Fidel Castro

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born on August 13, 1926, near Mayari in eastern Cuba, the son of a wealthy Galician-Spanish landowner. He studied at the Jesuit Colegio de Belen in Havana and entered the University of Havana law school in 1945, combining political activism with legal practice. In 1948 he was caught up in the Bogotazo riots in Colombia. When he stood for parliament in 1952 as a candidate of the Orthodox Party, Fulgencio Batista's coup voided the elections. After his legal challenge in the constitutional court was rejected, Castro turned to armed struggle.

On July 26, 1953, the 26-year-old Castro led about 130 fighters in an attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba. The assault failed, more than 80 attackers died, and Castro was sentenced to 15 years. His self-conducted defence, La historia me absolverá (History Will Absolve Me), became the manifesto of the movement. Amnestied in 1955, he went to Mexico, met Che Guevara, and on December 2, 1956, landed in southeastern Cuba with 82 fighters aboard the yacht Granma. The 18 survivors regrouped in the Sierra Maestra, and after almost three years of guerrilla warfare Batista fled the country on January 1, 1959, and Castro entered Havana. He became prime minister that year, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba in 1965, and formally head of state as President of the Council of State from 1976.

Initial overtures to the United States failed when Castro nationalised major US-owned businesses, including the United Fruit Company. In April 1961 his forces defeated the CIA-trained Bay of Pigs invasion, and on May 1 he declared the revolution socialist. The October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis began with Soviet missiles in Cuba and ended with Khrushchev withdrawing them in a bilateral deal with Kennedy, leaving Castro furious; he was reported to have smashed a mirror in rage. Soviet sugar-for-oil barter trade nonetheless sustained the Cuban economy for three decades. Castro supported the 1968 Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, finalising his break with Che. In April 1980 the Mariel boatlift carried 124,776 Cubans to the United States. From the mid-1970s tens of thousands of Cuban troops fought in Angola, giving Havana an outsize role in Third World diplomacy.

Cuba's revolutionary balance sheet is sharply contested. Literacy rose from about 76 percent before the revolution to the high 90s after the 1961 literacy campaign, and infant mortality and physician density reached upper-middle-income levels. Against this stand several hundred executions of opponents in the early years, long imprisonment of dissidents such as Armando Valladares, and the UMAP forced-labour camps that confined homosexuals and religious believers in the mid-1960s. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought the Special Period of acute scarcity, marked by malnutrition and a renewed wave of emigration. Relations with the Catholic Church softened after Pope John Paul II's 1998 visit. According to Cuban records, the CIA and others attempted to assassinate him 638 times, a number Guinness recognised. Intestinal surgery in July 2006 led him to delegate authority to his brother Raul, and on February 19, 2008, he formally retired from the presidency; he resigned as First Secretary in April 2011. He died in Havana on November 25, 2016, at the age of 90. By his own wishes he was cremated, and his ashes were buried in the Santa Ifigenia cemetery in Santiago de Cuba. He left instructions forbidding the use of his name or image on public sites.