Fidel Castro: An island leader's rise to power

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Fidel Castro, featured in a dramatic mural at a Cuban museum.
Fidel Castro, featured in a dramatic mural at a Cuban museum.
Image via the Library of Congress.
Cuba's Fidel Castro was many things to many people -- loved, hated, admired and despised. But for all that, he was undeniably consequential.

     The revolutionary leader died Nov. 25 at age 90, and many Cuban-Americans celebrated his death. Under Castro’s leadership, Cuba became the first Communist nation in the Western Hemisphere. And because Cuba is only 150 kilometers or 93 miles south of Key West, Florida, its political dramas have always been of interest to Americans.
     Anti-poverty organizations have noted that schools and health care systems on the archipelago (population: 11,179,995) improved under Castro. But it is also true that Cuba developed brutal policies, restricting freedom of expression, association and assembly. The group Amnesty International summed it up this way: “Government critics continue to be imprisoned; many report that they were beaten during arrest.”    
    Here is an overview of Castro's rise to prominence, along with a source list and links for further study. 

Castro’s rise: He was born Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz on Aug. 13, 1926, near Birán, Cuba. His father was a sugarcane farmer, and his mother was a servant.  
    While many in Cuba lived in poverty, Castro’s family enjoyed wealth, and he attended Jesuit boarding schools. By 1945 he was a student at the University of Havana's School of Law, where he became involved in politics. In 1947, Castro “joined an abortive attempt by Dominican exiles and Cubans to invade the Dominican Republic and overthrow Gen. Rafael Trujillo (the Dominican Republic's dictator). He then took part in urban riots that broke out in Bogotá, Colombia, in April 1948,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica website.
    After graduating from law school, Castro became a member of the Cuban People’s Party and ran for the House of Representatives in Cuba in 1952. But that year, Fulgencio Batista took control of the country in a bloodless coup, canceled elections and focused on increasing his fortune. (For more of a background on Batista, see the PBS website.)

A revolutionary: One year later, on July 26, 1953, Castro launched an assault on the Moncada Barracks, a military garrison. The attack failed and most of the 160 fighters with Castro were killed. Captured and put on trial, Castro was sentenced to 15 years in prison. But two years later, he and his brother, Raul, were released. 
    The Castro brothers then went to Mexico, where they met Ernesto "Che" Guevara of Argentina, recounts the Cold War Museum website. The brothers plotted guerrilla war and organized Cuban exiles into a group called the 26th of July Movement, named for their unsuccessful attack on the military barracks.
    In 1956, Fidel Castro and his followers invaded Cuba. Initial attacks were unsuccessful, but Castro escaped to the mountains, where he led guerrilla forces against Batista’s army.
     On Jan 2, 1959, The New York Times reported that Batista “resigned as President of rebellion-torn Cuba yesterday and fled to exile in the Dominican Republic. The rebel forces of Fidel Castro moved swiftly to seize power throughout the island.”
    A month later, on Feb. 23, 1959, Time magazine reported that Castro, then 32, had taken control of the Cuban government. His brother, Raul, then 27, was made commander of the armed forces.
     As summed up on the Cold War Museum website, Castro promised “mild reform and the re-institution of the former constitution.” In truth, he had radical changes in mind. “He nationalized the industry and commerce, and then proceeded to pass far-reaching land reforms. The relationship between the U.S government and the Cuban government became strained because of Castro’s nationalization of all agriculture and business, and therefore forcing U.S. agricultural and business estates out of Cuba. Castro also kept an anti-American rhetoric going throughout Cuba.” 

American-Cuban relations: For their part, U.S. leaders never trusted Castro. On April 17, 1961, a force of approximately 1,400 anti-Castro Cuban exiles, trained by the CIA, landed at the Cuban Bay of Pigs. It took less than three days for Castro’s forces to defeat them, recounts the book, Kennedy, by Theodore C. Sorensen (Bantam Books; 1965). The administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower had approved the training of these exiles, and Kennedy inherited the plan when he took office just three months before the invasion. Nonetheless, Kennedy took full responsibility for the failure.
    In October 1962, Americans braced for nuclear war after it was discovered that the Soviet Union was placing medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. Kennedy announced a naval blockade of the island.
   On Oct. 27, Kennedy and the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, reached an agreement: “The Soviets agreed to remove their missiles from Cuba in return for promises from the United States not to invade Cuba, and to pressure NATO into withdrawing its medium-range missiles from Turkey,” according to the The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962: The Missiles of October on the National Endowment for the Humanities website.      
    While those are the two most notable events in U.S. confrontations with Cuba, there were other conflicts as well. Tension between the two countries bubbled to the surface in 1999 after a five-year-old Cuban boy, Elian Gonzalez, was found clinging to an inner tube off the Florida coast. His mother and 11 others had drowned while attempting to float from Cuba to the U.S. A custody dispute soon erupted between the boy’s father, who was still in Cuba, and family members living in Florida. On April 22, 2000, federal agents seized the boy, who was  reunited with his father. 
     Castro stepped down as president in 2008, leaving his brother, Raul, in charge. 

Human rights: Throughout the years, the country’s human rights record has been a mixed bag.
    “Cuba has instituted free and universally accessible health care and education and has built on its formerly weak pension system to develop a universal and government-sponsored one,” reported a 2002 study on the website for Oxfam America, part of a global anti-poverty group. “Cuba’s safety net of benefits includes protection of workers’ employment and housing, food subsidies, utilities and other necessities, and mechanisms to assist vulnerable families without stigma. The results have been quite positive. Adult literacy is nearly 96 percent, and schooling rates have risen dramatically. Infant mortality has decreased, drug use and crime are subdued compared with other countries, and youth violence is minimal. Cubans feel these effects in their daily lives, and for many these transformations mean that the revolution is working for them.”
    But the website for the advocacy group Human Rights Watch sums up that under Castro, “thousands of Cubans were incarcerated in abysmal prisons, thousands more were harassed and intimidated, and entire generations were denied basic political freedoms.”  Abusive practices included “surveillance, beatings, arbitrary detention, and public acts of repudiation.”  

The Cuban equation: American policymakers have struggled to find a way to help Cubans while not abetting oppressive policies. Under President Barack Obama, tensions between the two countries have thawed. 
    In October, the U.S. delegation to the United Nations abstained from the annual General Assembly condemnation of the American trade embargo against Cuba. The New York Times reported that this “was another important signal by the Obama administration of its intention to fully repair relations with Cuba, including an end to the embargo.”   
    While some have criticized the Obama administration’s policy, there is another view.  “For decades, Fidel Castro was the chief beneficiary of a misguided U.S. policy that allowed him to play the victim and discouraged other governments from condemning his repressive policies,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, in an article on the group’s website. “While the embargo remains in place, the Obama administration’s policy of engagement has changed the equation, depriving the Cuban government of its main pretext for repressing dissent on the island.”

     To know more:

     Related:

     Mending fences: Why normalization matters  

     Most Americans approve of Cuba connection 

     Why the U.S. has a base at Guantanamo Bay 

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