FIDEL CASTRO, CUBAN LEADER WHO DEFIED U.S., DIES AT 90 Brought Cold War to Western Hemisphere The Faces of Raúl Castro’s Inner Circle Business or Politics? What Trump Means for Cuba The Times’s Archival Coverage of Castro Castro’s Revolution, Illustrated Castro’s Revolution, Illustrated Cuba on the Edge of Change
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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.
ObituariesBy THE NEW YORK TIMES4:56Video
My Three Days With Fidel
Richard Eder, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, recalls when he interviewed Fidel Castro in 1964.
By THE NEW YORK TIMES on Publish Date November 26, 2016.
Photo by Jack Manning/The New York Times.
Watch in Times Video »
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.
That image made him a symbol of revolution throughout the world and an inspiration to many imitators. Hugo Chávez 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. Castro’s 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. 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.
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.”
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, Ángel Castro, and one of his maids, Lina Ruz González,
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 Ángel 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 Belén, 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
Havana’s 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.
Castro’s 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 Szulc’s 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.
Castro’s initial response to the Batista government was to challenge it
with a legal appeal, claiming that Mr. Batista’s actions had violated
the Constitution. Even as a symbolic act, the attempt was futile.
Photo
Mr. Castro, giving a
deposition in July 1953, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for leading
an attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba.Credit
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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 Raúl. 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. Castro’s 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.
Photo
Mr. Castro with other rebel
leaders at a secret base in June 1957 including Che Guevara, the
guerrillas’ physician, second from left, and Mr. Castro’s brother Raúl,
kneeling in the foreground.Credit
United Press International
Man of the Mountains
During
Mr. Castro’s 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. Castro’s, Mr. Batista
grew fearful of the young guerrilla’s 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. Castro’s assertions that Cuba’s 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.”
The Times’s Coverage of Fidel Castro
Articles include an exclusive Times interview with the young
guerrilla leader in 1957 and coverage of the revolution, the Bay of
Pigs invasion and the 1962 missile crisis.
Fidel Castro, the rebel leader of Cuba’s youth,
is alive and fighting hard in the rugged, almost impenetrable fastnesses
of the Sierra Maestra, at the southern tip of the island.
The
Cuban government denounced Mr. Matthews and called the articles
fabrications. But the news that he had survived the landing breathed
life into Mr. Castro’s movement. His small band of irregulars skirmished
with government troops, and each encounter increased their support in
Cuba and around the world, even though other insurgent forces in the
cities were also fighting to overthrow the Batista government.
It
was the symbolic strength of his movement, not the armaments under Mr.
Castro’s control, that overwhelmed the government. By the time Mr. Batista fled
from a darkened Havana airport just after midnight on New Year’s Day,
1959, Mr. Castro was already a legend. Competing opposition groups were
unable to seize power.
Events
over the next few months became the catalyst for another transformation
in Mr. Castro’s public image. More than 500 Batista-era officials were
brought before courts-martial and special tribunals, summarily convicted
and shot to death. The grainy black-and-white images of the executions
broadcast on American television horrified viewers.
Mr.
Castro defended the executions as necessary to solidify the revolution.
He complained that the United States had raised not a whimper when Mr.
Batista had tortured and executed thousands of opponents.
But
to wary observers in the United States, the executions were a signal
that Mr. Castro was not the democratic savior he had seemed. In May
1959, he began confiscating privately owned agricultural land, including land owned by Americans, openly provoking the United States government.
In the spring of 1960, Mr. Castro ordered American and British refineries in Cuba to accept oil from the Soviet Union. Under pressure from Congress, President Dwight D. Eisenhower cut the American sugar quota
from Cuba, forcing Mr. Castro to look for new markets. He turned to the
Soviet Union for economic aid and political support. Thus began a
half-century of American antagonism toward Cuba.
Finally,
in 1961, he gave the United States 48 hours to reduce the staff of its
embassy in Havana to 18 from 60. A frustrated Eisenhower broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba and closed the embassy on the Havana seacoast. The diplomatic stalemate lasted until 2015, when embassies were finally reopened in both Havana and Washington.
