will be as hard as it has ever been for anyone, filled with threats, with vileness and cowardly brutality, Mr. Castro declared. I do not fear this, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who snuffed out the life of 70 brothers of mine. Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me.
Mr. Castro was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Mr. Batista then made what turned out to be a huge strategic error. Believing that the rebels energy had been spent, and under pressure from civic leaders to show that he was not a dictator, he released Mr. Castro and his followers in an amnesty after the 1954 presidential election.
Mr. Castro went into exile in Mexico, where he plotted his return to Cuba. He tried to buy a used American PT boat to carry his band to Cuba, but the deal fell through. Then he caught sight of a beat-up 61-foot wooden yacht named Granma, once owned by an American who lived in Mexico City.
The Granma remains on display in Havana, encased in glass.
Man of the Mountains
During Mr. Castros long rule, his character and image underwent several transformations, beginning with his days as a revolutionary in the Sierra Maestra of eastern Cuba. After arriving on the coast in the overloaded yacht with Che Guevara and 80 of their comrades in December 1956, Mr. Castro took on the role of freedom fighter. He engaged in a campaign of harassment and guerrilla warfare that infuriated Mr. Batista, who had seized power in a 1952 garrison revolt, ending a brief period of democracy.
Although his soldiers and weapons vastly outnumbered Mr. Castros, Mr. Batista grew fearful of the young guerrillas mesmerizing oratory. He ordered government troops not to rest until they had killed Mr. Castro, and the army frequently reported that it had done so. Newspapers around the world reported his death in the December 1956 landing. But three months later, Mr. Castro was interviewed for a series of articles that would revive his movement and thus change history.
The escapade began when Castro loyalists contacted a correspondent and editorial writer for The New York Times, Herbert L. Matthews, and arranged for him to interview Mr. Castro. A few Castro supporters brought Mr. Matthews into the mountains disguised as a wealthy American planter.
Drawing on his reporting, Mr. Matthews wrote sympathetically of both the man and his movement, describing Mr. Castro, then 30, parting the jungle leaves and striding into a clearing for the interview.
This was quite a man a powerful six-footer, olive-skinned, full-faced, with a straggly beard, Mr. Matthews wrote.
The three articles, which began in The Times on Sunday, Feb. 24, 1957, presented a Castro that Americans could root for. The personality of the man is overpowering, Mr. Matthews wrote. Here was an educated, dedicated fanatic, a man of ideals, of courage and of remarkable qualities of leadership.
The articles repeated Mr. Castros assertions that Cubas future was anything but a Communist state. He has strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social justice, the need to restore the Constitution, to hold elections, Mr. Matthews wrote. When asked about the United States, Mr. Castro replied, You can be sure we have no animosity toward the United States and the American people. New York Times
