Who was Fidel Castro?

General Fulgencio Batista seized power in a 1952 coup, cancelling scheduled elections in which Castro had been a congressional candidate. Convinced that legal opposition was futile, Castro built a clandestine organization known as "The Movement," recruiting over a thousand members and stockpiling weapons. On 26 July 1953 he led roughly 165 fighters in an assault on the Moncada Barracks near Santiago, intending to spark a nationwide uprising. The attack failed disastrously; many rebels were killed outright or captured and tortured, with 22 executed without trial. Castro escaped into the mountains but was soon captured.

At his trial, Castro acted as his own defense lawyer, delivering a lengthy speech later published as History Will Absolve Me, in which he argued Batista's government was the true lawbreaker for having seized power unconstitutionally. Sentenced to 15 years, he served his time in relatively comfortable conditions on the Isla de Pinos, reading widely in Marx, Lenin, and Martí, until a 1955 amnesty secured his release.

Forced into exile after further unrest, Castro went to Mexico, where he organized the 26th of July Movement with his brother Raúl and the Argentine revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, training under veteran guerrilla fighter Alberto Bayo. In November 1956 Castro and 81 armed companions sailed for Cuba aboard the overcrowded yacht Granma. The crossing went badly wrong, arriving days late and missing a planned coordinated uprising. After landing, government forces killed or captured most of the group, leaving only about nineteen survivors, including the Castro brothers and Guevara, to retreat into the Sierra Maestra mountains and begin a guerrilla campaign.

From their mountain base, Castro's small guerrilla band gradually expanded through raids on army outposts, gaining recruits, arms, and the attention of international media, notably a sympathetic New York Times profile. Despite being vastly outnumbered, the rebels repelled a major 1958 army offensive and went on the counterattack, cutting the island in two. As Batista's support collapsed both domestically and among US backers, he fled into exile on 31 December 1958 with a vast personal fortune. Castro's forces entered Havana shortly after, and he arrived in the capital on 9 January 1959 to mass celebration.

A moderate lawyer, Manuel Urrutia, was installed as provisional president, though Castro held real power from the outset and was formally sworn in as prime minister in February 1959. His government executed hundreds of Batista-era officials following hasty trials, redistributed land under agrarian reform laws, and began nationalizing industries, moves popular with the poor but alarming to the propertied classes, foreign investors, and the United States.

Tensions escalated quickly. After Cuba's government seized foreign-owned oil refineries and other US assets, Washington imposed a trade embargo. Castro suppressed opposition media, formed neighborhood surveillance committees called Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, and built a militia force, while increasingly aligning Cuba with the Soviet Union. He initially denied being a communist to the press even as he quietly brought Marxists into senior government positions.

In April 1961, CIA-backed Cuban exiles invaded at the Bay of Pigs, hoping to topple Castro's government. Cuban forces defeated the invasion within days, and Castro publicly declared for the first time that Cuba's revolution was socialist. Later that year he openly proclaimed himself a Marxist-Leninist, and by 1965 the merged revolutionary factions had become the Cuban Communist Party, with Castro as its first secretary.

Seeking to offset American nuclear superiority and protect Cuba from invasion, Castro agreed to let the Soviet Union station nuclear missiles on the island. American reconnaissance discovered the missiles in October 1962, triggering the Cuban Missile Crisis. Washington imposed a naval quarantine, and after tense negotiations Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba, a deal reached without Castro's direct involvement that left him feeling betrayed.

Throughout the 1960s Castro consolidated one-party rule, nationalized remaining private enterprise, and built an extensive system of free healthcare and education alongside continued repression of dissidents, independent press, and perceived social deviance, including the persecution of gay men. He also positioned Cuba as a champion of revolutionary movements abroad, hosting and arming leftist guerrillas from across Latin America and Africa, even as this strained relations with an increasingly cautious Soviet leadership under Leonid Brezhnev.

Castro dispatched Cuban troops and advisers to conflicts across the developing world, including Algeria's Sand War, the Angolan Civil War, the Ogaden War in support of Ethiopia, and the Yom Kippur War, while backing the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and Marxist movements in Chile and Grenada. These campaigns, combined with his leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement from 1979 to 1983, raised Cuba's international profile far beyond what its size would suggest, even as critics noted the human cost of these foreign deployments.

The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union cut off the subsidies that had propped up Cuba's economy, plunging the country into the severe shortages of what Castro termed the "Special Period." Rationing, blackouts, and food scarcity became widespread, prompting cautious market reforms such as legalizing small private enterprises and the US dollar, alongside a growing tourism industry. Despite the hardship, Castro's government survived the wave of communist collapses that swept Eastern Europe, later finding new allies in Latin America's "Pink Tide," particularly Hugo Chávez's Venezuela, with whom Cuba formed the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas.

Declining health forced Castro to hand presidential duties to his brother Raúl in July 2006, a transfer made permanent in February 2008. In retirement he remained a public commentator on world affairs, writing newspaper columns and occasionally meeting foreign leaders, while acknowledging past injustices such as the persecution of gay men. He died in Havana on 25 November 2016 at the age of 90; his ashes were carried in a funeral procession retracing his 1959 victory route before being entombed in Santiago de Cuba.