During
his two years in the mountains, Mr. Castro had sketched a social
revolution whose aim, at least on the surface, seemed to be to restore
the democracy that Mr. Batista’s coup had stifled. Mr. Castro promised
free elections and vowed to end American domination of the economy and
the working-class oppression that he said it had caused.
Despite
having a law degree, Mr. Castro had no real experience in economics or
government. Beyond improving education and reducing Cuba’s dependence on
sugar and the United States, his revolution began without a clear sense
of the new society he planned, except that it would be different from
what had existed under Mr. Batista.
At
the time, Cuba was a playground for rich American tourists and
gangsters where glaring disparities of wealth persisted, although the
country was one of the most economically advanced in the Caribbean.
After taking power in 1959 he put together a cabinet of moderates, but it did not last long. Mr. Castro named Felipe Pazos,
an economist, president of the Banco Nacional de Cuba, Cuba’s central
bank. But when Mr. Pazos openly criticized Mr. Castro’s growing
tolerance of Communists and his failure to restore democracy, he was
dismissed. In place of Mr. Pazos, Mr. Castro named Che Guevara, an
Argentine doctor who knew nothing about monetary policy but whose
revolutionary credentials were unquestioned.
Opposition
to the Castro government began to grow in Cuba, leading peasants and
anti-Communist insurgents to take up arms against it. The Escambray Revolt, as it was called, lasted from 1959 to 1965, when it was crushed by Mr. Castro’s army.
As
the first waves of Cuban exiles arrived in Miami and northern New
Jersey after the revolution, many were intent on overthrowing the man
they had once supported. Their number would eventually total a million,
many from what had been, proportionately, the largest middle class in
Latin America.
The
Central Intelligence Agency helped train an exile army to retake Cuba
by force. The army was to make a beachhead at the Bay of Pigs, a remote
spot on Cuba’s southern coast, and instigate a popular insurrection.
Mr. Szulc, then a correspondent for The Times, had picked up information about the invasion, and written an article about it. But The Times,
at the request of the Kennedy administration, withheld some of what Mr.
Szulc had found, including information that an attack was imminent.
Specific references to the C.I.A. were also omitted.
Ten days later, on April 17, 1961, 1,500 Cuban fighters landed
at the Bay of Pigs. Mr. Castro was waiting for them. The invasion was
badly planned and by all accounts doomed. Most of the invaders were
either captured or killed. Promised American air support never arrived.
The historian Theodore Draper called the botched operation
“a perfect failure,” and the invasion aroused a distrust of the United
States that Mr. Castro exploited for political gain for the rest of his
life.
Photo
Mr. Castro with Mr. Guevara in Havana in January 1959.Credit
Roberto Salas
Declaration or Deception?
The
C.I.A., fighting the Cold War, had acted out of worries about Mr.
Castro’s increasingly open Communist connections. As he consolidated
power, even some of his most faithful supporters grew concerned. One
break had taken place as early as 1959. Huber Matos,
who had fought alongside Mr. Castro in the Sierra Maestra, resigned as
military governor of Camagüey Province to protest the Communists’
growing influence as well as the appointment of Raúl Castro, whose
Communist sympathies were well known, as commander of Cuba’s armed
forces. Suspecting an antirevolutionary plot, Fidel Castro had Mr. Matos
arrested and charged with treason.
Within two months, Mr. Matos was tried, convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
When he was released in 1979, Mr. Matos, nearly blind, went into exile
in the United States, where he lived until his death in 2014. Shortly
after arriving in Miami and joining the legions of Castro opponents
there, Mr. Matos told Worldview magazine:
“I differed from Fidel Castro because the original objective of our
revolution was ‘Freedom or Death.’ Once Castro had power, he began to
kill freedom.”
It
was not until just before the Bay of Pigs invasion that Mr. Castro
declared publicly that his revolution was socialist. A few months later,
on Dec. 2, 1961, he removed any lingering doubt about his loyalties
when he affirmed in a long speech, “I am a Marxist-Leninist.”
