Fidel Castro: Fiery leader of the Cuban revolution who defied the West

Old age claimed Cuba’s ‘Commandante’ after a clutch of failed assassination attempts and the Cuban pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war. Critics will remember a reckless bully – admirers a hero who refused to bow to the United States.

Fidel Castro addressing a crowd in Havana in the 1970s. His speeches to the Cuban faithful could last up to 12 hours. – AFP

NEW YORK // Cuba’s revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro, survived everything his enemies could throw at him during a lifetime filled with intrigue. But it was not an exploding cigar, poison pills or a diving suit laced with poison that felled the Caribbean island’s “Commandante”, as in previous attempts, but simply old age.

The Cold War warrior ruled Cuba for a record 49 years despite more than 600 recorded plots against him during one of the world's most enduring geopolitical dramas. Castro's longevity, spanning ten US presidents from Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W Bush, was a lasting embarrassment to the US whose assassination plots against the Cuban leader were dutifully recounted by his former security chief, Fabian Escalante, in his book Executive Action: 634 Ways to Kill Fidel Castro.

Castro survived them all, as well as a US-backed invasion and a punishing trade embargo, defying Washington to the end.

With his familiar olive green fatigues, cigars and scraggly beard, Castro was as much adored for his firebrand audacity as he was reviled by the disaffected Cuban diaspora for his remorseless crushing of political dissent.

Perhaps most significantly, he will be remembered for nudging the world to the brink of atomic war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he tried to bring nuclear-tipped Soviet rockets on to Cuban soil. Away from politics, the tireless revolutionary was a prolific womaniser who fathered eight children, seven of them born out of wedlock.

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruiz came into the world on August 13, 1926, the third of seven children born to a prosperous immigrant landowner from Galicia, north-west Spain and a Cuban mother of humble origins, on a sugar plantation in the foothills of the Nipe Mountains near Biran, a town in the east of the island.

His early dreams were of playing baseball in the US, and Castro never lost his love for the sport. Educated by Jesuits, he graduated from the University of Havana in 1950 with a doctorate in law and instead turned to revolutionary politics, leading a failed assault on the Moncada military barracks a year after Fulgencio Batista seized power in a US-backed coup in 1952. That escapade landed the young Castro two years behind bars, and he subsequently went into exile in Mexico, where he forged an allegiance with the iconic Argentine revolutionary, Ernesto “Che” Guevara. On December 2, 1956, he landed back in Cuba with 81 fighters.

Batista was forced to flee Cuba on January 1, 1959, allowing Castro, Che and a band of bedraggled revolutionaries to emerge from their jungle hideout and enter Havana in triumph. In February, Castro was appointed prime minister. He swiftly aligned Cuba with the Soviet Union, which bankrolled his communism until the Eastern Bloc’s own collapse in 1989.

Known to Cubans simply as “Fidel” (Spanish for “Faithful”) Castro broke off diplomatic ties with Washington in 1961 and expropriated more than a billion dollars of American companies’ assets, thus ending Washington’s domination over Cuba which dated back to the 1898 Spanish-American War.

The retaliation came in April 1961 when 1,500 CIA-trained Cuban exiles attempted an invasion at the Bay of Pigs, only to be defeated by Castro’s forces. In 1962, Cuba’s alliance with the Soviet Union took the world to the nerve-jarring edge of nuclear war. A US spy plane spotted an installation of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. Alarmed by nuclear missiles positioned a mere 144 kilometres from Florida, President John F Kennedy enforced a naval blockade of Cuba to press the Soviet leader, Nikita Krushchev into withdrawing the missiles. For a week, a petrified world wondered which side would blink first. Krushchev backed down — but only after Kennedy publicly promised not to invade Cuba, and privately agreed to pull US missiles out of Turkey. Afterwards, a telephone hotline was installed between Washington and Moscow to defuse future tensions.

Castro strutted the world stage as a communist icon during the height of the Cold War, sending 15,000 soldiers to help Soviet-backed troops in Angola in 1975 and dispatching forces to Ethiopia in 1977 — actions which variously infuriated, embarrassed and alarmed the US. In 1962 Washington imposed an economic embargo in the hope of sparking rebellion among Cubans. It never did. Instead, Castro blamed the US embargo for all the hardships Cubans were forced to suffer.

