Fidel Castro was born on Aug. 13, 1926, to Angel's maid, lover and eventual second wife, Lina, who also had roots in Galicia. He grew up in a rambling two-story wood house, attended a one-room plantation school and learned to hunt. Younger brother Raul once tended bar at the family's roadside saloon.
Castro later said that life among the barefoot sons of poor farm laborers helped form his social conscience. By some accounts, he squabbled with his father over their treatment.
Castro attended Roman Catholic Church schools in the eastern city of Santiago and then in the capital, Havana, where he was named the country's best schoolboy athlete as a basketball player. He also loved baseball, though the legend he was scouted by Major League Baseball is untrue.
While studying law at the University of Havana, Castro plunged into the chaotic political scene of the day, joining violent student "action groups." He was arrested, though never charged, in the 1948 slaying of another group's leader.
He joined abortive efforts to topple Rafael Trujillo's dictatorship in the nearby Dominican Republic and took part in riotous protests in Colombia following the assassination of a presidential candidate there.
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| Fidel Castro & Rauf Castro |
Castro then became an activist lawyer with ambitions of a seat in Cuba's Congress until Batista organized a coup d'etat on March 10, 1952, short-circuiting scheduled elections.
Fidel and Raul Castro responded by organizing a near-suicidal attack on the sprawling Moncada military barracks in Santiago on July 26, 1953. More than 60 of the 119 who joined the brothers were killed, most by torture after they were captured. Castro survived only because the soldier who nabbed him took him to a police station rather than the barracks where others were being slain.
"Many great things in history started out as crazy acts," said Pedro Trigo Lopez, another survivor.
Castro was imprisoned but won sympathy because of Batista's bloody response to the attack.
Freed in an amnesty, he and Raul fled to Mexico and began recruiting a tiny rebel army. Fidel also went to New York City to raise money for his cause. Among those who joined up in Mexico City was "Che" Guevara, an Argentine physician who had witnessed the crudely disguised CIA overthrow of Guatemala's elected president.
In 1956, Castro loaded the "Granma," a creaky yacht meant for a dozen, with 82 fighters and set off for Cuba. Batista's forces were tipped off and spotted the wallowing boat before it could land, and all but 12 of the rebels were killed or arrested before they could flee to the nearby Sierra Maestra mountains.
Yet the guerrilla war against the Batista regime gradually became unstoppable, culminating in Castro's Jan. 8, 1959, entry into Havana before throngs of jubilant Cubans. To generations of youths who witnessed the moment, he became a larger-than-life figure known simply as Fidel, and for decades the left in Latin America considered him nearly infallible.
Hundreds of thousands turned out for Castro's speeches, hearing his high-pitched voice soar for hour after hour. He would walk listeners through world history, dip into provincial cane-cutting statistics, chuckle maliciously about his foes and then thunder about capitalist injustice. His 269-minute address to the U.N. General Assembly in 1960 set the world body's record for length, a mark that is unlikely to be broken.
Soon after the revolution, Castro set his eye outside the island.
"How much America and the peoples of our hemisphere need a revolution like the one that has taken place in Cuba!" he said days after his triumph.
"How much it needs for the millionaires who have become rich by stealing the people's money to lose everything they have stolen!" he added. "How much America needs for the war criminals in the countries of our hemisphere all to be shot!"
Most of the foreign uprisings inspired by Cuba's government fizzled, including Guevara's fumbling effort to bring revolution to Bolivia, where he was captured and killed in 1967.
But rebels helped by Cuba toppled Nicaragua's government in 1979 and battled to a peace treaty in the 1990s in El Salvador and Guatemala.
Castro became a hero to many Africans for sending more than 350,000 Cubans to join Angola's civil war against a faction backed by the U.S. and South Africa's white apartheid government.
Even as a young boy, Castro often seemed obsessed with the U.S., natural enough in a poor nation just 150 kilometers (90 miles) from the economic giant. He studied English in Santiago and practiced by writing a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 that is now preserved in the U.S. National Archives: "President of the United States. If you like, give me a ten dollar bill green American."
He signed it, "Your friend, Fidel Castro," and added, "If you want iron to make your ships I will show you the biggest mines of iron of the land. They are in Mayori, Oriente Cuba."
Perhaps only Castro knew when he first embraced socialism.
While fighting Batista, Castro consistently denied being a communist, and many Cuban supporters, foreign journalists and fellow rebels believed him. At the time, Raul was considered the family radical.
