From outcast to revolutionary....A man named Fidel Castro

From outcast to revolutionary....A man named Fidel Castro

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born Aug. 13, 1926, at Las Manacas, his family’s plantation in the village of Biran in eastern Cuba’s Oriente province.

His father, Angel Castro, was born in Spain and went to Cuba as a soldier in the Spanish army. He became a laborer on a railway owned by the United Fruit Co. Soon he was clearing land for himself in the wilds of Oriente and growing sugar cane, which he sold to the fruit company. In time, Las Manacas comprised 26,000 acres, of which almost 2,000 were owned by the elder Castro.

As a child, Fidel Castro was well off but nowhere near as wealthy as some of the boys at the schools to which he was sent, including the prestigious Colegio de Belen, a Jesuit school in Havana.

Behind his back, he was sometimes called guajiro, or peasant. In his authoritative 1986 biography of Mr. Castro, author Tad Szulc quotes this assessment from Enrique Ovares, an old friend of Fidel’s: “I think that the worst damage Fidel’s parents did him was to put him in a school of wealthy boys without Fidel being really rich . . . and more than that without having a social position. . . . I think that this influenced him and he had hatred against society people and moneyed people.”

Mr. Castro entered the University of Havana in 1945. Perhaps applying his firsthand experience of social and economic inequality, he immersed himself in the legacy of Cuba’s bygone revolutionaries.

Since 1898, when the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor sparked the Spanish-American War, the country had often had tumultuous relations with the United States. Mr. Castro concluded that casting off U.S. hegemony was more important to Cuba than mere prosperity.

He joined the Insurrectional Revolutionary Union and began to carry a pistol. In 1947, he signed up for an abortive expedition to free the Dominican Republic from the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. In 1948, he went to Colombia to protest a meeting of the Pan-American Union, which was reorganizing into the Organization of American States.

Mr. Castro received his law degree at the University of Havana in 1950 and set up a practice in the capital city. Two years later, he ran for a seat in the Cuban congress on the ticket of the Ortodoxo Party, a reform group. His campaign was cut short on March 10, 1952, when Batista staged a coup and retook the presidency he first held in the 1940s.

Even as a young man, Mr. Castro showed a remarkable ability to persuade people to join him in seemingly impossible tasks — such as his wild scheme to take over the army’s Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba.

Mr. Castro’s plan was to distribute arms from the barracks to his supporters and overthrow Batista. Mr. Castro was not deterred by the fact that the garrison numbered more than 1,000 soldiers and that he fielded only about 120 followers.

The July 26, 1953, assault went off with almost comic mismanagement. The contingent with most of the arms got lost in the city’s old quarter, and Mr. Castro’s men rushed into what they thought was an arsenal, only to discover that it was a barbershop. Without firing a single shot himself, Mr. Castro called a retreat. He and most of the others were captured.

Through the intercession of a bishop who was a friend of his father, Mr. Castro was spared immediate execution and was instead put on trial. Although the court proceeding was held in secret, it gave Mr. Castro, who acted as his own attorney, the chance to make what became the most famous speech of his life. Smuggled out of prison, it concluded with the words that became known to generations of Cuban schoolchildren: “Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me.”

Mr. Castro was sentenced to 15 years but was released after less than two under an amnesty declared by Batista. He then moved to Mexico City, where he continued his work with a group calling itself the 26th of July Movement, commemorating the date of the Moncada assault, which became known as the opening salvo of the Cuban revolution.

The Moncada debacle and its aftermath also brought an end to Mr. Castro’s first marriage. In October 1948, he had married Mirta Diaz-Balart, the daughter of a well-to-do family with close ties to Batista and U.S. business interests. In 1949, they had a son — Fidel Felix Castro Diaz-Balart, known as Fidelito. After their divorce in 1955, Mr. Castro’s former settled settled in Spain and remarried. He raised their son in Cuba.

On Dec. 2, 1956, Mr. Castro and 81 followers returned to Cuba from Mexico aboard a second-hand yacht called “Granma,” whose name was later adopted by the Communist Party newspaper in Cuba. All but 12 in the landing party were killed or captured almost immediately. Mr. Castro, his brother Raúl and an Argentine physician, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, escaped into the mountains and began organizing a guerrilla army.

In the summer of 1958, Batista launched a major offensive against Mr. Castro’s ragtag group. When it failed, it was clear that Batista’s days in power were numbered. He announced to a few close colleagues at a New Year’s Eve party in 1958 that he was leaving the country, and Mr. Castro and his followers triumphantly drove into Havana to take control of the country on Jan. 1, 1959.

He drew support from many intellectuals during the early years of his rule. Among them were Ernest Hemingway, a Castro hero and longtime resident of Cuba; authors Jean-Paul Sartre and Gabriel Garcia Márquez; and Bob Dylan, the troubadour of the American counterculture.

When Mr. Castro took power, he preached democracy and reform. He sought to assuage his critics, insisting that he was not a communist. A wary United States cautiously offered economic aid, which Mr. Castro refused.

Economic and political relations grew increasingly more difficult, particularly when it became known that the new regime imprisoned thousands of political opponents and executed many others. Within two years, Mr. Castro had expropriated $1.8 billion in U.S. property without compensation and turned Cuba into a bastion of Marxism-Leninism.

In May 1960, Cuba established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, which was soon supplying most of the island’s petroleum needs, as well as a constant flow of weapons and other military hardware. The government nationalized U.S. and British oil refineries and U.S.-owned banks. In October 1960, the U.S. government imposed an embargo on all trade with the island except for food and medicine.

On Jan. 3, 1961, diplomatic relations with the United States were broken. This set the stage for one of Mr. Castro’s greatest triumphs, the defeat of the CIA-organized invasion by Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs, which U.S. intelligence officials thought would set off a popular revolt against Mr. Castro. The invasion by about 1,350 CIA-trained fighters was put down by Cuban military forces, and about 1,200 of the invaders were captured.

The following year, Mr. Castro abetted the nuclear confrontation between Washington and Moscow, which ended when Khrushchev agreed to withdraw Soviet-made missiles and promised not to use Cuba as a base for offensive weapons. In return, the United States pledged not to invade Cuba and to remove missiles it had stationed in Turkey.

The U.S. promise to forgo force after the Cuban Missile Crisis was a major victory for Mr. Castro, but for years he lived under the threat of various CIA assassination plots. He cited U.S. threats to justify a large-scale military buildup, and he tried to export a Cuban-style revolution to countries across Latin America, including Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia. (Guevara was killed leading an uprising in Bolivia in 1967.)

In the mid-1970s, Mr. Castro sent thousands of troops to wars in Angola and Ethiopia. In addition, Cuban military training missions and thousands of physicians and teachers operated in more than a dozen other countries, from West Africa to North Korea.

An amazing life