The man known to history as Fidel Castro
was born on the 13th of August 1926 in Biran in Oriente, the easternmost
province on the island of Cuba. His father was Ángel María Bautista Castro y
Argiz who was born in 1875 in the Galicia region of northern Spain. Angel was conscripted into the
Spanish army in the early 1890s and subsequently was sent to Cuba, which at the time, was one
of Spain’s few remaining American colonies, to contribute to the effort to crush a Second War
of Independence which had erupted there in 1895. Unlike previous independence movements
in Cuba, this one proved successful, due to the intervention of the United States and
as a result, Cuba broke away from Spain in 1898. The nature of its independence struggle meant
that it now fell under the geopolitical sway of the US, a relationship which would cast
a long shadow over the country’s history during the twentieth century. Angel Castro
briefly returned to Spain but emigrated to Cuba through the port of Havana in 1905. Amongst
a succession of jobs in the 1900s and 1910s, he worked as a labourer for the American
United Fruit Company and by the 1920s, he had established his own agricultural business
hiring out men to work for the sugar plantations. At one point, he had over 300 employees
and strong business connections with American companies in Cuba. Thus, Fidel
was born into a relatively affluent family. In 1911, Angel Castro married María Argota
y Reyes, and the couple had five children. After the collapse of this marriage, Angel went
on to have seven more children with Lina Ruz González a farm servant who became his mistress
and later his second wife. They included Fidel and his younger brother Raúl, who would become
his closest political ally throughout his life. Fidel’s childhood was a curious one, as
he was born out of wedlock, at a time when there was still a very considerable stigma
surrounding illegitimacy. Angel Castro had Fidel raised using his mother’s surname, and amongst
the children of sugar plantation workers. Many of these were Haitian and other Caribbean workers
who lived difficult, poverty stricken lives. Fidel’s later views on the role of American
business on the island’s economy and workers, might well have been substantially shaped by his
experiences living amongst his father’s workers during his youth. When he was just six years
of age, Fidel and his elder brother and sister, Ramon and Angela, were sent to Santiago
de Cuba to begin their education. Here they lived in poor conditions with a tutor
who could barely afford the bare necessities. Curiously, for an island where Roman Catholicism
predominated, Castro was not baptized until he was eight years old in 1934. This seems to have been
for the purpose of ensuring that he could attend the La Salle boarding school. He was then sent to
the privately funded, Jesuit-run Dolores School in Santiago, and then on to El Colegio de Belen in
Havana. Despite having an interest in history and geography, Fidel never excelled academically,
but he was a good athlete. In 1943 and 1944, he was named Havana’s most outstanding sportsman
of his age, excelling in baseball, basketball, the high jump and middle distance running.
Castro was growing up during a period when
Cuban society was in chaos. In the decades which followed the country’s war of independence
in 1898, the island experienced profound political instability and poor economic development. The
country’s political system was highly corrupt, with the republic’s politicians from the very
top downwards, engaging in rampant bribery and corrupt activity. Much of this was driven by
American business interests controlling large parts of the Cuban economy, and the island had
also become a haven for the Italian Mafia and other criminal organisations based in America, to
operate in. Meanwhile the economy of the country remained underdeveloped and based on resource
exploitation of basic goods such as bananas, coffee and above all sugar. The net result of
this, was that a small elite profited massively, while ordinary Cubans remained trapped in
desperate poverty. Then in the 1930s, the Cuban military increasingly began to intervene in the
country’s politics, particularly so, following the so-called Revolt of the Sergeants in 1933. As a
result of this, the overall leader of the military element, Sergeant Fulgencio Batista, would begin
to play a major role in Cuban politics, serving as President between 1940 and 1944. After this,
he left to live in Florida in the United States, but he would later return into the fray of
Cuban politics with striking consequences. In 1945, Fidel Castro began studying law at
the University of Havana. Here his political instincts first began to manifest themselves,
as he became involved in several student protest movements against the outward corruption of
Cuban politics and the elites which ran the country. It was a highly contentious time on the
campuses of the island nation’s universities, where armed gangs were common and engaged in
widespread criminal behaviour, a reflection of the wider breakdown of law and order across
Cuban society. At this time Castro’s anti-American stance first manifested itself, when he joined
the Committee for the Independence of Puerto Rico, a body which had been set up to advocate for
the neighbouring Caribbean island to be given its independence from the United States. Puerto
Rico had effectively become an American colony following the Spanish-American War of 1898, but
it was never given statehood status, a situation which persists to the present day. Castro and
his fellow student agitators in Havana were opposed to this situation continuing and viewed
it as a symptom of America’s continuing strategy to dominate the Americas and oppress the states of
the Caribbean, Central America and South America. It was also during these years in Havana, that
Castro first earned a reputation within wider Cuban society for his dissident actions. In
the winter of 1946, he appeared in the pages of several newspapers following his criticisms of
the government and its corruption and violence. He subsequently developed extensive connections
with numerous left wing political groups within the country, notably the Unión Insurrecional
Revolucionaria, or Insurrectional Revolutionary Union. At the time, police suspected him
of the murder of a rival student leader, although nothing was ever proven and whilst
he regained a reputation for powerful oratory, he never became a prominent student leader himself
and on several occasions he was defeated in campus elections. In the summer of 1947, Castro
left university briefly to join a campaign to overthrow the right-wing government of Rafael
Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Trujillo, like Batista in Cuba was a military governor
who was supported by the United States. In late July of that year, Castro was one of the
leaders of a band of about 1,200 rebels, who set off from Cuba for the Dominican Republic with the
goal of overthrowing Trujillo. The effort though was quickly snuffed out, by a combination of US,
Cuban and Dominican forces. Many were arrested, although Fidel escaped after he reputedly jumped
overboard from the ship he was on, into shark infested waters carrying a gun above his head.
