Re: Castro No Where To Be Found on 80th Birthday
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Castro Resigns
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Bloomberg
By Michael Smith and Andrew Davis
Feb. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Fidel Castro resigned as president and commander-in-chief of Cuba, after almost 50 years as the country's leader, the official daily Granma said.
``I will neither aspire to nor will I accept -- I repeat -- I neither will aspire to nor will I accept, the position of president of the council of state and commander-in-chief,'' Castro wrote, according to Granma in its online edition. ``My only desire is to fight as a soldier for my ideas.''
Castro, 81, seized power in Cuba almost a half-century ago promising liberty and economic justice only to turn the Caribbean island into a communist bastion and a flashpoint of the Cold War.
In July 2006, he handed control to his brother Raul after undergoing surgery to treat an intestinal ailment. He failed to attend the May Day parade in Havana last year, missing the celebration for only the third time since taking power in 1959.
By June, though, he was well enough to meet with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for six hours in Havana.
The Cuban leader was lucid, healthy and ready to return, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said in January after meeting with Castro in Havana.
Castro, a lawyer by training, ruled the nation of 11 million people since the 1959 revolution. Over the decades, he boosted literacy and health care for the island's poor, while imprisoning thousands of dissidents, seizing private property and sparking an exodus of Cubans who braved treacherous, shark-infested waters on rickety, homemade boats to flee for the U.S.
Cold War Leader
The Cuban leader took his place on the world stage at the height of the Cold War by making his country an outpost of the Soviet Union only 90 miles (145 kilometers) from Florida. In Latin America and Africa, Castro gave military and political support to revolutionary groups and Marxist governments for more than three decades after taking power.
He pushed the superpowers toward nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and turned the nation into the region's strongest military power until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Castro is ``a monument to the practical art of political survival,'' said Robert Muse, a Washington attorney who specializes in international trade and the U.S. economic embargo on Cuba.
Cuban Missile Blockade
Projecting the image of an unrepentant revolutionary dressed in green military fatigues, Castro was a stubborn nemesis for U.S. presidents, from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush. His regime survived a U.S.-sponsored invasion, known as the Bay of Pigs, and at least eight assassination plots. President John F. Kennedy imposed the embargo in 1962, which was tightened by successive U.S. leaders, depriving the country of its largest trade partner and starving the economy of dollars.
The loss of Soviet aid plunged Cuba's economy into a deep depression, forcing Castro to ration food and order people to ride bicycles to save gasoline. In recent years, Castro recovered from the loss of his Soviet patron to antagonize the U.S. once again. Castro also inspired a new generation of Latin American leaders seeking to distance themselves from the U.S., including Venezuelan President Chavez.
Bush drew up a plan to force Castro from power and tightened the embargo in 2004, including limiting family visits to Cuba by U.S. residents to one trip every three years.
``We're not waiting for the day of Cuban freedom,'' Bush said in May 2004. ``We are working for the day of freedom in Cuba.''
Failing Health
In the past decade, Castro cut back public appearances as his health deteriorated. In 2004, he made international headlines when he tripped and fell at a graduation ceremony, breaking his left knee and suffering a hairline fracture in his upper right arm.
At the peak of his power in the 1960s through the 1980s, Castro used his clout and backing from the Soviet Union to aid leftist revolutionary groups, including sending troops to help Marxist governments in Angola, Grenada and Nicaragua. When U.S.- supported military dictatorships seized power in South America in the 1970s, Castro gave refuge to thousands of dissidents.
The bearded Cuban leader communicated best to vast crowds, drawing hundreds of thousands of people for speeches that might last six hours or more. He often toured Havana in an open military jeep, showing up unannounced for inspections of public- works projects and government offices clutching a Cohiba cigar. Castro tends to work well into the early morning hours; when he chose to give interviews, they could last all night. He eventually gave up cigars.
Financial Ruin
After Cuba plunged into financial ruin following the Soviet Union's collapse, Castro found ways to mitigate the loss of Soviet aid and the U.S. embargo. He generated foreign exchange by allowing Spanish-built hotels, filled with European tourists, to line the country's resort beaches.
He also cultivated his relationship with Venezuela, the largest oil exporter in the Americas.