Many
Cubans who had willingly accepted great sacrifice for what they
believed would be a democratic revolution were dismayed. They broke
ranks with Mr. Castro, putting themselves and their families at risk.
Others, from the safety of the United States, publicly accused Mr.
Castro of betraying the revolution and called him a tyrant. Even his
family began to raise doubts about his intentions.
“As
I listened, I thought that surely he must be a superb actor,” Mr.
Castro’s sister, Juanita, wrote in an account in Life magazine in 1964,
referring to the December 1961 speech. “He had fooled not only so many
of his friends, but his family as well.” She recalled his upbringing as
the son of a well-to-do landowner in eastern Cuba who had sent him to
exclusive Jesuit schools. In 1948, after Fidel married Mirta
Díaz-Balart, whose family had ties to the Batista government, the elder
Mr. Castro gave them a three-month honeymoon in the United States.
“How
could Fidel, who had been given the best of everything, be a
Communist?” Juanita Castro wrote. “This was the riddle which paralyzed
me and so many other Cubans who refused to believe that he was leading
our country into the Communist camp.”
Although
the young Fidel was deeply involved in a radical student movement at
the University of Havana, his early allegiance to Communist doctrine was
uncertain at best. Some analysts believed that the obstructionist
attitudes of American officials had pushed Mr. Castro toward the Soviet
Union.
Indeed,
although Mr. Castro pursued ideologically communist policies, he never
established a purely Communist state in Cuba, nor did he adopt orthodox
Communist Party ideology. Rather, what developed in Cuba was less
doctrinaire, a tropical form of communism that suited his needs. He
centralized the economy and flattened out much of the traditional
hierarchy of Cuban society, improving education and health care for many
Cubans, while depriving them of free speech and economic opportunity.
But
unlike other Communist countries, Cuba was never governed by a
functioning politburo; Mr. Castro himself, and later his brother Rául,
filled all the important positions in the party, the government and the
army, ruling Cuba as its maximum leader.
“The
Cuban regime turns out to be simply the case of a third-world dictator
seizing a useful ideology in order to employ its wealth against his
enemies,” wrote the columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, whose critical biography of Mr. Castro was published in 1991.
In
this view of Mr. Castro, he was above all an old-style Spanish
caudillo, one of a long line of Latin American strongmen who endeared
themselves to people searching for leaders. The analyst Alvaro Vargas
Llosa of the Independent Institute in Washington called him “the ultimate 20th-century caudillo.”
In
Cuba, through good times and bad, Mr. Castro’s supporters referred to
themselves not as Communists but as Fidelistas. He remained personally
popular among segments of Cuban society even after his economic policies
created severe hardship. As Mr. Castro consolidated power, eliminated
his enemies and grew increasingly autocratic, the Cuban people referred
to him simply as Fidel. To say “Castro” was considered disloyal,
although in later decades Cubans would commonly say just that and mean
it. Or they would invoke his overwhelming presence by simply bringing a
hand to their chins, as if to stroke a beard.
Photo
A celebration in Santiago de
Cuba on July 26, 1964, the anniversary of the attack on the Moncada
military barracks that started the Cuban revolution.Credit
Grey Villet/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images
Global Brinkmanship
Mr.
Castro’s alignment with the Soviet Union meant that the Cold War
between the world’s superpowers, and the ideological battle between
democracy and communism, had erupted in the United States’ sphere of
influence. A clash was all but inevitable, and it came in October 1962.
American spy planes took reconnaissance photos suggesting that the
Soviets had exploited their new alliance to build bases in Cuba for
intermediate-range nuclear missiles capable of reaching North America.
Mr.
Castro allowed the bases to be constructed, but once they were
discovered, he became a bit player in the ensuing drama, overshadowed by
President John F. Kennedy and the Soviet leader, Nikita S. Khrushchev.
Kennedy put United States military forces on alert and ordered a naval
blockade of Cuba. The two sides were at a stalemate for 13 tense days,
and the world held its breath.
Finally,
after receiving assurances that the United States would remove American
missiles from Turkey and not invade Cuba, the Soviets withdrew the
missiles and dismantled the bases.