This event is noteworthy for being the first occasion on which the future Cuban leader engaged
in direct armed rebellion in the Caribbean. Following the abortive expedition to the Dominican
Republic, Castro entered into a period in which his revolutionary activities expanded. He was
increasingly prominent within student protest circles against the government in Havana, while
during the course of 1948, he undertook a number of trips to Panama, Venezuela and Colombia to
meet with left-wing revolutionary groups there. In particular in the capital of Colombia,
Bogota, in the late spring of 1948, he was central to efforts to set up
a Pan-American Students Conference, which would act in opposition to right-wing
governments across Latin America. Meanwhile, back in Cuba, later that year he married
Mirta Díaz-Balart, a philosophy student. It was regarded as an unlikely union as Balart
came from a prominent Cuban family, which had extensive connections with the country’s political
elites, the very individuals and groupings whom Castro was increasingly appearing to be an
outright opponent of. The couple even received extensive gifts on their wedding day from some
individuals whom Castro had protested against, and they honeymooned in the United States. Despite
these curious contradictions the marriage lasted for seven years and Fidel and Mirta had a
son named Fidelito before divorcing in 1955. In the early 1950s Castro established a law firm
with two associates named Jorge Azpiazu and Rafael Resende. However, these were fellow leftists and
in reality the firm was engaged in pro bono work to defend workers who had been mistreated or
dismissed from their employment. Moreover, Castro was developing his knowledge of leftist
thought during these years, reading widely the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
the two pioneers of Communism, and other, more recent political thinkers such as Vladimir
Lenin and Leon Trotsky. At this stage, Castro was leaning towards changing Cuba from within and in
1952 he stood for election to the Cuban Congress in the national elections as a member of the
Partido del Pueblo Cubana - Ortodoxos Party, a Cuban catch-all left-wing populist party
founded by Eduardo Chibás in 1947. This was actually the beginning of the end of Castro’s
peaceful approach to changing Cuban politics. In the same year, 1952, Fulgencio Batista returned
to the political scene in Cuba and within months, had established a new military dictatorship in
the island nation following a brief military coup. He would henceforth rule Cuba as a one-party
military dictatorship with the backing of America. Castro now set out on a path to overthrow
the Batista regime through violent means. Within weeks of the return of Batista to power in
Cuba, Castro was working on a new revolutionary project which he and his followers, such as his
younger brother Raúl Castro called ‘The Movement’. Their first action came within months and was
a significant moment in the Cuban Revolution. On the 26th of July 1953, Castro and around a
hundred others attacked a Cuban army barracks at Moncado in Santiago de Cuba. The attack was
a complete failure. Nearly half of the militants were killed by the 400-strong man garrison
and most of the remainder were taken captive, with just a few escaping altogether. Fidel
was amongst those who were captured and he was subsequently sentenced to fifteen years in prison
for leading an insurrection against the state. During his trial, he delivered a lengthy defence
in what would become his most famous speech, La historia me absolverá, in which he attacked
Batista's regime and outlined his own political and economic ideas. Castro served his sentence on
the Isla de Pinos, the second largest island in the Cuban archipelago. While in captivity, he
rebranded ‘The Movement’ as ‘The 26th of July Movement’, in honour of the date on which the
attack on Moncado Barracks had been carried out. Despite this continuing incendiary behaviour,
Batista took the decision to release Castro from prison in the summer of 1955, after having served
less than two years of his sentence. It was a decision the dictator would soon come to regret.
After his release in 1955, Castro was exiled to
Mexico City, where and his brother Raúl began organising action against Batista. Here they
met a fellow Latin American revolutionary, an Argentinian medical doctor by the name of Ernesto
Guevara, more widely known by his nickname, ‘Che’ Guevara. Guevara had travelled throughout South
America during his youth and been radicalised by the appalling poverty which he had witnessed
there, poverty which he attributed to American Neo-Imperialism. In the months that followed,
the Castros, Guevara and their followers, trained and planned in Mexico for their return
to Cuba. Meanwhile the Batista regime back home was becoming increasingly oppressive.
Thus it was that in the summer of 1956, Castro and just over 80 followers left Mexico
on board a large yacht called the Granma said to have been named after a previous owner’s
grandmother. After a series of misadventures, they ran aground at Playa Las Coloradas, close
to Los Cayuelos in Cuba and were attacked by Batista’s forces, who drove them into hiding
in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Only 19 of the original party survived at this point. It was an
inauspicious beginning to their armed rebellion, but one which would bear surprising fruit
in the months and years that followed. From their relatively safe position within
the Sierra Maestra mountains Fidel and his followers now launched a guerrilla war against
Batista’s regime, organising bombing campaigns against government forces. Their numbers soon
expanded with more and more individuals joining the insurrectionists in the mountains. Attacks
were undertaken against government barracks to attain additional weapons and explosives and
by 1957 Castro was leading a small army in the rural regions of Cuba. Soon further militant
groups were emerging with a desire to overthrow Batista’s regime. As a consequence of all this,
by 1958 Batista’s forces were under increasing pressure from the revolutionaries. By the summer
the conflict began to tip in favour of Castro and the 26th of July Movement, as many of Batista’s
own soldiers began to desert their posts, appalled at the crimes against civilians which
they were being ordered to carry out in order to combat the revolutionaries. Eventually on the
31st of December 1958 Batista resigned and fled the country for the Dominican Republic, bringing
with him 300 million dollars in stolen money. On the 2nd of January 1959 Castro’s forces
occupied Moncado Barracks in a symbolic act, and six days later, on the 8th of January,
they entered Havana. The Cuban Revolution, despite its inauspicious beginnings just
over two years earlier, was victorious.
