FIDEL CASTRO

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz (Spanish: [fiˈðel ˈkastro]; born August 13, 1926) is aCuban communist revolutionary and politician who was Prime Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976, and President from 1976 to 2008. He also served as the Commander in Chief of the country’s armed forces, and as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba, from the party’s founding in 1961 until 2011. Politically a Marxist-Leninist, under his administration the Republic of Cuba became a one-party socialist state; industry and businesses were nationalized, and socialist reforms implemented in all areas of society. Castro was also the Secretary-General of the Non-Aligned Movement, from 1979 to 1983 and from 2006 to 2008.

 

Born the illegitimate son of a wealthy farmer, Castro adopted leftist anti-imperialistpolitics while studying law at the University of Havana. After participating in armed rebellions against right-wing governments in the Dominican Republic and Colombia, he planned the overthrow of the U.S.-backed Cuban dictator-president Fulgencio Batista, and served a year’s imprisonment in 1953, after leading a failed armed attack on theMoncada Barracks. On release he traveled to Mexico, where with his brother Raul and his friend Che Guevara he formed a revolutionary group, the 26th of July Movement. After his return to Cuba, Castro led the Cuban Revolution which ousted Batista in 1959, and brought his own assumption of military and political power. Alarmed by his revolutionary credentials and his friendly relations with the Soviet Union, the United States governments of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy made repeated unsuccessful attempts to remove him, by economic blockade, assassination and counter-revolution, including the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. To counter these threats, Castro formed an economic and military alliance with the Soviet Union, and allowed them to place nuclear weapons on the island, thus sparking the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

 

In 1961 Castro proclaimed the socialist nature of the Cuban revolution, and in 1965 became First Secretary of the newly-founded Cuban Communist Party. Cuba became a one-party state; ideologically-based domestic reforms were accompanied by state control of the press and the suppression of internal dissent. Abroad, Castro supported foreign revolutionary socialist groups in the hope of toppling world capitalism, sending Cuban troops to fight in the Yom Kippur War, Ogaden War and Angolan Civil War. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Castro led Cuba into its economic “Special Period“, before taking the country into the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americasin 2006 and forging alliances with other nations in the Latin American “Pink Tide“. With his health failing, in 2006 he transferred his responsibilities to Vice-President Raúl Castro, who assumed the full presidency in 2008