Fidel Castro, Cuban Revolutionary Who Defied U.S.,
Dies at 90
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 onto 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.
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.”
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, 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.)
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.
“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.”
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