XPost: soc.history   
   From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net   
      
   Fidel Castro obituary   
      
   Charismatic leader of the revolution and president of Cuba who   
   bestrode the world stage for half a century   
      
   Richard Gott   
      
   Saturday 26 November 2016 15.04 GMT   
   First published on Saturday 26 November 2016 12.12 GMT   
      
   Fidel Castro, who has died at the age of 90, was one of the more   
   extraordinary political figures of the 20th century. After leading a   
   successful revolution on a Caribbean island in 1959, he became a   
   player on the global stage, dealing on equal terms with successive   
   leaders of the two nuclear superpowers during the cold war. A   
   charismatic figure from the developing world, his influence was felt   
   far beyond the shores of Cuba. Known as Fidel to friends and enemies   
   alike, his life story is inevitably that of his people and their   
   revolution. Even in old age, he still exercised a magnetic attraction   
   wherever he went, his audience as fascinated by the dinosaur from   
   history as they had once been by the revolutionary firebrand of   
   earlier times.   
      
   The Russians were beguiled by him (Nikita Khrushchev and Anastas   
   Mikoyan in particular), European intellectuals took him to their   
   hearts (notably Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir), African   
   revolutionaries welcomed his assistance and advice, and the leaders of   
   Latin American peasant movements were inspired by his revolution. In   
   the 21st century, he acquired fresh relevance as the mentor of Hugo   
   Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia, the leaders of two   
   unusual revolutions that threatened the hegemony of the US. Only the   
   US itself, which viewed Castro as public enemy No 1 (until they found   
   an “axis of evil” further afield), and the Chinese in the Mao era, who   
   found his political behaviour essentially irresponsible, refused to   
   fall for his charm. It took until Barack Obama’s presidency for US   
   restrictions to be eased – but by then intestinal illness had   
   compelled Castro’s resignation as president in favour of his brother   
   Raúl, who saw in the historic normalising of relations between the two   
   countries. Nonetheless, Fidel maintained his antagonism until the end,   
   declaring in a letter on his 90th birthday this year that “we don’t   
   need the empire to give us anything”.   
      
   Castro’s rule thus spanned nearly five decades, and during the cold   
   war hardly a year went by without his mark being made on international   
   politics. On several occasions the world held its breath as events in   
   and around Cuba threatened to spill beyond the Caribbean. In 1961 an   
   invasion at the Bay of Pigs by Cuban exiles, encouraged and financed   
   by the US government, sought to bring down Castro’s revolution. It was   
   swiftly defeated. In 1962 Khrushchev’s government installed nuclear   
   missiles in Cuba in an attempt to provide the infant revolution with   
   “protection” of the only kind the US seemed prepared to respect. And   
   in November 1975 a massive and wholly unexpected airlift of Cuban   
   troops to Africa turned the tide of a South African invasion of newly   
   independent Angola, inevitably heating up cold war quarrels.   
   The young anti-Batista guerrilla leader Fidel Castro.   
      
   Castro was a hero in the mould of Garibaldi, a national leader whose   
   ideals and rhetoric were to change the history of countries far from   
   his own. Latin America, ruled for the most part in the 1950s by   
   oligarchies inherited from the colonial era, of landowners, soldiers   
   and Catholic priests, was suddenly brought into the global limelight,   
   its governments challenged by the revolutionary gauntlet thrown down   
   by the island republic. Whether in favour or against, an entire Latin   
   American generation was influenced by Castro.   
      
   Cuba under Fidel was a country where indigenous nationalism was at   
   least as significant as imported socialism, and where the legend of   
   José Martí, the patriot poet and organiser of the 19th-century   
   struggle against Spain, was always more influential than the   
   philosophy of Karl Marx. Castro’s skill, and one key to his political   
   longevity, lay in keeping the twin themes of socialism and nationalism   
   endlessly in play. He gave the Cuban people back their history, the   
   name of their island stamped firmly on the story of the 20th century.   
   This was no mean achievement, though by the early 1990s, when the   
   collapse of the Soviet Union brought the Cuban economy down with a   
   bump, the old rhetoric had begun to wear thin.   
      
   Fidel was the son of Lina Ruz, a Cuban woman from Pinar del Río, and   
   Angel Castro, an immigrant from Spanish Galicia who became a   
   successful landowner in central Cuba. Educated by the Jesuits, and   
   subsequently as a lawyer at Havana University, he was clearly marked   
   for politics from early youth. A brilliant student orator and a   
   successful athlete, he was the outstanding figure of his generation of   
   students.   
      
   The return to power by coup d’etat in 1952 of the old dictator,   
   Fulgencio Batista, seemed to rule out the traditional road to   
   political power for the young lawyer, and an impatient Castro embraced   
   the cause of insurrection, common in those years in the unstable   
   countries that bordered the Caribbean. On 26 July 1953, he led a group   
   of revolutionaries who sought to overthrow the dictator by seizing the   
   second largest military base in the country, the Moncada barracks in   
   Santiago de Cuba.   
      
   The attack was a dismal failure, and many of the erstwhile rebels were   
   captured and killed. Castro himself survived, to make a notable speech   
   from the dock – “history will absolve me” – outlining his political   
   programme. It became the classic text of the 26th of July Movement   
   that he was later to organise, using the failed Moncada attack as a   
   rallying cry to unite the anti-Batista opposition into a single   
   political force.   
      
   Granted an amnesty two years later, Castro was exiled to Mexico. With   
   his brother Raúl, he prepared a group of armed fighters to assist the   
   civilian resistance movement. Soon he had met and enrolled in his band   
   an Argentinian doctor, Che Guevara, whose name was to be irrevocably   
   linked to the revolution. Castro’s tiny force sailed from Mexico to   
   Cuba in December 1956 in the Granma, a small and leaky motor vessel.   
   Landing in the east of the island after a rough crossing, the rebel   
   band was attacked and almost annihilated by Batista’s forces. A few   
   members of Castro’s troop survived to struggle up the impenetrable   
   mountains of the Sierra Maestra. There they tended their wounds,   
   regained their strength, made contact with the local peasants, and   
   established links with the opposition in the city of Santiago.   
      
      
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