Castro did not immediately seize power himself.
Instead, the moderate lawyer Manuel Urrutia Lleo was proclaimed as the president of the country
in a provisional government, however Castro and his followers dominated the cabinet of this new
interim regime. Fidel’s military power was given formal acknowledgement in his appointment
as Representative of the Rebel Armed Forces of the Presidency. The new government effectively
ruled by decree without recourse to any parliament and given Castro’s influence over Urrutia, the
leader of the 26th of July Movement was the de facto power within the country following Batista’s
overthrow. Within weeks the situation became clearer as the Prime Minister, José Miró Cardona,
resigned and went into exile in the United States. Fidel now took office as his successor in
mid-February 1959. This was a position he would hold until 1976, when a new constitution
was introduced, following which, he became the President of the Council of Ministers of Cuba.
Castro would eventually hold this until 2008, ensuring that he held high office in Cuba for 49
years following his first appointment as Prime Minister in 1959.
It had always been assumed that Castro would be
the most influential member of the new regime when it came to power. An altogether more controversial
issue was the country’s future relationship with its neighbour and Batista’s former supporter, the
United States. Castro was a proclaimed leftist, but for a time figures such as the Republican
candidate for President of the US in 1960, Richard Nixon, believed that Castro could be won over
to the American cause. It was a delusional view. Castro quite quickly moved his country towards
an alliance with the Soviet Union and like-minded left leaning regimes throughout Latin America.
Moreover, his promotion of radical leftists such as Guevara to senior government offices clearly
indicated which way the regime wished to drive the country. Relations with the US were further soured
in the first year or so of the new regime’s life when Castro ordered the nationalisation of
American business interests located in Cuba. Tensions further escalated when Castro attended a
United Nations General Assembly in New York City in September 1960, where he openly associated
himself with regimes opposed to the US. The growing antagonism soon resulted in
an effort to intervene militarily in Cuba by the United States government. Already, under
the administration of Dwight Eisenhower millions of dollars of funding had been allocated towards
efforts to destabilise Castro’s regime. By the time that President John F. Kennedy was elected
as president late in 1960 the US government was already working extensively with Cuban exiles who
had left their homeland and settled in Florida and other parts of America since 1959. Many
of these Cuban exiles had formed themselves into a counter-revolutionary unit called ‘Brigade
2506’ and a political wing called the Democratic Revolutionary Front. These were collaborating with
the US Central Intelligence Agency by early 1961. However, to avoid suspicion at home and to ensure
that the Kennedy regime could disassociate itself from the group, they were training in Central
America in Guatemala. Here by the spring of 1961 a plan had been formulated for some 1,400 of these
Cuban paramilitaries to launch a naval invasion of Cuba, aided by advanced US military hardware
including B-26 Bomber Planes and M41 Tanks. But despite all their planning and support from
the US government the initiative would result in utter failure and would fatally damage US-Cuban
relations for the remainder of Castro’s life. The invasion force set off from Nicaragua and
Guatemala by boat on the 16th of April 1961. The previous day the US had bombed several sites in
Cuba. Then on the morning of the 17th of April the 1,400 Cuban paramilitaries began landing along the
coast within an inlet of the Gulf of Cazones, or Bay of Pigs, on the southern coast of Cuba. Within
hours Brigade 2506 were engaged in a shootout with a local militia. This provided a sufficient delay
for Castro and his government in Havana to respond to the landing. Fidel now ordered Captain José
Ramon Fernandez to initiate a counter-attack. In the hours that followed bombings commenced to
destroy the invaders fleet. With this accomplished and Brigade 2506’s escape route blocked, Castro’s
forces moved in, with Fidel taking personal control of the operation himself at this stage.
The initial plans for the invasion had involved significant air support from the US, but this was
dropped by Kennedy’s administration. Without it, and with their escape route cut off, the invasion
force was doomed. On the 20th of April, just over three days after their initial landing, Brigade
2506 surrendered, having already lost 118 men and hundreds more having suffered wounds. Accordingly
over 1,200 Cuban paramilitaries were captured by the Castro regime.
The reaction to the disastrous Bay
of Pigs invasion was multi-faceted. For Castro, he could now claim a great
victory over the American imperialists which his regime vilified as oppressing
and trying to control Latin America. Conversely, the abortive invasion of the country
was a foreign policy disaster for Kennedy’s regime. Not only was it exposed as having
conspired to overthrow a foreign government, but the botched nature of the invasion
looked poor from a military perspective, though Kennedy’s government did manage to
negotiate the release of over 1,000 of the Cuban paramilitaries in 1962 in return for over
50 million dollars of food and medicine for Cuba. This aside, the most significant consequence of
the attempted Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was that it propelled the country further towards
the Soviet Union in the Cold War camps. Within weeks more intense negotiations were underway
between Moscow and Havana as Castro sought greater trade and military ties with the Soviet Union
and the countries within its Communist bloc. Then in December 1961 Castro publically affirmed
that he was a communist, essentially throwing his country into the Soviet camp. In response the
Kennedy administration promoted the idea that the Organization of American States should
expel Cuba. A showdown appeared imminent. The Bay of Pigs was just the first act in a much
more volatile situation which was to develop in Cuba in the course of 1962, the infamous Cuban
Missile Crisis. The crisis is broadly understood to have been the point at which the Cold War came
closest to evolving into a full blown nuclear conflict. The events at the Bay of Pigs in the
spring of 1961 had quickly led Castro to begin moving even closer to the Soviet Union. It was
increasingly believed after the events of 1961 that a new American attack or plot would
eventually materialise and that the only way to protect the revolution and maintain the
Castro regime in power was to allow the Soviet Union to set up military defences in Cuba itself.