When Soviet aid ceased in 1989, bringing Cuba close to total collapse, Castro allowed more international tourism and slight economic reform. Even when China relaxed the economic reins, he still clung to the communist economic model, aided by a new ally — Hugo Chavez, the anti-American president of oil-rich Venezuela.

As a driving force behind the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), Castro demonstrated to developing countries that a sovereign nation, however small, could boldly thumb its nose at US policy and get away with it, using the 118-nation umbrella group to advocate for the rights of Palestinians. He also enjoyed good diplomatic relations with Arab League members, including the United Arab Emirates, establishing formal ties in 2002. That year, the president’s son, Dr Fidel Castro Jr, a scientist from the Cuban Academy of Sciences, visited Sharjah to examine whether UAE-based waste water treatment and desalination projects could help sustain the Cuban revolution.

Castro personally invited UAE president Sheikh Khalifa to the 2006 NAM summit in Havana, while Cuba’s foreign investment minister, Martha Lumas Morales, was in Abu Dhabi negotiating business deals. The UAE’s foreign affairs minister, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed first visited Cuba in 2009 and returned in 2015 to officially open the UAE embassy in Havana.

Under communism’s free health and education systems, Cubans had among the highest literacy and life expectancy rates in the developing world. Even so, disillusioned Cubans fled abroad, mainly to Florida, where the large and thriving anti-Castro movement reacted to news of his death by celebrating in the streets. Human rights groups repeatedly criticised the president for imprisoning political opponents, including the arrest of 75 opposition leaders in March 2003.

Castro never appeared in public with a woman and media censorship ensured his private life remained secret. In reality, he was a prolific womaniser. In 1948 he married Mirta Diaz-Balart, who gave birth a year later to Castro’s only legitimate child, Fidel Angel, known as Fidelito. A one-night-stand while he was still married to Mirta produced a daughter, Francisca. Castro and Mirta divorced in 1955 and the following year, socialite Natalia “Naty” Revuelta bore him another daughter, Alina. A year later, Castro took up with fellow revolutionary Celia Sanchez, his main partner until her death in 1980. Castro also had five sons with Dalia Soto del Valle, whom he reportedly married sometime in the 1980s, but still had countless affairs, often with women procured for him during foreign trips.

He functioned on little sleep and often insisted on meeting diplomats in the middle of the night, believing they would be too tired to argue with him. Friends said he seemed to have mastered how to rest while awake. “When Castro is tired of conversing, he rests by conversing more,” wrote Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a personal friend. He cared little for music but loved books and never lost his thirst for knowledge. Late in life he learned to surf the internet (even as his government controlled access to it) and when Concorde touched down in Havana for the first and only time, Castro rushed to the airport to grill the pilot on the workings of the supersonic jet. While Cubans endured food shortages, Castro collected recipes and prepared dishes “with a sort of scientific rigour,” according to Garcia Marquez.

Concerns over his health first emerged in 1985, when Castro was forced to give up smoking his cherished Cohiba cigars. In 2001, he passed out during a public event in Havana and, three years later, fell and injured himself during a speech in Santa Clara.

In July 2006, Castro temporarily transferred power to his brother, defence chief Raul, while he underwent gastrointestinal surgery, and failed to appear during his 80th birthday celebrations or the 50th anniversary of his return to Cuba from exile. In 2008, the handover to Raul became permanent. Castro informed the National Assembly by letter, that “It would betray my conscience to take up a responsibility that requires mobility and total devotion, that I am not in a physical condition to offer.” But he continue wielding influence behind the scenes and through his regular newspaper column and the occasional speech. In 2012 it was revealed that along with Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, Castro had played a key role in initiating peace talks between the Colombian government and the Farc movement, which culminated in this year’s historic peace agreement.

However, he was unable to prevent Raul from introducing reforms of which he disapproved. Though he described the thaw in relations with the US as positive, Castro openly declared he still mistrusted the American government and was furious when President Barack Obama came to Cuba in March — the first US leader to do so in nearly 90 years — without paying him a courtesy visit. .

El Commandante was not to be thwarted, right to the end.