Fidel Castro / The Times 25.11.2016

Shortly after midnight on November 25, 1956, a ragtag group of 82 Cuban exiles boarded a leaky wooden motor yacht and slipped down Mexico’s Tuxpan River into the Gulf of Mexico. It was the start of a madcap mission. Armed with just 90 rifles, two anti-tank guns, three machineguns and 40 pistols they planned to return to their homeland to overthrow the corrupt, US-backed regime of General Fulgencio Batista. Led by Fidel Castro, a left-wing revolutionary who had fled Cuba, the men stood in the darkness and sang the Cuban national anthem — “To die for the motherland is to live.”

From the outset everything went wrong. The Mexicans informed the Cuban embassy that Castro was on his way. Their boat, Granma, was seriously overcrowded. The exiles were seasick. A voyage that was supposed to take five days lasted seven, by which time the expedition was almost out of food and water and had missed an abortive uprising by supporters in Cuba.

When Granma reached Cuba it ran aground far from shore. The men had to wade in, leaving much of their equipment. One of them, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, called it a shipwreck not a landing. For three nights they trudged towards the Sierra Maestra mountains, lying low during daylight, but at dawn on December 5 soldiers attacked them. Most of the rebels were killed or surrendered. Castro and two others hid in a sugar cane field. His quixotic adventure seemed doomed, but Castro was a determined and resourceful man.

The trio eventually reached heavily forested mountains, where they were joined by a dozen other survivors, including Guevara and Castro’s younger brother, Raúl. Gradually they won over oppressed peasants, contacted supporters elsewhere in Cuba, who brought supplies, and secured more weapons by attacking a military post.

For more than 20 months Castro lived in those mountains. He issued “manifestos” to the Cuban people that called for free elections, social reform and justice. He met foreign journalists in the mountains and duped them into writing reports that exaggerated his strength. He launched a radio station. He pulled off a spectacular publicity stunt on the eve of the Havana grand prix when supporters kidnapped Argentina’s world champion driver from a hotel just before the race and returned him with an apology afterwards.

Batista sent 10,000 men to the Sierra Maestra to crush the rebels. Instead Castro’s 300 guerillas ambushed and captured whole units, handing them to the Red Cross to generate favourable publicity. Castro made common cause with other groups, expanding Cuba’s “liberated zone” westwards towards Havana. As the tide turned against the regime its demoralised military began to disintegrate, and the US abandoned its ally, whose excesses had become an embarrassment. Shortly after midnight on January 1, 1959 Batista flew into exile. Five days later, after a triumphant journey across Cuba, Castro — tall, bearded and charismatic — arrived in Havana to a hero’s welcome and took up residence in the Hilton hotel.

“Castro was seen by many, especially women, as a Christ-like figure, the pure one descending from the mountains to clean away the dirt and corruption of the cities,” his biographer, Leycester Coltman, a former British ambassador to Cuba, wrote.

Castro was only 32. He had achieved power against all odds, and would go on to rule Cuba for 50 extraordinary years.

During that half-century “El Comandante” transformed his tiny island into a centre of world attention and a focal point in the Cold War superpower rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union. He established a Soviet-backed Marxist-Leninist state only 90 miles from Florida, freed Cuba from the domination of its giant neighbour and outlasted ten US presidents, despite their repeated attempts to remove or assassinate him. He helped to take the world to the brink of atomic war in 1962 by allowing Moscow to deploy nuclear missiles on Cuban soil. He sought to export his anti-capitalist revolution to Latin America and Africa, offering moral and material support to Marxist insurgencies

At home, Castro improved healthcare, education and housing, but otherwise the island paid a high price for its independence. Its economy was wrecked by a combination of his ideology and US sanctions, leaving the poor whom he sought to help facing hardship. Dissent was crushed and opponents imprisoned. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled to the US, and many more drowned when their rafts sank en route.

In the end Castro and his revolution were overtaken by events. The Cold War’s end robbed Cuba of its relevance. The Soviet Union’s implosion robbed it of its paymaster. In 2014 President Obama ordered the restoration of full diplomatic relations with Cuba, ending five decades of hostilities, but by then Castro had handed power to his brother, Raúl, and retreated from public view. He died a Cold War relic, the champion of a discredited ideology, but arguably the only communist leader who had seized power and ruled with the assent of his people.