Consequently in the months following the Bay of Pigs Fidel Castro had negotiated an arrangement
with the Russian premier, Nikita Khrushchev, whereby the Soviet Union would install its
advanced ballistic missiles at sites in Cuba. This would ensure that the country would
be protected against a possible invasion by the United States or American-backed counter
revolutionaries. It was a fateful decision, one which would create one of the foremost
political crises in modern history. On the 14th of October 1962 Major Richard
Heyser, the pilot of a US U-2 spy plane was undertaking a reconnaissance mission over
Cuba when he spotted and photographed a site on the island where Russian SS-4 medium-range
ballistic missiles were being assembled. Two days later the American President, John F.
Kennedy, was briefed about the Russian missile sites being established in Cuba. This was the
beginning of the so-called ‘Thirteen Days’ of what has become known as the Cuban Missile
Crisis. Kennedy immediately convened a meeting of the National Security Council and several other
key advisors. It was decided that these sites were or would soon be capable of launching Russian
nuclear missiles and that these missiles would be capable of striking every major American
city on the East Coast in minutes or hours. In the course of this initial meeting Kennedy was
advised by several individuals to immediately move to directly bomb the missile sites in Cuba, and
to perhaps then commence a direct invasion of the island to overthrow Castro’s regime and
ensure that no further threats of this nature could be directed against America. However Kennedy
opted for a less aggressive action, but one which nevertheless opened a period of intense
political crisis in the days that followed.
The crisis which now developed largely played out between Washington and Moscow, despite
the fact that the nuclear warheads which were causing the crisis were located on Cuban soil and
involved Castro’s regime explicitly. Nevertheless, the political gambit that was playing out
here was that Russia would provide Cuba with extensive financial and military aid in return
for Castro’s regime allowing the Soviets to locate their missiles on Cuban soil. It should be noted
that the Soviets viewed this as a strategically acceptable thing to do. By 1962 the United States
had had its own ballistic weapons and then nuclear weapons stationed for many years in regions
which were just as geographically close to Russia as Cuba was to the United States, notably Turkey
on the Soviet Union’s southern border. Khrushchev and the principle members of the Soviet government
in Moscow believed that they could install nuclear weapons in Cuba in a similar way to which the US
had earlier stationed them in Turkey. After all if the United States had their warheads trained
on Moscow and other Soviet cities from close by, then why should Russia not do the same? But,
if this was their rationale they were soon to be proved wrong, although in a way which
would serve Russian ends in the long run. The crisis deepened in the days that followed
the initial meeting on the 16th of October. On the 22nd of October after initial diplomatic
exchanges failed, Kennedy’s government ordered what was referred to as a ‘quarantine’
of any shipping entering or leaving Cuba. The word ‘blockade’ was avoided as under certain
legal definitions this would have constituted a declaration of war with Castro’s Cuba. American
planes and ships were quickly dispatched to the western Caribbean to monitor all ships attempting
to enter Cuba and to assess whether their contents included war material. That evening Kennedy
delivered a live televised address to the nation in which he affirmed that any attack initiated
against any country in the Western Hemisphere from Cuba would be considered as an attack
on the United States by the Soviet Union. He then explained that the purpose of the quarantine
which had just been introduced was to ensure that no further Russian military hardware arrived in
Cuba. However, Kennedy maintained that the purpose of the quarantine was not to shut off all goods
entering the country in the same manner in which the Russians had cut off all supplies by land into
West Berlin during the Berlin Blockade of 1948. The next step now lay with the wider international
community and Khrushchev’s government in Russia. In the days that followed, the crisis deepened
as America’s allies and those of the Soviet Union intensified their rhetoric and willingness
to come to their respective ally’s aid if the crisis developed into an outright war. On the
24th of October, Pope John XXIII issued a plea for both sides to consider the implications of their
actions. Throughout these days Castro continued to insist that the installation of the weapons
was a defensive action rather than offensive, but the response which mattered was that which
came from Moscow. The first signs were not good. On the 24th of October Soviet news agencies
broadcast a telegram from Khrushchev to Kennedy stating that the Soviet Union considered the
quarantine to be an act of military aggression and requesting that they cease activities in
the waters around Cuba with immediate effect. This effectively signalled a further escalation
in the crisis. Thus, on the 24th of October and during the hours which followed, the world stood
perhaps as close to the outbreak of a nuclear war as it ever has, all caused by the installation
of the nuclear ballistic missiles in Castro’s Cuba. In the hours that followed the US requested
a meeting of the United Nations Security Council, while also sending hundreds of bomber planes,
including nearly two dozen B-52 bombers carrying nuclear warheads, which were put into the
air around Cuba and also near Soviet airspace. The world stood on the brink of nuclear war.
The 25th, 26th and 27th of October witnessed the
most intense period of the Cuban Missile Crisis. As diplomatic negotiations continued
between Russia and the United States, ships heading to Cuba continued to be checked
for nuclear warheads by the American quarantine. Negotiations did open between Moscow and
Washington on the 26th, but these were nearly compromised by the shooting down of an American
plane by a surface to air missile launched from Cuba. Khrushchev subsequently stated that this
attack had been ordered by Fidel’s brother Raúl, rather than being a directive of the Soviet Union.