But
the Soviet presence in Cuba continued to grow. Soviet troops,
technicians and engineers streamed in, eventually producing a generation
of blond Cubans with names like Yuri, Alexi and Vladimiro. The Soviets
were willing to buy all the sugar Cuba could produce. Even as other
Caribbean nations diversified, Cuba decided to stick with one major
crop, sugar, and one major buyer.
Photo
Mr. Castro at an experimental
cattle-breeding station in 1964. He tried to develop a Cuban supercow
that could produce milk at prodigious rates.Credit
Jack Manning/The New York Times
But
after forcing the entire nation into a failed effort to reach a record
10-million-ton sugar harvest in 1970, Mr. Castro recognized the need to
break the cycle of dependence on the Soviets and sugar. Once more, he
relied on his belief in himself and his revolution for solutions. One
unlikely consequence was his effort to develop a Cuban supercow.
Although he had no training in animal husbandry, Mr. Castro decided to
crossbreed humpbacked Asian Zebus with standard Holsteins to create a new breed that could produce milk at prodigious rates.
Decades
later, the Zebus could still be found grazing in pastures across the
island, symbols of Mr. Castro’s micromanagement. A few of the hybrids
did give more milk, and one that set a milk production record was
stuffed and placed in a museum. But most were no better producers than
their parents.
As
the Soviets settled in Cuba in the 1960s, hundreds of Cuban students
were sent to Moscow, Prague and other cities of the Soviet bloc to study
science and medicine. Admirers from around the world, including some
Americans, were impressed with the way that health care and literacy in
Cuba had improved. A reshaping of Cuban society was underway.
Cuba’s
tradition of racial segregation was turned upside down as peasants from
the countryside, many of them dark-skinned descendants of Africans
enslaved by the Spaniards centuries before, were invited into Havana and
other cities that had been overwhelmingly white. They were given the
keys to the elegant homes and spacious apartments of the middle-class
Cubans who had fled to the United States. Rents came to be little more
than symbolic, and basic foods like milk and eggs were sold in
government stores at below production cost.
Mr.
Castro’s early overhauls also changed Cuba in ways that were less than
utopian. Foreign-born priests were exiled, and local clergy were
harassed so much that many closed their churches. The Roman Catholic
Church excommunicated Mr. Castro for violating a 1949 papal decree
against supporting Communism. He established a sinister system of local Committees for the Defense of the Revolution
that set neighbors to informing on neighbors. Thousands of dissidents
and homosexuals were rounded up and sentenced to either prison or forced
labor. And although blacks were welcomed into the cities, Mr. Castro’s
government remained overwhelmingly white.
Mr.
Castro regularly fanned the flames of revolution with his oratory. In
marathon speeches, he incited the Cuban people by laying out what he
considered the evils of capitalism in general and of the United States
in particular. For decades, the regime controlled all publications and
broadcasting outlets and restricted access to goods and information in
ways that would not have been possible if Cuba were not an island.
His revolution established at home, Mr. Castro looked to export it. Thousands of Cuban soldiers were sent to Africa to fight in Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia
in support of Communist insurgents. The strain on Cuba’s treasury and
its society was immense, but Mr. Castro insisted on being a global
player in the Communist struggle.
As potential threats to his rule were eliminated, Mr. Castro tightened his grip. Camilo Cienfuegos,
who had led a division in the insurrection and was immensely popular in
Cuba, was killed in a plane crash days after going to arrest Huber
Matos in Camagüey on Mr. Castro’s orders. His body was never found. Che
Guevara, who had become hostile toward the Soviet Union, broke with Mr.
Castro before going off to Bolivia, where he was captured and killed in
1967 for trying to incite a revolution there.
Despite the fiery rhetoric from Mr. Castro in the early years of the revolution, Washington did attempt a reconciliation.
By some accounts, in the weeks before he was assassinated in 1963,
Kennedy had aides look at mending fences, providing Mr. Castro was
willing to break with the Soviets.
