He suffered 638 assassination attempts from Washington // He turned the island into a sanctuary for the left in Latin America
▲ Commander Fidel Castro, in a photo taken on March 9, 2004.Afp Photo
Sputnik and Prensa Latina
The newspaper La Jornada
Wednesday, August 14, 2024, p. 27
Havana. The memory and legacy of the historic leader of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro (1926-2016), were remembered yesterday on the island on the occasion of the 98th anniversary of his birth.
In these difficult times, keeping the thoughts of the Commander-in-Chief alive and eternal will be the greatest monument we can build for him.underlines a message from the Presidencia Cuba website on its X account.
Today we pay tribute to Fidel, our undefeated commander in chief, on the 98th anniversary of his birththe Foreign Ministry also published, with the hashtag #FidelPorSiempre.
His example transcended borders and generations, leaving an indelible mark on the history of humanity.added the message in X.
Sole survivor of the great protagonists of the cold warCastro established a socialist government just 150 kilometres from the US coast and allied himself with the latter’s arch-enemy, the Soviet Union. He successfully fended off 638 assassination attempts by US intelligence services.
Fidel Castro was born in the town of Birán, in the current province of Holguín, some 735 kilometers east of Havana, on August 13, 1926, the son of a Galician immigrant, a former soldier in the Spanish colonial army on the island, who became a wealthy landowner.
He began his political activism in the mid-1940s, when he was studying law and social sciences and joined the University Student Federation, a period in which he began to study Marxism.
In 1947 he joined the expeditionary contingent to fight the dictatorship of Leonidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. The expedition, which was traveling by boat, was intercepted by the Cuban Navy; Fidel Castro, who escaped by jumping into the sea with his weapon, described it as shameful that the expedition ended without a fight, according to the website www.fidelcastro.cu.
In 1948, he traveled to Venezuela, Panama and Colombia as a youth leader to organize a Latin American Congress of Students. He was in Bogotá when the popular rebellion that followed the assassination of Colombian leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán took place in April of that year. He resolutely joined that struggle. He survived by chance.
In March 1949, he led a protest in front of the United States diplomatic mission in Havana in rejection of actions of disrespect to the monument of the Cuban hero José Martí by marines Americans.
After Fulgencio Batista’s coup d’état on March 10, 1952, he denounced the regime de facto and called for his overthrow.
He organized and trained a contingent of more than a thousand young workers, employees and students. With 160 of them, on July 26, 1953, he commanded the assault on the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba and the Bayamo barracks, in an action conceived as a trigger for the armed struggle against the Batista regime, which then failed.
He was arrested and sentenced to 15 years in prison, but as a result of strong pressure and popular campaigns, he was released in May 1955.
He left for Mexico, where he organized a rebel movement again, which led him to land on the Cuban coast in December 1956 with 82 expeditionaries, beginning the armed struggle with the nascent rebel army, a guerrilla group that managed to definitively overthrow General Batista on January 1, 1959.
Having become prime minister of the new revolutionary government that year, a position he held until 1976, Fidel Castro held the reins of power on the island until 2008, when he resigned from his posts as president of the Council of State and of Ministers due to his failing health.
During this period he achieved international relevance and chaired the Non-Aligned Movement in two periods (1979-1983 and 2006-2008).
Castro died at the age of 90 on November 25, 2016, and his remains rest in the Santa Ifigenia cemetery in Santiago de Cuba.
His ideological radicalism made him, for both his followers and his enemies, one of the most important political figures of the international left in the 20th century, and his figure and the strength of his political legacy are still present, both in Cuba and in many countries where his image and thought guide popular and progressive movements that fight for a more equitable society.
Accused of being a dictator by successive US governments, Fidel Castro enjoyed wide sympathy and recognition, even among those who did not agree with socialism as a political-social project, but considered themselves Fidelistas.
During 11 administrations in the White House – from Dwight Eisenhower (1953-1961) to Barack Obama (2009-2017), the name of Fidel Castro hovered around the Oval Office like a real headache, both in the implementation of restrictive policies against Cuba and on the world stage.
Under his command, Cuba was at the center of the Cuban missile crisis, became a sanctuary for the Latin American left, and sent troops to Africa to defend the leftist government of Angola against the forces of the apartheid South African. Survived the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991.