Fidel Castro, former president of Cuba, dead at 90

Fidel Castro Delivers Monacada Speech Fidel Castro addresses the crowd July 26, 1999 celebrating the 46th anniversary of the Moncada assault, led by Fidel Castro on July 26, 1953. The speeches lasted for hours. His column “Reflections by Comrade Fidel” published by his party newspaper, “Granma”, never exhausted of criticizing his archenemy, the United States. The Pope is finishing up his first trip to Cuba, fourteen years after Pope John Paul II visited the communist country.

He said many Cubans were cheering, because they had been forced to come to the USA because they couldn’t have the freedoms and ways to make a life in their homeland. He found the industrial and capitalist world order abhorrent. Nine United States presidents came and went throughout Castro’s reign in Cuba. He worked as a lawyer in Havana after his studies, often serving poorer clients.

He assumed military and political power. Alongside Che Guevara he swept to power in a revolution in 1959, ousting the pro-US regime.

“Fidel? Fidel?” he said, slapping his head in shock. Castro wanted the 5-year-old kept from Mirta’s family, which included her brother Rafael Diaz-Balart, an official in Batista’s government.

In 1959, after almost a decade of fighting, Castro and his MR-26-7 movement (26th of July Movement) succeeding in overthrowing the army of Batista. Even his good friend and ally, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, said in early 2009 that he doubted Castro would ever return to the public stage. The USSR supported Cuba financially and in 1962, stationed medium-range nuclear weapons on the island.

And Castro’s risky liaison with the Soviet Union took the world to the nerve-jarring edge of nuclear war in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Scapegoating the US embargo played well within Cuba, but from a strict economic view, the failure of the economy was largely the fault of the Cuban leadership, Falk added.

In 2008, when the National Assembly prepared to reconfirm Fidel as Cuba’s leader, he declined in a letter. Months after falling ill, Castro acknowledged he underwent numerous surgeries for his condition and at least one had gone badly, nearly killing him. Castro claimed he wanted to create a new man who was part of a socialist society, but critics say a white elite continued to rule Cuba, and an underground economy flourished amid Castro’s communist economic doctrine. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled, including Castro’s daughter Alina Fernandez Revuelta and his younger sister Juana.

August 1994 Castro declares he will not stop Cubans trying to leave; some 40,000 take to sea heading for United States. “He’d have memorials around the world dedicated to him if he were a democrat”, Henkel said.

His death – which would once have thrown a question mark over Cuba’s future – seems unlikely to trigger a crisis as Raul Castro, 85, is firmly ensconced in power. Before resigning February 19, 2008, he was the world’s longest-ruling head of government, and leader of one of world’s last five communist states.

Rumours over the years have surfaced over his frailing health, although he appeared recently through a letter to the Cuban people after the Communist nation and the United States began to thaw relations, warning his people about the dangers of American policies and power.