Photo
Marines helping a Cuban child
off a boat in Key West, Fla., in May 1980. Mr. Castro tried to defuse
domestic discontent by allowing about 125,000 Cubans to flee in boats,
rafts and inner tubes. He emptied prisons of criminals and people with
mental illnesses, forcing them to join the exodus.Credit
Fernando Yovera/Associated Press
But
with Kennedy’s assassination, and suspicions that Mr. Castro and the
Cubans were somehow involved, the 90 miles separating Cuba from the
United States became a gulf of antagonism and mistrust. The C.I.A. tried
several times to eliminate Mr. Castro or undermine his authority. One
plot involved exposing him to a chemical that would cause his beard to
fall out, and another using a poison pen to kill him. Mr. Castro often
boasted of how many times he had escaped C.I.A. plots to kill him, and
he ordered information about the foiled attempts to be put on display at
a Havana museum.
Relations between the United States and Cuba briefly thawed
in the 1970s during the administration of President Jimmy Carter. For
the first time, Cuban-Americans were allowed to visit family in Havana
under strict guidelines. But that fleeting détente ended in 1980, when
Mr. Castro tried to defuse growing domestic discontent by allowing about
125,000 Cubans to flee
in boats, makeshift rafts and inner tubes, departing from the beach at
Mariel. He used the opportunity to empty Cuban prisons of criminals and
people with mental illnesses and force them to join the Mariel boatlift.
Mr. Carter’s successor, Reagan, slammed shut the door that Mr. Carter
had opened.
In
1989, when frustrated veterans from Cuba’s African ventures began
rallying around Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa, who led Cuban forces on the
continent, Mr. Castro effectively got rid of a potential rival by
bringing the general and some of his supporters to trial on drug charges. General Ochoa and several other high-ranking officers were executed on the orders of Raúl Castro, who was then minister of defense.
The
United States economic embargo, imposed by Eisenhower and widened by
Kennedy, has continued for more than five decades. But its effectiveness
was undermined by the Soviet Union, which gave Cuba $5 billion a year
in subsidies, and later by Venezuela, which sent Cuba badly needed oil
and long-term economic support. Most other countries, including close
United States allies like Canada, maintained relations with Cuba
throughout the decades and continued trading with the island. In recent
years, successive American presidents have punched big holes in the
embargo, allowing a broad range of economic activity, though maintaining
the ban on tourism.
Photo
Mr. Castro, speaking on July
26, 2003, lived to rule a country where the overwhelming majority of
people had never known any other leader.Credit
Sven Creutzmann/Polaris
End of an Empire
“I
faced my greatest challenge after I turned 60,” Mr. Castro said in an
interview with Vanity Fair magazine in 1994. He was referring to the
collapse of the Soviet empire, which brought an end to the subsidies
that had kept his government afloat for so long. He had also lost a
steady source of oil and a reliable buyer for Cuban sugar.
Abandoned,
isolated, facing increasing dissent at home, Mr. Castro seemed to have
come to the end of his line. Cuba’s collapse appeared imminent, and Mr.
Castro’s final hours in power were widely anticipated. Miami exiles
began making elaborate preparations for a triumphant return.
But
Mr. Castro, defying predictions, fought on. He chose an unlikely
weapon: the hated American dollar, which he had long condemned as the
corrupt symbol of capitalism. In the summer of 1993, he made it legal
for Cubans to hold American dollars spent by tourists or sent by exiled
family members. That policy eventually led to a dual currency system
that has fostered resentment and hampered economic development in Cuba.
Mr.
Castro, the self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist, was also willing to
experiment with capitalism and free enterprise, at least for a time.
Encouraged by his brother Raúl, he allowed farmers to sell excess
produce at market rates, and he ordered officials to turn a blind eye to
small, family-run kitchens and restaurants, called paladares, that
charged market prices. Under Rául Castro, those reforms were broadened
considerably, though they were sometimes met with public grumbling from
his older brother.
But
despite his apparent distaste for capitalism, and lingering memories of
the 1950s Cuba that preceded his rule, Fidel Castro continued to foster
Cuba’s tourism industry. He allowed Spanish, Italian and Canadian
companies to develop resort hotels and vacation properties, usually in
association with an arm of the Cuban military.
