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(Reuters) 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 center 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 recognizable.

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 favorable 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 vigor 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 track suits 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. But Fidel Castro offered only lukewarm support, reluctant to back an end of hostilities with his most bitter enemy.

PERMANENT STRUGGLE

Known by the militaristic title of “El Comandante,” in some ways Castro was always replaying the exhilaration of revolt, exhorting Cubans to fight one battle after another, from confronting U.S. hostility to boosting potato production.

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 his attire, he often built to a crescendo of indignation, gesturing firmly with long-fingered, well-manicured hands.

“We shall endeavor 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.”

But many Cubans fled his rule as he expropriated businesses and homes and imposed state control over the economy.

The long arm of Castro’s government reached deep into Cubans’ lives and internal dissent was stifled with the assiduous harassment and jailing of opponents who Castro described as mercenaries working for the United States.

Economic and political freedoms were constrained and the state controlled everything from the media and ballet companies to doctors’ associations and neighborhood watch groups.

The rapprochement with the United States over the last two years has eased tensions but, given the decades of outright animosity, some Cuban-American groups and political leaders openly rejoiced at Castro’s death.

Castro 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.”

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 lifelong 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 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 realize that this will be my true destiny.”

U.S. ENEMY

Washington viewed him as a potential enemy even before his rebel army forced Batista to flee Cuba on New Year’s Day, 1959.

It took just two years for the relationship to unravel as Castro nationalized swaths of the economy and introduced a broad agrarian reform. Thousands escaped the island, starting what became a bitter bulwark of opposition in Florida.

In April 1961, when his military crushed a CIA-backed invasion by Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs, he declared Cuba socialist and allied himself with the Soviet Union.

Moscow put nuclear missiles on the island in 1962, touching off a 13-day superpower showdown known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In an Oct. 26 cable to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Castro seemed convinced the Americans would invade Cuba and suggested the Soviets “eliminate this danger” with an act of “legitimate self defense.”

Khrushchev felt Castro was advocating a pre-emptive nuclear strike and rejected it, telling him he was satisfied with U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s pledge not to invade.

The Soviets withdrew the missiles and Washington secretly agreed to remove its nuclear missiles from Turkey, ending the crisis.

The United States imposed its trade embargo on Cuba in 1962 and the CIA admitted trying to kill Castro in the early years of his rule.

Plots or plot ideas included trying to get Castro to smoke a poisoned cigar and taking advantage of his love of diving with an exploding seashell, or poisoning a diving suit.

Castro reveled in his status as an elusive target.

“I’m really happy to reach 80. I never expected it, not least having a neighbor – the greatest power in the world – trying to kill me every day,” he said at a 2006 summit in Argentina, where crowds greeted him like a rock star.

While the embargo was economically devastating, it allowed Castro to shift blame for chronic economic problems away from the system he built and onto the United States.

He cast the fight as a David-and-Goliath story.

Philip Bonsal, U.S. ambassador to Cuba in 1959, later described Castro as a “phenomenally gifted, erratic and unscrupulous autocrat who ‘freed his country from American imperialism’ only to reduce it to a satellite of Moscow.”

REVOLUTION

In a country that was prosperous by Latin American standards but riven by inequality and illiteracy and with an unsavory reputation as a brothel and gambling-rich playground for Americans, Castro sought to build a socialist society.

His government trained thousands of doctors and provided free schooling, changes that have endured well into the 21st century, even as the state’s role in the economy was reduced in recent years.

The gains came, however, at a considerable cost to personal freedoms.

Throughout, Castro was a mentor to left-wing leaders and a friend to intellectuals such as Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, although others abandoned him in horror.

He helped Marxist guerrillas and revolutionary governments around the world, sending troops to Angola in the 1970s to support a left-wing government over the initial objections of Moscow.

Cuba helped defeat South African insurgents in Angola and win Namibia’s independence from South Africa in 1990, adding pressure on the apartheid regime.

After Nelson Mandela was freed from prison in 1990, he repeatedly thanked Castro. The Cuban leader was also a hero to Sandinista rebels who took power in Nicaragua in 1979.

COMMUNIST OUTPOST

When the Soviet bloc collapsed in 1991, it seemed Castro’s communist rule would not survive.

Cubans endured prolonged power cuts and shortages of food and basics such as soap. Ever stubborn, Castro implored them to endure the “special period” for the sake of the revolution.

