President Raul Castro said on state television that his older brother died at 10-29 p.m. Friday. He ended the announcement by shouting the revolutionary slogan- “Towards victory, always!”
Castro’s reign over the island-nation 90 miles (145 kilometres) 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 eight years after ill health forced him to formally 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.
“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.
“It’s a tragedy,” said 22-year-old nurse Dayan Montalvo about Fidel Castro’s death. “We all grew up with him. I feel really hurt by the news that we just heard.”
Fidel Castro Ruz was born in Aug. 13, 1926, in eastern Cuba’s sugar country, where his Spanish immigrant father worked first recruiting labour 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 defence into a manifesto that he smuggled out of jail, famously declaring, “History will absolve me.”