For
many years, the resorts were off limits to most Cubans. They generated
hard cash, but a new generation of struggling young Cuban women were
lured into prostitution by the tourists’ money.
For
a time, Mexican and Canadian investors poured money into the decrepit
telephone company (owned by ITT until it was nationalized by Mr. Castro
in 1960), mining operations and other enterprises, which helped keep
Cuba’s economy from collapsing. He declared an emergency during which he
expected the Cuban people to tighten their belts. He called the United
States embargo genocide.
All
his efforts were not enough to keep dissent from sprouting in Havana,
Santiago de Cuba and other urban areas during this period of hardship.
Despite worldwide condemnation of his actions, Mr. Castro clamped down
on a fledgling democracy movement, jailing anyone who dared to call for
free elections. He also cracked down on the nucleus of an independent
press, imprisoning or harassing Cuban reporters and editors.
In 1994, for the first time, demonstrators took to the streets of Havana
to express their anger over the failed promises of the revolution. Mr.
Castro had to personally appeal for calm. Then, in early 1996, he seized
an opportunity to rebuild his support by again demonizing the United
States.
Photo
In 1994, demonstrators took to the streets of Havana to express their anger over the failed promises of the revolution.Credit
Prensa Latina, via Associated Press
A South Florida group, Brothers to the Rescue,
had been flying three civilian planes toward the Cuban coast when two
were shot down by Cuban military jets. Four men onboard were killed. Mr.
Castro raged against Washington, maintaining that the planes had
violated Cuban airspace. American officials condemned the attack.
Until
then, President Bill Clinton had been moving discreetly but steadily
toward easing the United States embargo and re-establishing some
relations with Cuba. But in the wake of the attack, and the virulent
reaction from Cuban-Americans in Florida — a state Mr. Clinton
considered important to his re-election bid — he reluctantly signed the Helms-Burton law, which allowed the United States to punish foreign companies that were using confiscated American property in Cuba.
The
State Department’s first warnings under the new law went to a Canadian
mining company, which had taken over a huge nickel mine, and a Mexican
investment group, which had purchased the Cuban telephone company.
Despite protests from American allies,
the United States maintained the Helms-Burton law as a weapon against
Mr. Castro, although all its provisions have never been carried out.
But
in Cuba, the American actions reinforced Mr. Castro’s complaints about
American arrogance and helped channel domestic dissent toward
Washington. One of his strengths as a communicator — he considered
Reagan his only worthy competitor in that regard — had always been to
transform his anger toward the United States into a rallying cry for the
Cuban people.
“We
are left with the honor of being one of the few adversaries of the
United States,” Mr. Castro told Maria Shriver of NBC in a 1998
interview. When Ms. Shriver asked him if that truly was an honor, he
answered, “Of course.”
“For
such a small country as Cuba to have such a gigantic country as the
United States live so obsessed with this island,” he said, “it is an
honor for us.”
Photo
Mr. Castro in June 2006. His impact on Latin America and the Western Hemisphere has the earmarks of lasting indefinitely.Credit
Alejandro Ernesto/European Pressphoto Agency
Parallel Lives
As
he grew older and grayer, Mr. Castro could no longer be easily linked
to the intense guerrilla fighter who had come out of the Sierra Maestra.
He rambled incoherently in his long speeches. He was rumored to be
suffering from various diseases. After 40 years, the revolution he
started no longer held promise, and Cubans by the thousands, including
many who had never known any other life but under Mr. Castro, risked
their lives trying to reach the United States on rafts, inner tubes and
even old trucks outfitted with floats.
Although
the revolution lost its luster, what never diminished was Mr. Castro’s
ability to confound American officials and to create situations to seize
the advantage of a particular moment.
That was evident early in 1998, when Pope John Paul II visited Havana
and met with Mr. Castro. The meeting was widely expected to be seen as a
rebuke and an embarrassment to Mr. Castro. The aging anti-Communist
pontiff stood beside the aging Communist leader, who had abandoned his
military uniform for the occasion in favor of a dark suit. The pope
talked about human rights and the lack of basic freedoms in Cuba. But he
also called Washington’s embargo “unjust and ethically unacceptable,”
allowing Mr. Castro to claim a political if not a moral victory.
