Castro, Fidel
Castro, Fidel (1926- ), Cuban revolutionary, who took control of Cuba in 1959 and established a Communist dictatorship.
Castro was born in Mayarí. He received a degree in law from the University of Havana in 1950. After Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar seized control of the Cuban government in 1952, Castro became the leader of an underground, antigovernment faction. In 1953 he was jailed for having led the July 26th uprising against Batista. Released in 1955, he went into exile in the United States and Mexico. In 1956 he returned to Cuba and led a rebellion from the Sierra Maestra region of Oriente Province, a lightly populated and mountainous region in southeastern Cuba. His rebel forces, known as the 26th of July Movement, won steadily increasing popular support. Batista fled from the country on January 1, 1959, and Castro assumed power. He became premier on February 16.
At first Castro seemed to be a moderate leftist, but once in power he became increasingly radical, executing and imprisoning thousands of political opponents, nationalizing industry, collectivizing agriculture, and establishing a one-party socialist state that drove large numbers of middle- and upper-class Cubans into exile. He was especially hostile to the United States, which had been friendly to Batista and had frequently intervened in Cuban affairs. After the Castro government seized U.S.-owned oil refineries, sugar mills, and electric utilities in 1960, the United States stopped buying Cuban sugar and imposed an economic embargo on the island nation. The United States backed an unsuccessful attempt by Cuban exiles to overthrow Castro in 1961 (see Bay of Pigs Invasion).
In the early 1960s Castro openly embraced Communism and formed close ties with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), relying increasingly on Soviet economic and military aid. The bearded, cigar-smoking Cuban leader, invariably dressed in army fatigue uniform, soon became a familiar figure to millions of people all over the world. During the 1960s and 1970s Castro's government made significant strides in improving Cuba's educational and health care facilities, and offered the Cuban revolution as an example to other developing nations. Castro gave active support to revolutionary movements in Latin America and, during the 1970s and 1980s, in Africa as well.
When the USSR began instituting social and economic reforms in the late 1980s, Castro criticized the experiments with capitalism and argued that Cuba did not need to implement any similar reforms. The collapse of the USSR in 1991 sharply curtailed aid to Cuba, causing further deterioration in the island nation's already struggling economy. Castro responded to his country's increasingly desperate economic situation in 1993 by approving limited economic reforms that legalized some free enterprise.
Castro visited China in December 1995 and expressed his admiration for the Chinese Communist Party's success in combining limited economic reforms with relentless repression of political dissidents. Back in Cuba, Castro criticized his nation's fledgling free-market experiments. He argued that the only way to achieve economic growth and prevent the breakdown of Cuba's one-party state was to severely limit the freedom of self-employed workers and entrepeneurs, and move quickly to silence political opponents.
In February 1996 Cuban jets shot down two civilian airplanes that Cuba claimed had violated Cuban airspace. The planes belonged to Brothers to the Rescue, a U.S.-based group headed by Cuban exiles dedicated to helping Cuban refugees. The U.S. government responded to the incident by further tightening the economic embargo to include measures aimed at punishing foreign companies that invested in Cuba.
In March 1996 Castro convened a rare full session of the Central Committee of Cuba's Communist Party, which endorsed an even stricter crackdown against dissidents, as well as against Cuban business owners who had been allowed to engage in private ventures with foreign companies. Castro vowed to step up efforts to silence opposition groups and enforce compliance with the economic and ideological stances of Cuba's Communist Party.
See: Batista,Fulgencio, Cuba