He undertook some reforms, allowing foreign investment and mass tourism from Canada and Europe, and tapping exile dollars by allowing Cubans more contact with their relatives abroad.

He also let the most disgruntled leave in a chaotic exodus of makeshift boats that forced U.S. President Bill Clinton to agree to more orderly migration.

Castro was quick to see a potential ally in late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez and courted him well before he won power. When Chavez took office in 1998, Castro had a new source of cheap oil, providing a huge boost to Cuba’s economy.

Little was known about Castro’s personal life but even among his fiercest critics, few accused him of using power for personal gain. His tastes tended toward the ascetic.

He lived in a compound in western Havana and had nine children with five women, including five sons with his common-law wife Dalia Soto del Valle, who lived with Castro at the end.

His eldest son, Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart, is a Soviet-trained nuclear scientist from the Cuban leader’s only acknowledged marriage. Daughter Alina Fernandez, whose mother was a Havana socialite who Castro had an affair with while underground in the 1950s, escaped from Cuba disguised as a tourist in 1993 and is a vocal critic of her father.

In one of two documentaries about him, U.S. director Oliver Stone suggested to Castro that he was a “caudillo,” or Latin American strongman.

Castro, who always prickled at suggestions of cruelty, rejected the term. “I am a kind of spiritual leader,” he said.

 

 

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Fidel Castro

By
 -SN

It is hard to think of another leader from such a small state who had the kind of impact on world affairs that Fidel Castro had. It is also hard to think of another leader who elicited such distorted policy responses from the United States over such a long time frame. Some of it came about because of Cuba’s close proximity to the US, situated as it was, ninety miles off the coast of Florida; some of it from Castro’s prolonged hold on power; and some of it from his unswerving adherence to Marxist ideology, but those factors in and of themselves were insufficient. Most important was the fact that the communist leader thought large and acted boldly, as a consequence of which he has left an indelible imprint on history.

Which other developing world leader could have been at the centre of what was effectively a nuclear crisis in 1962? It was the wisdom of John F Kennedy and Nikita Khruschev on that occasion that steered the great powers away from an unthinkable collision, although it has been reported that Castro himself was not so moderate in his approach. And which other leader could have remained so unbending in the face of the decades-long US blockade?

As for what he accomplished within Cuba itself, that was remarkable, more especially in the fields of education and medicine. As a consequence of his efforts, Cuba moved from being a nation with a high illiteracy rate, to one with a highly educated population. His method for the mass reproduction of textbooks, for example, was simply to run them off cheaply using newsprint on newspaper presses. It was an idea which it was proposed to the then PNC government at the end of the 1980s they should copy, but with no success.

The story of Cuba’s free medical service for all, and its capacity to engage in a level of medical research which has made an impact on treatment beyond its borders, is well known. Castro’s generosity in supplying doctors to a number of countries, including this one, to shore up their public health services has been publicly acknowledged on many occasions, as has been his willingness to train local doctors so they can return home to serve.

But there was, of course, a darker side to the Cuban revolution, with its intolerance of criticism ‒ never mind opposition ‒ its imprisonment of activists and its summary executions. But then Cuba was a communist state where the denial of many human and political rights inhibited the freedom of the human spirit, just as it did in other communist polities.

It must be said, however, that that was less of an issue in the earlier years of Fidel Castro’s long rule than it became later, largely because the world was blanketed by the Cold War at the time, and the idea of democracy was not the mantra it became in the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In this region particularly, and to some extent in this hemisphere, what mattered was not so much the existence of an undemocratic Cuba, as the fact that Fidel Castro as the leader of a tiny country, poked his finger into the eye of a giant – and got away with it. And it must be remembered that in those days that giant cast a long shadow. It is for this reason that people from that earlier generation dwell less on Castro’s darker legacy, and remember instead his chutzpah in confronting America.

In the first years following his seizure of power, Castro appeared to favour fomenting similar revolutions in other parts of this hemisphere. Among these were Nicaragua and Venezuela ‒ the last mentioned of which we will return to later ‒ as well as Bolivia, where Che Guevara was killed after an unsuccessful foray into the Congo.