Photo
Pope John Paul II visited
Havana in 1998. The pope spoke about the lack of basic freedoms in Cuba,
but also called the United States embargo “unjust and ethically
unacceptable.”Credit
Pool photo by Paul Hanna
The
next year, Mr. Castro converted another conflict into an opportunity to
bolster his standing among his own people while infuriating the United
States. A young woman and her 5-year-old son were among more than a
dozen Cubans who had set out for Florida in a 17-foot aluminum boat. The
boat capsized and the woman drowned, but the boy, Elián González,
survived two days in an inner tube before being picked up by the United
States Coast Guard and taken to Miami, where he was united with
relatives.
Later, however, the relatives refused to release
the boy when his father, in Cuba, demanded his return. The standoff
between the family and United States officials created the kind of
emotional and political drama that Mr. Castro had become a master at
manipulating for his own purposes.
Mr.
Castro made the boy another symbol of American oppression, which
diverted attention from the deteriorating conditions in Cuba. After
several months, American agents seized the boy from his Miami relatives
and returned him to his father in Cuba, where he was greeted by Mr.
Castro.
That episode carried great significance for Mr. Castro in the way it echoed one in his personal life.
Mr. Castro and his wife, Mirta Díaz-Balart, divorced in 1955, six years after the birth of their son, Fidelito.
In
1956, when Mr. Castro and Ms. Díaz-Balart were both in Mexico, Mr.
Castro arranged to have the boy visit him before embarking on what he
said would be a dangerous voyage, which turned out to be his invasion of
Cuba. He promised to bring the boy back in two weeks, but it was a
trick. At the end of that period, Mr. Castro placed Fidelito in the
custody of a friend in Mexico City. He then sailed for Cuba with his
fellow rebels on the yacht Granma.
The
boy’s mother, with the help of her family and the Cuban Embassy in
Mexico City, found a team of professional kidnappers, who ambushed the
boy and his guardians in a park and carried him off. Ms. Díaz-Balart
took Fidelito to New York and enrolled him in a local school for a year.
But after Mr. Castro entered Havana and grabbed control of the
government, he persuaded his former wife to send the boy back. The
younger Mr. Castro lived in Cuba until, years later, he was sent to
Russia to study. He became a physicist, married a Russian woman and
eventually returned to Cuba, where he was named head of Cuba’s nuclear power program.
Details
of Mr. Castro’s personal life were always murky. He had no formal home
but lived in many different houses and estates in and around Havana. He
had relationships with several women, and only in his later years was he
willing to acknowledge that he had a relationship of more than 40 years
with Dalia Soto del Valle, who had rarely been seen in public. (Whether
they were legally married was not clear.)
The
two had five sons — Alexis, Alexander, Alejandro, Antonio and Ángel —
all of whom live in Cuba. Mr. Castro also has a daughter, Alina, a radio
host in Miami, who bitterly attacked her father on the air for years.
Mr.
Castro had stormy relations with many of his relatives both in Cuba and
the United States. He remained close to Celia Sánchez, who was with him
in the Sierra Maestra and who looked after his schedule and his
archives devotedly, until she died in 1980. A sister, Ángela Castro,
died at 88 in Havana in February 2012, according to The Associated
Press, quoting her sister Juanita. And his elder brother Ramón died in
February 2016 at 91.
Outlasting
all his enemies, Mr. Castro lived to rule a country where the
overwhelming majority of people had never known any other leader. Hardly
anyone talked openly of a time without him until the day, in 2001, when
he appeared to faint while giving a speech. Then, in 2004, he stumbled
while leaving a platform, breaking a kneecap and reminding Cubans again of his mortality and forcing them to confront their future.
As Mr. Castro and his revolution aged, Cuban dissidents grew bolder. Oswaldo Payá,
using a clause in the Cuban Constitution, collected thousands of
signatures in a petition demanding a referendum on free speech and other
political freedoms. (Mr. Payá died in a car crash in 2012.) Bloggers
wrote disparagingly of Castro and the regime, although most of their
missives could not be read in Cuba, where Internet access was strictly
limited.