``Castro managed to survive all the catastrophes that Cuba faced: droughts, financial and economic isolation, riots,'' said Wilson Borja, an opposition Colombian lawmaker who met with Castro three times.
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born on Aug. 13, 1926, one of seven children fathered by Angel Castro y Argiz, a Spanish immigrant laborer who rose to operate a 26,000-acre sugar plantation. His mother, Lina Ruz Gonzales, was a member of the household staff.
The elder Castro leased most of the land from United Fruit Co., one of the U.S. companies that dominated Cuba's economy. About 300 families lived and worked on the property.
Jesuit Education
Castro was sent to schools run by the Roman Catholic Marist and Jesuit religious orders. Physically gifted, he was passionate about baseball and was named Cuba's ``outstanding collegiate athlete'' in high school.
In 1945, Castro enrolled in law school at the University of Havana and took his first steps into revolutionary politics. Cuba was between dictatorships, and political factions were fighting for dominance with rhetoric and guns. Castro armed himself and later described his student years as the most dangerous of his life.
While still in school, the future Cuban leader joined 1,200 men who set out to invade the Dominican Republic and overthrow dictator Rafael Trujillo. The Cuban navy turned the expedition back. He also married Mirta Diaz Balart, a philosophy student. They had one child, Felix Fidel Castro Diaz, nicknamed Fidelito. They divorced in 1954.
Law Degree
Two years after receiving a law degree, Castro ran in 1952 for Cuba's Chamber of Deputies. The race ended when Fulgencio Batista, then a general in Cuba's military, staged a coup and canceled elections. Castro challenged Batista in court, lost and began a six-year effort to oust him.
On July 26, 1953, Castro led about 165 men in an attack on an army barracks, hoping to spark a popular uprising. The troops killed eight of Castro's men and executed scores when the fighting was over. The survivors fled and were later captured and tried.
Representing himself at a closed trial, Castro delivered a two-hour speech that became a manifesto for the so-called 26th of July Movement. He ended with an often-cited declaration: ``History will absolve me.'' He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
General Amnesty
Batista released Castro in 1955 as part of a general amnesty. Castro went into exile in Mexico, where he joined forces with Argentine communist revolutionary Ernesto ``Che'' Guevara. In 1956, Castro and Guevara crossed the Caribbean with about 80 men on a yacht called the Granma to start a guerrilla campaign against Batista. Cuban forces killed all but 12 on landing.
Castro retreated into the Sierra Maestra mountains with the survivors, rallied popular support in battling Batista and, at the age of 32, drove the general into exile on Jan. 1, 1959.
Over the next two years, Castro transformed Cuba into a communist dictatorship, seizing land and nationalizing sugar mills, ranches and oil refineries owned by U.S. interests. His government imprisoned or killed political opponents, declared the country atheist and closed 400 Catholic schools.
Embracing Khrushchev
On Sept. 29, 1960, amid the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, Castro embraced Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in the Theresa Hotel in New York's Harlem when the two visited the city for a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. The gesture deepened the rift with the U.S., which imposed the trade embargo. Castro turned to the Soviet Union for economic and military aid.
Under Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, the U.S. made clandestine efforts to remove Castro. From 1960 to 1965, the Central Intelligence Agency mounted at least eight assassination plots, according to the 1975 report of a U.S. Senate committee headed by Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho.
``I've survived 600 attempts on my life,'' Castro said in Cordoba, Argentina, in July 2006.
The plots included lacing Castro's cigars with a botulinum toxin and enlisting Mafia bosses Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante Jr. to have someone add poison to one of Castro's drinks, the report said. The CIA also set out to undermine Castro by dusting his shoes with a depilatory that would cause his beard to fall out, according to the report.
Bay of Pigs
President Kennedy authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion. On April 17, 1961, refugees armed by the CIA staged an amphibious landing at the bay on the island's southwest coast with the goal of sparking an uprising. Castro's forces killed more than 100 invaders and captured more than 1,100. He released the prisoners after securing a ransom from the U.S. of $53 million worth of food and medicine.