The Cubans only once confronted US forces directly, and that was very briefly in Grenada in 1983 after the Maurice Bishop government was removed by a faction led by Bernard Coard and others. The Cubans had workers in Grenada building the airport, as well as a very small number of military personnel. It was a difficult situation for Castro, who condemned the killing of Bishop, although he was not prepared to send in troops to help Bishop’s supporters. His instructions to the small Cuban force were not to engage the Americans when they came, and if they had to, only to defend the embassy and airport.  The Americans invaded on October 25 in the company of a token force from the Anglophone islands, and while a very small number of Cubans was killed, those captured and wounded were released by the US to return home.

Two days before the Americans landed, the Caricom leaders had met in Trinidad to discuss whether they should publicly endorse the coming US action and send some token troops to join them. According to reports, Burnham was very angry about the position taken by leaders like Eugenia Charles, and at the meeting only he and Trinidad opposed support for the US.

What happened outside the region was very different from Grenada; the Cubans made a direct contribution to the removal of apartheid in southern Africa, by fighting South African forces in Angola which were trying to remove a left-wing government there. They sent a large number of men, and in 1988 finally defeated the South African army. It was no small achievement.

This story, of course, has a small Guyana codicil, since Forbes Burnham for a time allowed Cuban planes en route to Angola to refuel here. He was famously confronted by US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger about it, and subsequently the facility had to come to an end. What is not known, is whether at any point any GDF soldiers went with the Cubans, because rumours to this effect have been circulating here for the last few decades – although there has never been any official confirmation or denial of this.

Ralph Ramkarran in his column today (page 7) recounts how Fidel Castro interfered directly in our local politics. However, it was former Foreign Minister Carolyn Rodriues-Birkett who in 2013 spoke on Cuba’s early assistance to this country. During the course of a motion to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Guyana’s recognition of Cuba, she said the PPP exported rice to that island in 1961, and that at the time of the disturbances here in the 1960s, the Cuban government helped with kerosene and gasoline.

Cuba had been invited to the Non-Aligned Foreign Ministers Conference held in August 1972, and the intention was for Guyana to announce its recognition then. However, Guyanese diplomats thought better of that approach, and after the conference was over, overtures were made to the Jamaicans, Trinidadians and Barbadians to join Guyana. Agreement was reached between the four, and in December 1972 recognition was announced. Fidel Castro never forgot that these were the first regional nations to recognize his government, and he showed his magnanimity thereafter by providing assistance in all kinds of professional fields, not the least of them, as said above, medical.

And finally, a word about the Venezuelan controversy on which Castro may possibly have had first an indirect and later a direct influence. The Venezuelan state was involved in an armed guerilla struggle at the beginning of the 1960s, when the MIR – a Marxist grouping which took its inspiration from Fidel Castro ‒ instigated urban clashes. Rómulo Betancourt, President at the time, broke off relations with Cuba in 1961 and in January 1962 voted to have the island expelled from the OAS. His experience with the Cuban-inspired armed struggle in Venezuela may have been one of the factors in his 1962 decision to resurrect a nineteenth century claim to Guyana’s territory which had been settled by an international tribunal in 1899, and which his country had accepted for more than sixty years.

Decades later, President Hugo Chávez – a veritable firebrand on the matter of the border controversy in his early days ‒ arrived in Georgetown in 2004, with an entirely different message as to its origins. He indicated too that he would not oppose projects in the Essequibo which were intended to benefit the population, provided they did not involve multinationals.  And how did this volte face come about, everyone wondered. The answer, it has been said, is that Chávez’s close friend Fidel Castro persuaded him to see the issue through different eyes. It has always been assumed that during the difficult times of the 1980s Cuba gave Guyana tacit, albeit not overt, support on the boundary controversy. Unfortunately for this country, this conversion did not linger long in the mind of Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro.

“History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him,” President Obama was quoted as saying, yesterday. That is something no one can gainsay.

FM

Fidel Castro

The world woke up to the news yesterday that Fidel Castro had died. Although his increasingly frail health and advancing years suggested that Fidel’s continued sojourn amongst us would be of limited duration, the news of his passing nevertheless delivered a shock, then sadness, that a revolutionary giant of the 20th century would no longer be a presence.

It was the sheer audacity and bravery of his Moncada attack, his inspiring speech (“history will absolve me”) at his trial and the death-defying persistence of the Granma invasion, buttressed by the rousing speeches but vague notions in Guyana of independence and socialism, that inspired me as a teenager.

The success of the Cuban Revolution lies not only in the social developments which it brought to Cuba by way of its world class health and education systems, exemplified by one of the highest literacy rates and one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world, but by bringing an end to the second class status for Afro-Cubans who were historically discriminated against and lived in dire poverty. These social benefits are available to every single Cuban.