In Washington a decision was now taken to invade Cuba if another plane was shot down, but cooler
heads prevailed. By the end of the 27th of October negotiations were advanced for the Russians to
withdraw their missiles and cease developing the launch sites in Cuba in return for Kennedy’s
government removing its own nuclear warheads from Turkey. Additionally Kennedy wrote to Khrushchev
stating that the US government would respect the sovereignty of Cuba henceforth and not attempt
another intervention such as had been attempted with the invasion of the Bay of Pigs. This
arrangement was enough that both the US and the Soviet Union could save face and Cuba’s
independence would henceforth be preserved. Thus the Cuban Missile Crisis came to an end
after thirteen days on the 29th of October 1962. In the aftermath of the Crisis, an arrangement was
reached to establish better communications between the US government and the Soviet regime in Moscow.
The Cold War also gradually entered a period of de-escalation, one which saw tensions reduced
gradually through the 1960s and especially in the 1970s, before a fresh escalation in the 1980s.
For Fidel’s Cuba, the impact of all this was that the island nation would not be directly interfered
with by the United States again. Castro continued to move the country closer within Russia’s sphere
of influence within the Cold War during the early 1960s, visiting Moscow and several other Soviet
cities in 1963. As a result of this state visit he initiated a number of reforms of Cuban society
and its economy and politics in the years that followed which mirrored those which prevailed
throughout the Soviet Union. Thus, Cuba would continue to act as an antagonistic country
opposed to the United States on its doorstep. Meanwhile, America for its part, while never again
interfering directly in Cuban affairs continued to impose wide-ranging economic, diplomatic and trade
sanctions against Castro’s regime and Cuba, ones which would have considerable implications for the
country’s economy in the years and decades ahead. The subsequent period of Cuba’s development
under Fidel’s rule brought mixed and ambiguous results. Owing to a combination of factors,
some of which were associated with the American economic sanctions imposed on the island, and some
of which were the result of poor economic planning by Castro’s government itself, the country entered
into a major economic decline in the 1960s. Much of the country’s economy continued to be reliant
on the sugar industry, much as that of the wider Caribbean had been since the seventeenth century,
but other developing industries such as the casino and tourist sector, which had been growing in the
pre-revolution period, now declined exponentially. As a result the country was increasingly
reliant on subsidies from the Soviet Union throughout the 1960s, which at one stage
amounted to nearly 40 per cent of Cuba’s GDP. However, thereafter things improved. While the
state was the main player, the Cuban economy nevertheless improved considerably in the 1970s
and the 1980s, even during periods of general international economic stagnation. But, as we will
see the decline of the Soviet Union in the 1980s and the eventual end of the Cold War ushered in
a renewed period of economic difficulties for the Cuban economy in the late twentieth century.
One of the most significant achievements of the
Castro regime, must surely be the healthcare system which was built up in the decades
under Fidel’s rule. Cuba’s healthcare system was already one of the most successful in Latin
America prior to the Cuban Revolution, but these successes were expanded from the 1960s onwards.
Universal healthcare became free and equally accessible to all Cuban people under the Castro
regime. Significant investment commenced in the 1960s in response to an exodus of Cuban doctors
to the United States in the early years of the regime. The government’s commitment to the health
care system was also underpinned specifically in Article 50 of the Cuban constitution issued in
1976. As a consequence, the ratio of doctors to patients in the country increased from a low of
9.2 doctors for every 10,000 individuals in 1958 to a high of nearly 60 doctors for every 10,000
citizens in 1999. As a result Cuba has a lower rate of infant mortality than the United States
and life expectancy at birth is 79 years of age. The country was also highly successful in the
1990s and 2000s in eliminating and reducing the spread of HIV and has developed numerous
innovative medical interventions in recent decades ahead of the more developed western world,
notably a ground-breaking lung cancer vaccine. The country’s education system similarly
flourished during Fidel Castro’s time as ruler of the country. All educational institutions
were brought under state ownership and management following the revolution. The education system
was, along with the healthcare system, made a priority by the administration and was invested
in heavily. In recent decades the Castro regime spent as much as 10 per cent of the country’s
Gross National Product on the education system, roughly twice the amount spent by
neighbouring developed countries on average. Immediately after the revolution a campaign was
undertaken to eradicate illiteracy in the country. By 2000 over 97 per cent of Cubans in
their young adult years were literate. Moreover, a study in 1998 by UNESCO found that
Cuban students had a considerably higher level of education than their contemporaries in much
of the developed world. This extended to third level institutions such as the University of
Havana, which were also nationalised in 1961. Additionally the country was highly progressive
in how it has facilitated equal access for women to higher education as well as men. Perhaps the
foremost indication of the success of both this education system and the Castro regime’s
healthcare policy is that institutions such as the University of Havana have become
attractive options for international students. Despite the manner in which Cuba had become
the central theatre of the Cold War in the years immediately following the Cuban Revolution,
in the 1970s Castro moved the country to a more neutral stance in the global conflict between
the United States and its allies in NATO, and the Soviet Union. This focused on the Non-Aligned
Movement, a forum or informal union of developing nation states which had emerged in the 1950s as an
alternative to siding with either of the two major power blocs in the Cold War. The driving force
behind the Non-Aligned Movement had initially been India under its Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru and Communist Yugoslavia under Josip Tito. At first Castro’s appearance at the Fourth Summit
of the Non-Aligned Movement in Algeria in 1973 had aroused criticism from nation states who believed
that Cuba was too closely associated with Moscow, however in the years that followed Castro managed
to pull Cuba away from Russia politically, and in the late 1970s he served as president of the
Non-Aligned Movement. Economic practicalities and the continuing sanctions imposed on the country
by the United States ensured that the Soviet Union remained Cuba’s major trading partner, but
under Castro in the 1970s the country pulled back dramatically from the frontlines of the Cold War.