A group of Cuban women, who called themselves the Ladies in White,
rallied on Sundays to protest the imprisonment of their fathers,
husbands and sons, whose pictures they carried on posters inscribed with
the number of years to which they were sentenced as political
prisoners.
After
being made his brother’s successor, Raúl Castro tried to control the
fragments of the revolution that remained after Fidel Castro fell ill,
including a close association with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela,
who modeled himself after Fidel. (Mr. Chávez died in 2013.)
Photo
With his brother Raúl Castro,
then Cuba’s defense minister in December 2003. Fidel Castro ceded much
of his power to his brother in 2006.Credit
Adalberto Roque/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Never
as popular as his brother, Raúl Castro was considered a better manager,
and in some ways was seen as more conscious of the everyday needs of
the Cuban people, despite his reputation as the revolution’s
executioner. One of his first moves as leader was to replace the grossly
overcrowded city buses, known as “camels,” with new ones, many imported
from China. He opened up the economy somewhat, allowing entrepreneurs
to start businesses, and he eased restrictions on traveling, access to
cellphones, computers and other personal items, and the buying and
selling of property.
Still,
Raúl Castro came under mounting pressure from Cubans demanding even
more economic and political opportunity. He took more steps to open the
economy and, in so doing, dismantled parts of the socialist state that
his brother had defended for so long.
Lurking
in the background as Raúl Castro embarked on that new course was the
brooding visage of Fidel, whose revolution has been seen as a rebellion
of one man. When President Obama and Raúl Castro simultaneously went on TV
in their respective countries in 2014 to announce a prisoner exchange
and the first steps toward normalizing relations, Cubans and Americans
alike expected to hear Fidel either accepting or condemning the moves.
Six weeks after the deal was announced, Mr. Castro, or someone writing in his name, finally reacted in a way that combined his own bluster and his brother’s new approach.
“I
do not trust the politics of the United States, nor have I exchanged a
word with them, but this is not, in any way, a rejection of a peaceful
solution to conflicts,” Mr. Castro wrote near the end of a rambling
letter to students on the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of his
own time at the University of Havana.
Sounding
more like his brother than his old self, he backed any peaceful
attempts to resolve the problems between the two countries. He then took
one final swipe at his old nemesis.
News Clips: AmericasBy CUBAVISION, VIA REUTERS1:28
Fidel Castro Addresses Cuban Public
Video
Fidel Castro Addresses Cuban Public
In a rare public address, the Cuban
revolutionary leader addressed the people and congratulated his brother
Raúl on his continued efforts as president.
By CUBAVISION, VIA REUTERS on Publish Date April 19, 2016.
Photo by Ismael Francisco/Cubadebate, via Associated Press.
Watch in Times Video »
“The
grave dangers that threaten humanity today have to give way to norms
that are compatible with human dignity,” the letter said. “No country is
excluded from such rights. With this spirit I have fought, and will
continue fighting, until my last breath.”
In
April 2016, a frail Mr. Castro made what many thought would be his last
public appearance, at the Seventh Congress of the Cuban Communist
Party. Dressed in an incongruous blue tracksuit jacket, his hands at
times quivering and his once powerful voice reduced to a tinny squawk,
he expressed surprise at having survived to almost 90, and he bade farewell to the party, the political system and the revolutionary Cuba he had created.
“Soon I will be like everybody else,” Mr. Castro said. “Our turn comes to us all, but the ideas of Cuban communism will endure.”
No
one is sure if the force of the revolution will dissipate without Mr.
Castro and, eventually, his brother. But Fidel Castro’s impact on Latin
America and the Western Hemisphere has the earmarks of lasting
indefinitely. The power of his personality remains inescapable, for
better or worse, not only in Cuba but also throughout Latin America.
“We
are going to live with Fidel Castro and all he stands for while he is
alive,” wrote Mr. Matthews of The Times, whose own fortunes were dimmed
considerably by his connection to Mr. Castro, “and with his ghost when
he is dead.”
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.
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