Fidel Castro, Cuba's leader of revolution, dies at 90
This file photo taken on May 25, 2002 shows Cuban President Fidel Castro speaking to a crowd, holding a Cuban flag, in Sancti-Spiritus, some 340 kilometers east of Havana. / AFP
By Park Si-soo
Cuba’s former President Fidel Castro, who led a rebel army to improbable victory, embraced Soviet-style communism and defied the power of 10 U.S. presidents during his half century rule, has died at age 90.
“The commander in chief of the Cuban revolution died at 10:29 p.m. (Friday)," President Raul Castro said in an urgent TV speech. The President ended his announcement by shouting the revolutionary slogan: “Toward victory, always!”
Fidel Castro ruled Cuba as a one-party state for almost 50 years before Raul, his younger brother, took over in 2008. The senior Castro will be cremated on Dec. 4.
In April, Fidel Castro gave a rare speech on the final day of the country's Communist Party congress.
He acknowledged his advanced age but said Cuban communist concepts were still valid and the Cuban people “will be victorious.”
“I’ll soon be 90,” the former president said, adding that this was “something I’d never imagined.”
“Soon I’ll be like all the others, "to all our turn must come," Fidel Castro said.
Castro -- who had survived many assassination plots -- was the longest serving non-royal leader of the 20th Century.
A file picture dated 03 January 2004 shows Cuban President Fidel Castro addressing the nation on occasion of the 45th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution in the Karl Marx Theater in La Havana. / EPA-Yonhap
His legacy
Castro's reign over the island-nation 145 kilometers from Florida was marked by the U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis a year later that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
The bearded revolutionary, who survived a crippling U.S. trade embargo as well as dozens, possibly hundreds, of assassination plots, died 10 years after ill health forced him to hand power over to Raul.
Castro overcame imprisonment at the hands of dictator Fulgencio Batista, exile in Mexico and a disastrous start to his rebellion before triumphantly riding into Havana in January 1959 to become, at age 32, the youngest leader in Latin America. For decades, he served as an inspiration and source of support to revolutionaries from Latin America to Africa.
His commitment to socialism was unwavering, though his power finally began to fade in mid-2006 when a gastrointestinal ailment forced him to hand over the presidency to Raul in 2008, provisionally at first and then permanently. His defiant image lingered long after he gave up his trademark Cohiba cigars for health reasons and his tall frame grew stooped.
``Socialism or death'' remained Castro's rallying cry even as Western-style democracy swept the globe and other communist regimes in China and Vietnam embraced capitalism, leaving this island of 11 million people an economically crippled Marxist curiosity.
In this March 14, 1957 file photo, Fidel Castro, the young anti-Batista guerrilla leader, center, is seen with his brother Raul Castro, left, and Camilo Cienfuegos, right, while operating in the Mountains of Eastern Cuba. / AP-Yonhap
He survived long enough to see Raul Castro negotiate an opening with U.S. President Barack Obama on Dec. 17, 2014, when Washington and Havana announced they would move to restore diplomatic ties for the first time since they were severed in 1961.
He cautiously blessed the historic deal with his lifelong enemy in a letter published after a month-long silence. Obama made a historic visit to Havana in March 2016.
Fidel Castro Ruz was born Aug. 13, 1926, in eastern Cuba's sugar country, where his Spanish immigrant father worked first recruiting labor for U.S. sugar companies and later built up a prosperous plantation of his own.
Castro attended Jesuit schools, then the University of Havana, where he received law and social science degrees. His life as a rebel began in 1953 with a reckless attack on the Moncada military barracks in the eastern city of Santiago. Most of his comrades were killed and Fidel and his brother Raul went to prison.
Fidel turned his trial defense into a manifesto that he smuggled out of jail, famously declaring, ``History will absolve me.''
Freed under a pardon, Castro fled to Mexico and organized a rebel band that returned in 1956, sailing across the Gulf of Mexico to Cuba on a yacht named Granma. After losing most of his group in a bungled landing, he rallied support in Cuba's eastern Sierra Maestra mountains.
Three years later, tens of thousands spilled into the streets of Havana to celebrate Batista's downfall and catch a glimpse of Castro as his rebel caravan arrived in the capital on Jan. 8, 1959.
The U.S. was among the first to formally recognize his government, cautiously trusting Castro's early assurances he merely wanted to restore democracy, not install socialism.
This Sept. 25, 2016 file photo shows Cuba's former leader Fidel Castro talking with China's Premier Li Keqiang, in one of the last pictures taken of Castro before he died, in Havana, Cuba. / AP-Yonhap
Within months, Castro was imposing radical economic reforms. Members of the old government went before summary courts, and at least 582 were shot by firing squads over two years. Independent newspapers were closed and in the early years, homosexuals were herded into camps for ``re-education.''
In 1964, Castro acknowledged holding 15,000 political prisoners. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled, including Castro's daughter Alina Fernandez Revuelta and his younger sister Juana.
Still, the revolution thrilled millions in Cuba and across Latin America who saw it as an example of how the seemingly arrogant Yankees could be defied. And many on the island were happy to see the seizure of property of the landed class, the expulsion of American gangsters and the closure of their casinos.