The Biography of Fidel Castro, The Late Cuban Leader

  The son of a wealthy landowner, Fidel Castro turned his back on a life of privilege to lead a left-wing revolution in Cuba that endured for decades and was shaped by his political cunning, keen sense of destiny and boundless ego.

Castro, who has died at the age of 90, was at once idealistic and pragmatic, sharply intelligent and reckless, charismatic and intolerant.

Critics saw in him a stubborn bully who violated human rights, jailed his critics, banned opposition parties and wrecked Cuba’s economy.
  Admirers saw a visionary who stood up to U.S. domination of Latin America, brought healthcare and education to the poor, and inspired socialist movements across the world.

Even before leading the 1959 revolution that propelled Cuba toward communism and onto the Cold War stage, Castro saw greatness in himself.
   From an early age, he admired history's boldest figures, particularly Alexander the Great, and believed he and his rebels were part of that tradition.

“Men do not shape destiny. Destiny produces the man for the moment,”

He said in 1959.Castro toppled the unpopular U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista by uniting a disparate opposition and outsmarting a bigger, better-equipped Cuban military.

His alliance with the Soviet Union put him at the centre of the Cold War, most notably when the 1962 Cuban missile crisis took the world to the brink of nuclear war.

He was a global celebrity, his beard, military fatigues and big Cuban cigars making him instantly recognisable.

He owed his prominence in part to geography. Looking to bolster an ally just 90 miles (140 km) from Florida, Moscow helped him build socialism by giving him billions of dollars worth of aid and favourable trade, from oil to tractor parts.

But Castro also mined Cuban nationalism and Latin American pride, stirring resentment of U.S. power and influence.

He managed to preserve his revolution despite constant U.S. hostility even when Cuba reeled from the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, showing the vigour of a man  who intended to die in office.

Instead, almost killed by a serious intestinal illness, he was forced to step aside in 2006 and he formally handed over to his younger brother, Raul Castro, in 2008.In his final years, Castro wrote opinion columns for Cuba’s state media but was rarely seen. His famously long speeches gave way to silence, at least in public, and comfortable tracksuits replaced the stiff black boots and crisp military attire.

On Dec. 17, 2014, Raul Castro cut a deal to restore diplomatic ties with the United States. Six weeks later,Fidel Castro offered only lukewarm support, raising questions about whether he approved of ending hostilities with his longtime enemy.

He survived numerous assassination attempts and outlasted nine U.S. presidents in power, seizing control of Cuba while Dwight Eisenhower occupied the White House and stepping down during George W. Bush’s second term.

Throughout, Castro lectured Cubans.
    A magnificent orator who instinctively altered his cadence to fit the moment, he re-trod history and delved deep into detail about Cuban independence heroes, plans to“perfect” the revolution and the declared evils of U.S. imperialism.Tall and physically commanding, fastidious in hisattire, he often built to a crescendo of indignation, gesturing firmly with long-fingered, well-manicured hands.

“We shall endeavour to be brief,” he told the United Nations General Assembly in 1960, then set a record for U.N. speeches by talking for nearly 4-1/2 hours.

Castro never allowed statues of him to be erected or streets to be named after him, saying he did not want a cult of personality. Nevertheless, the cult was everywhere. His image and words were posted on billboards and his name was invoked at every public event.

Most Cubans, whether for or against him, refer to him simply as “Fidel.”He was a night owl. He would keep foreign guests waiting until late at night and then summon them for talks. Even his critics would sometimes find themselves oddly charmed by such encounters.

Tad Szulc, a biographer, called him “Cuba’s great master of political seduction.”

         HIS EARLY YEARS
         

Born on Aug. 13, 1926, Castro grew up as a privileged son on his father’s plantation in the eastern village of Biran, where his playmates were children of impoverished workers living in thatched huts with dirt floors.

He said the economic injustice he witnessed there inspired a life-long sympathy for the poor.
   He attended the Jesuit-run Belen School in the capital and then studied law at the University of Havana, plunging into the violent politics of the time and starting his drift leftward.

Long-winded, intolerant and –unusually for a Cuban – awkward on the dance floor, he was not embraced by his fellow students at first but eventually emerged as a leader.
   He took part in an aborted 1947 plan to overthrow Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo and was at a youth conference in Colombia when riots broke out and some 2,000 people died.

After law school, he decided to run for Congress in 1952. When Batista staged a coup and halted the elections, Castro began plotting armed rebellion.

In 1953, he led a raid on the Moncada barracks in the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba. Dozens of followers died and he, Raul Castro and others were captured and imprisoned.“History will absolve me,” he declared at his trial.

Pardoned in 1955, he went into exile in Mexico where he met Argentine revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Together with Raul, they trained a rebel band that in 1956 returned to Cuba aboard an overcrowded yacht called Granma.

Ambushed at the landing by government troops, only 12 of the 82 rebels on board made it to the rugged Sierra Maestra mountains.

Castro denied Batista’s claims that he was a communist but decades later he told Spanish journalist Ignacio Ramonet in a book “100 hours with Fidel” that by 1952, “I was already a convinced Marxist-Leninist.”Whatever the evolution of his views on communism, he was determined to throw off American influence in Cuba. When U.S.-supplied aircraft bombed his rebels in 1958, he vowed revenge.“I have sworn that the Americans will pay very dearly for what they are doing,” he said in a letter to close friend and aide Celia Sanchez.

“When this war has ended, a much bigger and greater war will start for me, a war I shall launch against them. I realise that this will be my true destiny.”