Castro’s decision to reduce its
partisan ties with the Soviet Union was not based on a general unwillingness to engage
in foreign wars. Indeed the 1970s saw Cuba become a major actor in numerous international
conflicts in Latin America and Africa, particularly the latter. Castro had always
been influenced by Che Guevara in his belief that Cuba was just one actor in a wider effort at
international revolution. Thus, from its earliest days the Cuban government under Castro had
provided support to numerous left-wing and revolutionary movements throughout the southern
hemisphere. Additionally, in the 1960s Guevara, with Castro’s approval, had set up a guerrilla
movement known as the Andean Project with the goal of fomenting left-wing revolutions in Peru,
Bolivia and Argentina. This particular scheme was abandoned when Guevara was captured and killed
by the US Central Intelligence Agency in Bolivia in October 1967. Despite this setback, which came
as a strong blow to Fidel on both a political and a personal level, Castro continued to act as
a supporter of revolutionary movements in the years that followed, throughout
Latin America and the Caribbean. In the 1970s it was Africa where Castro became
most active on the world stage and in his support for other revolutions. In the mid-1960s he
and Guevara had supported rebels in the Congo against an American backed regime. This strategy
was expanded in the 1970s, with Castro referring at the time to Africa as “the weakest link in
the imperialist chain.” Consequently, in 1975 hundreds of military advisors were sent to Angola
in southwest Africa where a civil war had just broken out following the country’s independence
from Portugal. Castro’s advisors were sent to aid the Communist Peoples Movement for the Liberation
of Angola against the western-backed National Union for the Total Independence of Angola. It was
the start of an enormous role which Cuba played in a bloody Angolan Civil War which would drag on,
in one shape or another for 27 years. By 1991 over 370,000 Cuban military troops and a further
50,000 Cuban civilians had served in Angola as doctors, nurses and in other roles. This means
that nearly 5 per cent of the Cuban population served in Angola in some capacity during the
first fifteen years of the civil war there. Nor was this the only front in which Cuba
fought in Africa at the time. Fidel Castro also involved the nation in civil wars and
revolutionary engagements in countries such as Somalia and Madagascar in the late 1970s.
Despite the country’s increasing role in fomenting and supporting revolutionary movements across
Africa in the 1970s, Cuba’s relationship with the United States and its allies improved
slightly in the latter part of the decade. This occurred as a coalition of leaders,
including President Luis Echeverría of Mexico, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau of Canada
and the US President Jimmy Carter, combined to offer to improve relations with the
island nation. In particular Carter was willing to abandon the antagonistic stance which had been
favoured by his predecessors in the White House, notably John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. And
while Carter continued to criticise many aspects of Castro’s regime he also entered into meaningful
negotiations with a view to improving relations between the two neighbouring countries. Castro
agreed to release numerous political prisoners and put in place measures which would allow Cubans
who had fled to the United States following the revolution twenty years earlier to temporarily
visit family back in Cuba, albeit under strict conditions. For his part Castro hoped that the
United States would end its economic embargo on the country. While this did not happen
the more punitive measures were watered down, providing some financial respite.
Despite certain successes at home within
Cuba in developing the country’s education and healthcare system, the country was blighted
throughout Fidel’s long tenure as head of state, by an oppressive authoritarian government. As
elsewhere globally, the Communist regime did not accept challenges to its authority and there
was little scope for political dissent. Press censorship and efforts to root out ‘bourgeois’
or ‘counter-revolutionary’ elements within Cuban society were rife throughout the period of
the Cold War, though especially so during the so-called ‘Grey Years’, a period of nearly
a decade during the 1970s when Castro’s regime was particularly oppressive. During this period
there was widespread cultural censorship of poets and artists and harassment of intellectuals and
academics. The homosexual community suffered in particular during these years. The net result of
all of this was a growing swell of individuals seeking to illegally leave from Cuba to head to
the United States, the state of Florida being just a small boat ride away from the country. ‘The
Grey Years’ began to taper off following the establishment of a new constitution in 1976 and
a loosening of some state control over the arts, but political dissent remained anathema
to Castro’s regime for years to come. The persecution of individuals within Cuba
for opposing Fidel’s authoritarian rule led to a major development in 1980 which has shaped
much of the Cuban community in the United States. After years of oppression and efforts by tens
of thousands of individuals to leave Cuba, Castro’s regime decided to temporarily open
a port in order to allow individuals to leave the country. This was the port of Mariel and
its harbour lying some forty kilometres to the west of Havana. For over six months between the
15th of April 1980 and the end of the following October the port was opened for anyone who
wanted to leave Cuba for the United States. In total, before it was closed again just over six
months later approximately 120,000 Cubans left for the US. What has become known as the Mariel
Boatlift became a political issue in America where the administration of President Jimmy Carter
was unsure what to do with the arrivals if they continued to come to the US in such numbers.
By the time that Mariel harbour was closed again the huge influx of Cubans into Florida and
the city of Miami in particular had changed the demographics of the Sunshine State in ways which
have had implications down to the present day, particularly so as the Cuban American
vote are a large group with their own political lobby in a state which is consistently
a swing-state in American Presidential elections. The 1980s brought considerable
change to Cuba under Fidel’s rule. The country’s economy yet again declined
owing to a global fall in the price of sugar, the country’s main export commodity.