 

Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution have been heavily criticized by the West for its purported undemocratic political system and its curbs on democratic freedoms.

These are not recent accusations, nor are they made against allies of the West such as Saudi Arabia. The US remained silent at the Fulgencio Batista coup in 1952 and mass torture and executions during his reign up to 1959.

The US suddenly found its voice in 1959 when lawful punishment was meted out to the Batista torturers and murders. This commenced the fifty plus years of efforts by the US to assassinate Fidel Castro and strangle the Cuban Revolution.

The great success of Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution lies not merely in its social achievements but in its inspiration to peoples all over the world oppressed by foreign domination, to the peoples of Latin America against the vestiges of the Monroe Doctrine, to the peoples of Southern Africa, particularly Angola, in which Cuban soldiers died, to the numerous countries like Guyana to which major assistance is being offered. Cuba’s mere survival is an inspiration to humanity by its modern replay of the victory of David over Goliath. And Fidel Castro is the symbol of that inspiration.

Cuba’s influence on Guyana’s recent political history has been significant but with no lasting impact. After years of hostility to Cuba and the Cuban Revolution, the Burnham government opened diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1972. Close political relations quickly developed as the Guyana government moved to the left. It appears as if the Cuban analysis of Guyana went something like this: The PNC is a friend of Cuba and is on the left. It is entrenched in power, which it will not share. Cuba’s fraternal party, the PPP, should therefore support the PNC and strengthen its capacity to resist imperialism.

The PPP’s fundamental objection to this analysis was that the PNC held power undemocratically and socialism cannot be built without democracy. Also, unconditional support to the PNC government would have undermined its own support. The Cuban’s disapproval of the PPP’s posture was evidenced by Castro’s visit to Guyana in 1973, just after the egregious rigging of the 1973 elections in which the PNC gave itself a two-thirds majority and the brutal killing of three PPP supporters, and not meeting with Cheddi Jagan.

The Cubans then sought to subvert the PPP. Ranji Chandisingh, seen as second in line to Cheddi Jagan and the PPP’s chief ideologue, and Feroze Mohamed, a rising star, visited Cuba in about 1975. It was believed, and later confirmed by Chandisingh to Billy Strachan, in a conversation in 1994-5 (unfortunately both have since passed and I have no way of proving this other than my word) that during that trip the Cuban Communist Party had persuaded him to leave the PPP and join the PNC, which Chandisingh did in 1976, creating a major division.

It is impossible not to believe that Feroze Mohamed did not know of the Cuban involvement in Chandisingh’s resignation. But he has remained silent; or he was not also encouraged by the Cubans to leave the PPP and join the PNC. Burnham began at this time in Parliament to shower praises on him, maybe as encouragement to take the step across the floor. But if he was encouraged, he did not cross over. I know the whole story as told to me by senior PNC sources, but regrettably can say no more. Billy Strachan was a Jamaican-British labour activist and lawyer since the late 1940s. He and Chandisingh were extremely close friends and comrades from the 1950s.

 

Cheddi Jagan had long realised that it was necessary to show solidarity with the PNC’s progressive policies. He had offered ‘critical support’ in 1975 but finally concluded that something more was necessary, while remaining convinced that a solution not based on democracy would not endure. He may well have been further influenced by the Cuban view and feared a loss of their solidarity.

Thus in 1977 the PPP offered the National Patriotic Front based on free and fair elections in which the majority party would not field a candidate for president but for the second position of prime minister.

Neither the Cubans nor the PNC was impressed, but Cuban relations with the PPP, as well as the PNC, continued.

FM

Fidel Castro wanted the merger of the PPP and PNC.  He went so far as to give Dr. Jagan and Mr.Burnham his private phone number to his flat that he stayed on Thursday nights so that he can know what was going on with the merger talks. He saw the fight between the PNC and PPP as self defeating for these two leftist parties that had the same origin. It is very unfortunate that he never saw the merger in his lifetime.

FM
Last edited by Former Member
Wally posted:

.. It is very unfortunate that he never saw the merger in his lifetime.

Imagine Burnham, and Jagan, two old time communists.  There would have been no Hoyte reforms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqEFDzq7TCg

This would have been Guyana in 2016.

A man earns US$15.  A shabby shirt costs US$30.  And people sing praises of Castro.

FM
Last edited by Former Member

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