Fidel Castro

Fidel Castro was the Cuban revolutionary who overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959 and ruled Cuba for almost half a century, as prime minister and then president, until illness forced him to hand power to his brother Raúl in 2006–2008. He turned Cuba into a one-party communist state allied to the Soviet Union, brought the world close to nuclear war in 1962, and defied the United States throughout the Cold War. Supporters credit him with national independence and broad gains in literacy and health care; his government also executed opponents, imprisoned dissidents and suppressed free speech, and more than a million Cubans left the island.

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born on 13 August 1926 at Birán, in eastern Cuba, the son of Ángel Castro, a Spanish immigrant who had become a wealthy sugar planter, and Lina Ruz, a household servant whom Ángel later married. He was educated at Jesuit schools, including the Belén College in Havana, and in 1945 entered the University of Havana to study law. There he was drawn into the violent world of student politics and into anti-imperialist causes, and in 1947 he joined a failed expedition to overthrow the dictator of the Dominican Republic. He qualified as a lawyer and joined the reformist Orthodox Party, standing for parliament in elections that were cancelled when Batista seized power in a coup in March 1952.

On 26 July 1953 Castro led about 160 men in an attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba. The assault failed; many of the rebels were killed, several of them tortured and executed after capture. At his trial Castro gave a long speech ending with the words "History will absolve me", which became the manifesto of his movement. Sentenced to fifteen years, he was released under an amnesty in 1955 and went to Mexico, where he organised the 26th of July Movement and met the Argentine doctor Che Guevara.

In December 1956 Castro, his brother Raúl, Guevara and 79 others landed in Cuba from the yacht Granma. Most were killed or captured in the first days, but the survivors built a guerrilla force in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Interviews with foreign journalists made Castro famous, and Batista's brutality, corruption and military failures cost him support at home and in Washington. Batista fled on 1 January 1959, and Castro entered Havana in triumph a week later.

Castro became prime minister in February 1959. His government carried out a sweeping land reform, cut rents, and nationalised industries, banks and American-owned businesses. Revolutionary tribunals tried officials and police of the old regime, and several hundred people were executed by firing squad in the first year, many after summary trials that ignored due process. Moderates in the government were pushed out, independent newspapers closed, elections promised for later never took place, and opponents were imprisoned in large numbers.

Relations with the United States collapsed. Washington imposed a trade embargo from 1960, tightened in 1962, while Cuba turned to the Soviet Union for oil, credit and arms. In April 1961 some 1,400 CIA-trained Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs and were defeated within three days. Castro declared the revolution socialist and later proclaimed himself a Marxist-Leninist. In 1962 he accepted Soviet nuclear missiles on the island, provoking the Cuban Missile Crisis with the government of John F. Kennedy in October. The crisis ended when Nikita Khrushchev withdrew the missiles in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba, a deal made without consulting Castro, who was furious.

The Communist Party of Cuba, formed in 1965 with Castro as first secretary, became the only legal party, and a new constitution in 1976 made him president of the Councils of State and Ministers. The state controlled the economy, the press and education. The 1961 literacy campaign sent young volunteers across the countryside and largely wiped out illiteracy, and free universal health care and education raised life expectancy and lowered infant mortality to levels close to those of rich countries. These achievements are what supporters most often credit him with.

Repression was a permanent feature of his rule. Between 1965 and 1968, gay men, religious believers and others deemed unfit were sent to forced labour camps known as UMAP; decades later Castro accepted responsibility for the persecution of gay people. Neighbourhood committees watched for dissent, and thousands of political prisoners served long sentences in harsh conditions. Executions for political offences continued after the first years, and researchers who have tried to document them count deaths by firing squad over the decades in the thousands. In 1980, after thousands sought asylum at the Peruvian embassy, Castro let about 125,000 people leave by boat from the port of Mariel.

Abroad, Castro sought a role as a leader of the developing world. He backed guerrilla movements in Latin America and sent tens of thousands of troops to Angola from 1975, where they fought South African forces, and to Ethiopia in 1977–1978. Cuban doctors and teachers also served across Africa and Latin America.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended the subsidies that had kept Cuba's economy afloat, and the island suffered severe shortages during what the government called the Special Period. Castro allowed limited private enterprise, tourism and the use of the US dollar, while keeping political control; in 1994 tens of thousands of Cubans fled on rafts. From 1999 he found a new ally in Hugo Chávez's Venezuela, which supplied cheap oil. In 2003, in the crackdown known as the Black Spring, 75 dissidents and independent journalists were given long prison sentences.

In July 2006, after intestinal surgery, Castro handed power provisionally to Raúl, who formally succeeded him as president in 2008 and as party leader in 2011. Fidel continued to write newspaper columns and receive visitors. He died in Havana on 25 November 2016, aged 90, and his ashes were buried in Santiago de Cuba.

Castro remains one of the most divisive figures of the twentieth century. To admirers across Latin America, Africa and the left, he was a champion of national sovereignty and social justice who survived the hostility of a superpower and many assassination plots. To his critics, including most of the large Cuban exile community, he was a dictator who executed and jailed opponents, denied Cubans basic freedoms and left behind a poor, stagnant economy. Both views draw on real parts of his record in the history of Cuba.