Unemployment rose sharply. As a consequence Cuba, which had successfully wrested itself away from
Soviet influence to some extent in the 1970s, found itself drifting back towards a reliance on
Russian subsidies and the Russian export market again. Yet this was a time limited strategy. In
1985 Mikhail Gorbachev had succeeded as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union. A reformer, he began to initiate a series of new policies which aimed to modernise the
Soviet Union and bring an end to the Cold War which had entered a more intense period again
since Ronald Reagan had entered office as US president in 1981. But Gorbachev’s reforms had
unintended consequences and by the late 1980s the Eastern Bloc of Communist countries stretching
from East Germany to the borders of Russia were agitating for wide-ranging political reforms. In
November 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, reuniting the city, the division of which had become a symbol
of the Cold War nearly half a century earlier. And two years later the Soviet Union collapsed,
bringing an end to the conflict between Capitalist America and Communist Russia.
The implications of the collapse of the Soviet
Union were profound for Castro and Cuba. For forty years Fidel had fashioned himself as the
arch-nemesis of America on the country’s very own doorstep, one who had been an ally of the Soviet
Union. Moreover, the country had been resoundingly reliant on Moscow for financial support to help
its economy at various times between the early 1960s and the late 1980s. But now, as the Soviet
Union collapsed and the Cold War came to an end, communist regimes such as Castro’s were being
overthrown rapidly in countries such as Poland and elsewhere across Eastern Europe. There was
a strong possibility that the same would happen in Cuba, but Fidel quickly moved to ensure a
continuation of his rule. He strengthened his control over the Cuban military to prevent
any revolt from within the armed forces and temporarily allied the country with other regimes
across Latin America which were fellow antagonists of the United States. Through such mechanisms,
Castro was able to ensure a continuation of the Communist regime in Cuba beyond the end of the
Cold War, though the United States indicated its intention to continue to apply pressure on
Castro’s government by securing a vote at the United Nations Human Rights Commission accusing
his regime of widespread human rights abuses. The survival of Castro’s regime beyond the
end of the Cold War ushered in an era which Fidel referred to as ‘a Special Period in Time
of Peace’. But despite Castro’s assertion of this being a ‘special’ time, the raw truth of
the 1990s for most Cubans was one of increasing destitution. The country was now continuing to
face economic sanctions from the United States and was cut off from the funding and support which
it had long received from Moscow. Gorbachev’s successor as head of the new Russian state, Boris
Yeltsin, possessed a deep antipathy for Fidel and the country offered virtually no support to its
former ally. Thus, despite some piecemeal efforts to improve relations with some western powers,
Cuba’s economy collapsed in the early 1990s. By 1992 economic activity had declined by
nearly 40% on the level it had been in 1990. Electricity shortages were widespread across the
island nation, petrol to run cars, and for other purposes, was in short supply, while imports of
essential goods such as Russian-manufactured cars completely dried up. Over time there was a domino
effect as increasing shortages of raw materials saw Cuban factories being shut down, further
driving unemployment and economic decline. Thus, the ‘Special Period’ was actually
one of economic freefall in Cuba. The economic crisis of the early 1990s did
produce a response. Within broader Cuban society there was a clear undercurrent of unrest at the
difficulties ordinary people were experiencing. In response the regime sought to ameliorate the
economic situation before it led to efforts to overthrow the government, as had happened across
Eastern Europe. Accordingly from late 1991 onwards, piecemeal plans were being initiated
to allow private industries to operate in Cuba and to permit the use of American dollars as an
alternative currency. In addition some political reforms were initiated which aimed to make
the country’s government more representative of the people and to bring in younger political
leaders to replace many of the senior figures who like Castro had risen on the back of their
involvement in the revolution back in the 1950s. Inward and outward travel were also relaxed and
this contributed greatly to the rejuvenation of the country’s economy as tourism, with most
visitors arriving from Spain and Latin America, quickly replaced sugar production as the most
important sector of the Cuban economy. As a result by 1996 the country’s budget deficit had been
nearly eliminated and foreign investment was increasing, though with criticisms abounding that
the socialist ideals of the revolution were being betrayed.
Despite this de-regulation of
parts of the Cuban economy, Fidel himself continued to present himself on
the world stage as the inveterate opponent of capitalism and sided with many regimes around
the world which were antagonistic towards the United States and the western capitalist powers
in general. Some of this was retrospectively statesmanlike. For instance, Castro had long
been a firm opponent of the policy of apartheid practiced by the South African government,
and indeed Cuba’s long-running involvement in the Angolan Civil War had partially been
to provide aid to South African dissidents. As a long-standing friend of the leading
anti-apartheid campaigner, Nelson Mandela, Castro was asked to attend Mandela’s inauguration
as the first black President of South Africa in 1994. Perhaps more controversial was Castro’s
leadership of a new alliance of Latin American states which espoused an anti-American stance and
favoured socialism. In this Fidel was most closely aligned with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, with
Castro providing healthcare expertise from Cuba in return for Venezuelan oil. Other countries such
as Bolivia would associate themselves with ‘the Pink Tide’, as this movement became known,
but the subsequent collapse of Venezuela politically and economically has considerably
tarnished the reputation of this initiative. It was also in the post-Cold War period that
Castro’s personal life became a subject of some attention. This followed from the defection
of his daughter to the United States in 1993 when she sought asylum there, after which
she widely criticised her father’s regime. Castro’s wider private life was a closely
protected thing and also substantially unconventional. He married at least twice,
but also had several long-running affairs. His marriage to his second wife, Dalia
Soto Del Valle, resulted in five sons, but he also had numerous other children from his
other relationships. His closest relationship, though, was with his younger brother, Raúl,
his associate in power since the late 1950s. Generally, though, Castro was known to be taciturn
and private. And despite being the head of the Communist regime Fidel did not eschew having more
material wealth than the average Cuban and in addition to a large estate called ‘Punto Cero’ in
Havana, he had several other large residences and often travelled by limousine. Despite this, the
public image of the man who was referred to as the Commandante or the Commander throughout his long
reign was carefully manufactured and controlled and Castro rarely appeared in public wearing
anything other than a green military uniform. In 2003 the Cuban National Assembly
granted Castro a further five-year term as president of the country, however
just three years later, in July 2006, Fidel transferred power on a provisional basis to
his long-standing ally and brother, Raúl Castro. Initially this hiatus was intended to allow Fidel
sufficient time to recover from surgery which he had undergone for a serious intestinal problem
which had led to internal bleeding. It was the first time since the Cuban Revolution’s success
and the victorious entry into Havana in 1959 that Fidel was not effectively at the head of the
state. This retirement was made permanent a year and half later. By February 2008 the Commandante
had not been seen in public for over 19 months and when the National Assembly met to determine who
would serve as president for the next five years it was possibly unsurprising for Cuba and the
wider international community to learn that Fidel, who was 81 years of age at the time, would not
stand for another term. Instead power would devolve to his brother Raúl who was elected as
President of the National Assembly on the 24th of February 2008 bringing to an end his brother’s
49 years as head of the Communist regime in Cuba.