Eighteen months later, in October 1962, photographs taken by a U.S. spy plane showed Castro had allowed the Soviet Union to build nuclear-missile bases in Cuba. The discovery marked the start of the Cuban Missile Crisis, 13 days during which the world stared down ``the gun barrel of nuclear war,'' in the words of Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorensen.
Kennedy imposed a naval quarantine to block Soviet ships and said the U.S. would regard a strike by Cuba as a Soviet attack. As Soviet ships cruised toward Cuba, Kennedy ordered nuclear weapons loaded onto aircraft.
The Showdown
On the 12th day of the confrontation, Kennedy wrote to Khrushchev offering assurances that the U.S. wouldn't invade Cuba, eliminating Castro's stated reason for the missiles. The next day, Radio Moscow broadcast a statement by the Soviet leader that the weapons would be dismantled.
Castro continued to rely on Soviet military support and he built Cuba into the most-heavily armed Caribbean country, with about 150 Soviet-supplied fighter jets and 235,000 troops in the early 1990s, according to CIA estimates. Cuban military forces were dispatched to support guerrilla movements in developing countries throughout the 1970s and 1980s, often clashing with U.S.-backed governments.
After a Marxist government seized control of the Caribbean island of Grenada in 1979, Castro contributed money and manpower to build an airport with a runway long enough to accommodate military aircraft. President Ronald Reagan ordered an invasion in 1983, partly to stop the construction, after another coup sparked chaos. About 1,000 U.S. citizens were on the island at the time, many of them medical students. U.S. Marines freed them after exchanging fire with Cuban troops.
Cuban Diaspora
The Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 deprived Cuba of its largest source of trade and military support. Saddled with a weakening economy, Castro retreated from intervening in the affairs of other countries while continuing to spar with the U.S. over immigration.
Castro's ascent to power sparked a Cuban diaspora and thousands fled, mainly to the U.S., where they established anti- Castro refugee communities in South Florida and the New York area.
The largest exodus, the so-called Mariel boatlift, took place in 1980. After groups of Cubans tried to leave the country by fighting their way into foreign embassies, Castro removed security forces from the buildings. Within a week, 10,000 Cubans pushed their way into the Peruvian compound.
Castro responded by announcing that Cubans were free to leave and he invited emigres in the U.S. to pick them up at the port of Mariel. The harbor was soon clogged with boats that helped ferry more than 125,000 people to the U.S. Castro included among the Marielitos some criminals released from prison, mentally ill people and others he found undesirable.
Elian Gonzales
In February 1996, Cuban MiG fighter jets shot down two U.S.- registered aircraft piloted by representatives of an anti-Castro organization searching for refugees at sea. Four years later, Castro orchestrated one of the largest rallies of his tenure in the case of Elian Gonzales, a 6-year-old boy who had been taken off the island by his mother.
The mother and 10 others died when the 16-foot boat carrying them to Florida sank. Elian, rescued after clinging to an inner tube for two days, was turned over to relatives in Miami. Castro allowed Elian's father to travel to Florida for custody proceedings that took on the tone of a battle between his regime and foes in the U.S.
Soviet Collapse
Castro prevailed with the support of President Bill Clinton's administration. The Justice Department decided Elian should be returned to his father and ordered federal agents to seize the boy in a raid on his relatives' house. Elian was flown to Cuba after the U.S. Supreme Court let stand an order giving his father custody.
Cuba's economic condition after the Soviet collapse prompted Castro to introduce some market-oriented changes to the centralized economic system. In 1993, he legalized use of the U.S. dollar and permitted self-employment in about 150 occupations, leading to a surge of tourism.
In 1991 the Communist Party lifted its ban on membership in religious organizations. Castro invited Pope John Paul II to visit in 1996, allowing four open-air Masses and responding to the pope's call for a prisoner amnesty by releasing 300 inmates, including about 70 held on political charges.
Even so, Castro maintained a repressive grip on society and in 2003 he implemented a new crackdown on dissidents that led to wide international condemnation.
Raul Castro, who also held the post of Cuba's Minister of Defense when he was made acting president, has shown more willingness than his brother to tolerate political opposition and he ordered the release of a number of dissidents, including Hector Palacios, the first among the so-called Group of 75.
To contact the reporters on this story: Michael Smith in Santiago at
mssmith@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: February 19, 2008 03:26 EST
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