Castro was not a stereotypical dictator. He was autocratic and ruthless, but sought to carry his people with him — not least through television appearances. However misguided his revolution, few questioned his sincerity or integrity. He was never a total pariah in western circles. He had plenty of admirers — Jean-Paul Sartre, Gabriel García Márquez, Simone de Beauvoir, Nelson Mandela and Pierre Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister. He had a temper, but could also be witty and charming.

Of Castro’s private life, little is known. He routinely worked into the small hours. He liked to swim, read and watch baseball. His two main weaknesses were for cigars — which he smoked heavily until giving them up in 1985 — and women, of which there were many. He was nicknamed “the Horse” for his prowess.

Aged 22, he married Mirta Díaz-Balart, a lawyer’s daughter, and they had a honeymoon in the US paid for by her father. They had a son, Fidelito, who was educated in Moscow and became head of Cuba’s nuclear energy commission before being removed. “He was fired for incompetence,” Castro said. He and Mirta divorced in 1955. After she married a former Batista acolyte and moved to Spain she was permitted to return to see her son only if she did not speak to the media.

Castro had a second child, a daughter named Alina, through Naty Revuelta Clews, a middle-class Cuban who became an ardent revolutionary. There were many other women, and other children. His need for sex was purely physical, Coltman wrote. “He had numerous affairs but accepted no commitments. The only great passion in his life was making revolution.”

In his late forties he married Dalia Soto del Valle, a teacher 20 years younger than himself, and stayed loyal to her. She was required to sever links with friends and family and to live an isolated life in his heavily protected compound — replete with bunker — in Havana. They had five sons who live comfortable but low-profile lives in Havana, using their mother’s name and working in medicine or computers.

Castro was revered and loathed in equal measure, and his zeal divided not only the world and Cuba, but his family. His older brother, Ramón, refused to have anything to do with communism or politics. Two of his sisters were supporters, but a third, Juanita, defected to the US and labelled Cuba “an enormous prison surrounded by water”. His daughter, Alina, also defected in 1993.

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born out of wedlock in 1926. His father was a former Spanish soldier who settled in Cuba, became a sugar cane farmer, had five children by his wife, then seven more with a servant. Fidel was educated at expensive Jesuit-run schools alongside the very boys whom his revolution would later drive from Cuba. He enrolled as a law student in Havana. Idealistic and with a flair for dramatic gestures, he became a central player in the political gangsterism of that era. He was arrested several times and was suspected of killing a rival.

When Batista seized power in a coup in 1952 Castro formed a “movement” dedicated to his overthrow. The next year he and 165 others attacked the Moncada Barracks, hoping to trigger an uprising. They failed. Castro was captured and many of his colleagues were killed. Yet at his trial he used his oratorical talents to put the regime in the dock. “Condemn me if you will. History will absolve me,” he declared.

Castro was sentenced to 15 years, but was released a year later. He started rebuilding his movement, but fled to Mexico during a crackdown. There he met Guevara, an Argentinian who shared his yearning to rid Latin America of US imperialism, and together they built up their ragtag invasion force.

Throughout this period, and during his time in the Sierra Maestra, Castro concealed his communist beliefs. Initially, after his improbable victory, he governed through a moderate puppet president, Manuel Urrutia, but the pretence soon evaporated. Thousands of supporters of the deposed regime were executed by firing squads. Political parties were banned, elections postponed.

In 1959 Castro met Vice-President Nixon who told President Eisenhower: “He’s either incredibly naive about communism or under communist discipline. My guess is the former.” Castro’s anti-Americanism was “virtually incurable”, Nixon added.

Back in Cuba the revolution gathered pace. Urrutia was cast aside. Castro, who had no knowledge of economics, cut utility charges, halved rents and raised salaries. He divided cattle ranches and sugar plantations into smallholdings for 200,000 peasants. He built a repressive security apparatus, suppressed the media, banned almost all private enterprise and, absurdly, put Guevara in charge of the national bank. Middle-class Cubans began their exodus to the US.