Castro’s retirement was spent largely out of the spotlight as his health deteriorated.
He continued to publish articles in Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist
Party and occasionally gave public lectures. He composed his memoirs, the first volume of which
appeared as The Strategic Victory and provided an account of the war against Batista’s regime in
the 1950s. In 2011 he relinquished his last major position in politics, when he stepped down as
secretary general of the Communist Party of Cuba in favour of his brother Raúl. Yet he continued
to play something of a role on the international stage in his final years, becoming an advocate
of nuclear non-proliferation and warning of the risks of a war between the United States and
a nuclear power such as North Korea. However, he did not meet with the US President Barack
Obama when in March 2016 he became the first American head of state to visit the country
since the Revolution. Just over half a year later Fidel died on the 25th of November 2016 of an
undisclosed illness. A funeral procession was undertaken along the route through which the
revolutionaries had travelled across Cuba in 1958 and early 1959 before his ashes were interred
in Santa Ifigenia Cemetery in Santiago de Cuba. The Cuba that Fidel left behind after his
nearly half a century as its dictatorial ruler is one of mixed legacies. Today
the country continues to be ruled by the Communist Party of Cuba as a one-party,
authoritarian state in much the same way as other Communist regimes such as China survived
the end of the Cold War. However, like China the country has been forced to move away from a
strict adherence to socialist ideas since 1991, though Cuba had remained a strong advocate
of left-wing, Latin American socialism. As such there is still a planned or controlled
economy there, one though which does allow limited private enterprise and which has become
increasingly reliant on tourism. The growth of the latter sector has opened Cuba up to the
outside world in the last twenty years in ways which were unthinkable for most of
Castro’s tenure as head of the regime. However, there are many things which continue to blight
the lives of Cubans. The country has a poor human rights record and one of the worst records
in terms of freedom of the press. Meanwhile, the economy remains markedly underdeveloped and
continues to have some economic sanctions imposed on it by other countries. And yet a series of
political and economic reforms in recent years offer the prospect of a more open society and
economy developing in the near to medium future. Fidel Castro was an individual with a lengthy
political career which it is difficult to assess. He started as a Latin American revolutionary, one
who wished to remove American influence from Cuba and reform the country’s politics. There is no
doubting that when he led the Cuban Revolution in the 1950s that the island was bedevilled by
appalling corruption and misconduct in government, epitomised by Fulgencio Batista. Thus, there
was a considerable legitimacy to anyone reacting against the government in Cuba at this time.
However, owing to the manner in which the Cuban Revolution occurred during the 1950s, it quickly
drew the new Cuban government into the political influence of the Soviet Union. As a result the
country became a central agent in the Cold War in the early 1960s and was infamous for being the
environment in which the United States and the Soviet Union came closest to nuclear war. However,
the most long-lasting impact of this was that Cuba was and continues to operate under economic
sanctions which the United States has maintained for over sixty years. The economic problems
which this created cast a long shadow over Cuba and its economic development during the near
half century that Fidel Castro ruled the country.
But whatever the circumstances of the Cuban Revolution and the
island’s role in the Cold War in the late 1950s and early 1960s, there were several decades
thereafter during which Castro’s reign over Cuba can be evaluated. Based on these years
it must be viewed as a fairly mixed legacy. Some reforms and innovations which were
introduced into Cuban society were very positive. And the country enjoys an education and healthcare
system which is accessible to all and which would be the envy of the average American who has to
pay high fees to access the best universities or shop around for jobs which offer private health
insurance. As a result Cuba has been able to make remarkable medical breakthroughs for a country
of its small size and is a net contributor to global medical aid efforts. But contrasted with
this is the fact that Castro’s Cuba was a highly oppressive authoritarian regime which persecuted
much of its population over the last half century in order to maintain Castro and his followers
in a position of unchallenged power in Havana. Castro may be regarded as a man who oversaw
a regime which demonstrated how Communism could benefit many of its citizens in
the realms of education and healthcare, but whose rule was ultimately sullied by
his repressive actions and authoritarianism. What do you think of Fidel Castro? Was he a
nationalist patriot who liberated the Cuban people from an oppressive dictatorial regime, or
was he simply another dictator himself who in turn oppressed the Cuban people? Please
let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank
you very much for watching.