The U.S. government cut off aid to Batista's government in its dying days. But even American officials alert to any whiff of Soviet influence were not quite sure what to make of the rebel leader.
When Castro came to the U.S. as Cuba's new prime minister in April 1959, he denounced communism, wooed the press, met then-Vice President Richard Nixon and reached through bars to pet a tiger at the Bronx Zoo.
Nixon wrote in a four-page memo to President Dwight D. Eisenhower that Castro was "either incredibly naive about Communism or is under Communist discipline." But he also said the 32-year-old showed "those indefinable qualities which make him a leader of men. Whatever we may think of him, he is going to be a great factor in the development of Cuba and very possibly in the development of Latin American affairs generally."
Many U.S. companies initially looked to work with the revolutionary government, including Coca-Cola, which ran a magazine ad celebrating "the resurgence of democratic liberties in our country."
The popular Cuban magazine Bohemia lionized Castro and assured readers that he would never embrace communism. A year later, Bohemia's editor fled as the government took over all independent media, much of the economy and social organizations.
The U.S. government, anxious over Castro's lurch to the left, began imposing economic restrictions and backing plots to overthrow him. It was a tense time in the Cold War, and Washington feared Castro had loosed a political virus that would infect other Latin American countries.
"El Comandante" pushed even more quickly toward the Soviet camp. Factories and even neighborhood shops were transformed into state enterprises. Farms were collectivized. Once-independent labor unions were absorbed into the Communist Party system. No other parties were allowed. Every neighborhood had its "Committee for the Defense of the Revolution" keeping watch for subversive tendencies.
Many Cuban parents so feared communist education that they separated themselves from their children, about 14,000 of whom were sent to the U.S. under a Catholic Church program known as Operation Pedro Pan.
When Castro traveled to the United Nations in September 1960, relations with Washington had become so bad that his delegation had trouble getting suitable lodging. He wound up making a showy move to the decaying Hotel Theresa in Harlem, where he met with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader.
Exiles formed guerrilla bands to try to topple Castro, and the CIA recruited, trained and organized them for the Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961. It was a debacle for the U.S., and a triumph for Castro, who climbed into a tank to direct some of the island's defenses. More than 1,200 invading troops were captured, about 100 were killed and the operation was crushed.
That was the moment the combative leader chose to officially declare Cuba a socialist country. By year's end, it had adopted Soviet bureaucracy and textbooks. It waged war on rock 'n roll and sent priests, gays and others considered socially suspicious to labor camps.
American officials could do little about it. Cuban warnings of a U.S. invasion were shown to the world to be true — and U.S. denials of involvement were proven to be lies.
Never again would Washington risk a major military operation to topple Castro.
Instead, it turned to tougher sanctions to strangle Cuba's economy. President John F. Kennedy imposed what came to be known as the U.S. embargo on Feb. 7, 1962, widening existing sanctions. The measure would remain stubbornly in place for the rest of Castro's life.
U.S. officials also covertly dreamed up numerous ways of assassinating their nemesis. By Cuban count, he was the target of more than 630 assassination plots by militant Cuban exiles or the U.S. government.
Castro, meanwhile, deepened his embrace of Moscow, agreeing to host thousands of Soviet military "advisers" and silos containing nuclear missiles, a decision that brought the world to the brink of destruction. Once it got wind of the missiles, the Kennedy administration ordered a blockade of the island and demanded the Soviets pull out.
The standoff known as the Cuban Missile Crisis ended — over Castro's objections — with the Soviet decision to remove the warheads.
Despite his disappointment at what he saw as Khruschev's weakness and betrayal, Castro moved the country even moIn 1964 he acknowledged holding 15,000 political prisoners. That number would drop into the hundreds in the final years of his rule, though human rights activists continued to deplore harassment and detentions of many opponents. It was left to his brother Raul to hammer out a 2010 agreement with the Roman Catholic Church that freed dozens of intellectuals and social commentators sentenced seven years earlier to long jail terms.
Castro summed up his views on dissent with a famous 1961 warning to Cuba's intellectual class that excessive criticism would not be tolerated: "Within the Revolution, everything; outside the Revolution, nothing."
"There are books that should not have a single issue published, not even a chapter, not a page, not a letter," Castro said a decade later, adding: "There will be room here now ... only for revolutionaries."
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