As the economy declined Castro turned to Moscow, trading sugar for heavily subsidised oil. He nationalised banks and sugar mills and seized control of refineries. He began accepting refugees from right-wing Latin-American dictatorships and issued a “Havana Declaration”, calling on the people of Latin America to throw off the US yoke. Eisenhower authorised covert CIA action to remove Castro, and over the next decade the agency devised bizarre schemes involving exploding cigars, booby-trapped sea shells and cyanide-laced milkshakes.

In late 1960 Castro attended the UN general assembly in New York, where he received Malcolm X and Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, who publicly declared himself a “Fidelista” and privately predicted that US hostility would drive Castro into Soviet arms “like an iron filing to a magnet”.

Shortly afterwards the US banned all exports to Cuba and broke relations. It also began planning an operation that succeeded only in enhancing Castro’s stature: it started to train 1,400 Cuban exiles to invade Cuba. President Kennedy inherited the project in 1961, and that April gave the go-ahead.

The force landed at the Bay of Pigs. Cuba’s military repelled it and 1,189 of the exiles surrendered. Another 110 were killed. “What the imperialists can’t forgive is that we have made a socialist revolution under their noses,” Castro gloated.

He milked his triumph, leading journalists on a tour of the battlefield, reading out captured CIA documents on television and personally questioning some of the prisoners. “You’re the first prisoners in history who are allowed to argue with the head of the government you came to overthrow in front of the whole country and the whole world,” he told them. He eventually exchanged them for US medicine and food.

A still greater drama followed. Khrushchev proposed the deployment of 42 nuclear missiles on Cuban soil. Castro regarded the plan as a Soviet security guarantee. In October 1962 Kennedy demanded the Soviet missiles be withdrawn and imposed a naval blockade of Cuba. For 13 days the superpowers confronted each other, and the world came as close as it ever has to nuclear war, before Khrushchev backed down. Castro was furious. When told the news he kicked his office wall, bringing a mirror crashing down, and called Khrushchev a “faggot”. He suffered one of his occasional bouts of depression. It took a 31-page letter from Khrushchev and a red-carpet tour of the Soviet Union to placate him.

Cuba was too small a stage for a man of Castro’s ego. He hated US imperialism, but appeared less bothered by the Soviet equivalent, supporting Moscow’s invasions of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and of Afghanistan in 1979. Successive US presidents tightened the embargo. Castro used such threats to rally his people, finishing his speeches with the cry: “Patria o muerte, venceremos” (“Homeland or death, we shall prevail”). He was adept at manipulating Cubans, who remained proud of their revolution, despite the appalling human rights record that came with it.

It was the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 that posed the gravest threat to Castro. Cuba’s supply of oil and other goods dried up. Its economy shrank 40 per cent in two years. Factories closed. Power cuts lasted 16 hours a day. People scarcely had bread, let alone soap, toothpaste or razor blades.

Cuba had few allies left, and for the first time Castro was compelled to compromise. From the early 1990s he courted western investment and opened Cuba to tourists. He introduced limited reforms, legalising the dollar and small-scale private enterprises.

In 1994 he attended an Ibero-American conference in Colombia wearing a Caribbean shirt called a guayabera — his first public appearance in anything other than an olive-green military uniform. In 1998 he allowed John Paul II to make the first papal visit to Cuba. The next year an admirer, Hugo Chávez, became president of Venezuela and threw Castro an economic lifeline by supplying Cuba with cheap oil in return for doctors.

Ultimately it was age, not the US, that ended Castro’s rule. In 2006, two weeks before his 80th birthday, he announced that he was temporarily delegating his powers to Raúl. “I’m really happy to reach 80,” he quipped. “I never expected it, not least having a neighbour — the greatest power in the world — trying to kill me every day.”

In 2008, grey-bearded and blotchy-skinned, he resigned permanently and largely disappeared from public view. Through necessity or inclination, Raúl proved more pragmatic than his brother, ushering in much greater economic liberalisation and ending half a century of confrontation with the US. Whether Fidel approved is unclear. He was neither seen nor heard during Obama’s historic visit to Cuba in March — the first by a US president in nearly a century — but subsequently wrote a long and defiant essay to the Communist Party newspaper Granma in which he declared: “We do not need the empire to give us anything.”

The international reaction to his death — praised by few, vilified as a brutal despot by many — suggests that he might have been wrong to assume that history would absolve him.

Fidel Castro, Cuban leader, was born on August 13, 1926. He died on November 25, 2016, aged 90