Fidel Castro, Cuban Revolutionary Who Defied U.S., Dies at 90
Mr. Castro brought the Cold War to
the Western Hemisphere, bedeviled 11
American presidents and briefly
pushed the world to the brink of
nuclear war.
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 that 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.
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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 Mr.
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 Henry M.
Wriston , the 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 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 America and its embargo for
many of Cuba’s ills. 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?”
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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.
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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 a 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 took
Mr. Matthews into the mountains
disguised as a wealthy American
planter.
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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, Mr. Castro
put together a cabinet of moderates,
but it did not last long. He 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 had 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 Mr. Castro
married Mirta Díaz-Balart, whose
family had ties to the Batista
government, his father 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, which 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 the
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 on board 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 that had
taken over a huge nickel mine, and a
Mexican investment group that 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 the
Soviet Union 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, a woman 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 Mr.
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
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.”
the Western Hemisphere, bedeviled 11
American presidents and briefly
pushed the world to the brink of
nuclear war.
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 that 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.
ADVERTISEMENT
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 Mr.
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 Henry M.
Wriston , the 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 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 America and its embargo for
many of Cuba’s ills. 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?”
ADVERTISEMENT
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.
ADVERTISEMENT
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 a 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.
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 took
Mr. Matthews into the mountains
disguised as a wealthy American
planter.
ADVERTISEMENT
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, Mr. Castro
put together a cabinet of moderates,
but it did not last long. He 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 had 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 Mr. Castro
married Mirta Díaz-Balart, whose
family had ties to the Batista
government, his father 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, which 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 the
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 on board 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 that had
taken over a huge nickel mine, and a
Mexican investment group that 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 the
Soviet Union 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, a woman 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 Mr.
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
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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