Cuba will observe nine days of mourning for Fidel Castro, including a three-day journey by his ashes along the route taken by the rebel army he led on a victorious march across the island in 1959.

The plans were announced Saturday by the Organizing Committee of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, State and Government, which is one of the most powerful organs of the single-party state put in place by Castro.

It said Cubans can show their respects for Castro beginning at 9 a.m. Monday at the Havana memorial to national hero Jose Marti, a poet and leader of Cuba's 19th century fight for independence from Spain. Mourners will be able to pay their respects until 10 p.m. Monday and again on Tuesday at the memorial in the Plaza of the Revolution as well as specially designated sites across the country.

Cubans will be able to "pay homage and sign the solemn oath of fulfilling the concept of revolution ... as an expression of the will to continue Castro's ideas and our socialism," the committee said.

Officials say Castro will be cremated, but offer no details about how or when.

The committee said Cubans will be called to a demonstration at 7 p.m. Tuesday in the Plaza of the Revolution, which was the site of a series of huge rallies led by Castro as he consolidated power in the years after the revolution.

On Wednesday, Castro's ashes will begin traveling eastward across Cuba following in reverse the route taken by his rebels from the Sierra Maestra mountains to the capital, Havana. The cortege is to take three days.

At 7 p.m. Dec. 3, a mass commemoration will be held at the Antonio Maceo plaza in central Santiago de Cuba, the largest city in the east.

Castro's ashes are to be interred at 7 a.m. the following day at the Santa Ifigenia cemetery, where Marti is also buried.</s>“Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.” — Oct. 16, 1953, at his trial for rebel attack that launched Cuban Revolution.

“I am not interested in power nor do I envisage assuming it at any time. All that I will do is to make sure that the sacrifices of so many compatriots should not be in vain, whatever the future may hold in store for me.” — Jan. 1, 1959, upon triumph of the revolution.

“Workers and farmers, this is the socialist and democratic revolution of the humble, with the humble and for the humble.” — April 16, 1961, declaring his government socialist.

“I believe that aggression is imminent in the next 24 to 72 hours,” Oct. 26, 1962, commenting on possibility of U.S. attack in memo to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during tensest hours of Cuban missile crisis.

“Millions of Cubans shed their tears today together with the loved ones of the victims of the abominable crime. And when an energetic and forceful people cry, injustice trembles.” — Oct. 15, 1976, addressing more than 1 million mourners in Havana the week after the terrorist bombing of Cuban airliner killed 73 people.

“Today it hurts us if a Cuban is hungry, if a Cuban has no doctor, if a Cuban child suffers or is uneducated, or if a family has no housing. It hurts us even though it’s not our brother, our son or our father. Why shouldn’t we feel hurt if we see an Angolan child go hungry, suffer, be killed or massacred?” — March 30, 1977, to Cuban civilian and military personnel in Luanda, Angola.

“Cuba is not opposed to finding a solution to its historical differences with the United States, but no one should expect Cuba to change its position or yield in its principles. Cuba is and will continue to be socialist. Cuba is and will continue to be a friend of the Soviet Union and of all the socialist states.” — Dec. 20, 1980, to Congress of Communist Party of Cuba.

“We will take the steps we have to take to keep our factories running, to keep our workers employed, to keep going forward in these difficult conditions, and … find the formulas to save the country, save the revolution and save socialism.” — Oct. 14, 1991, to Communist Party congress as Cuba felt first effects of waning Soviet trade.

“We will win this battle for life, and not only for your lives, but also for the lives of all children in the world.” — Dec. 23, 1999, calling on schoolchildren to participate in fight to repatriate Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez.

“I promise that I will be with you, if you so wish, for as long as I feel that I can be useful — and if it is not decided by nature before — not a minute less and not a second more … Now I understand that it was not my destiny to rest at the end of my life.” — March 6, 2003, upon being re-elected by Cuba’s National Assembly to sixth term as Council of State president.

“I do not have the slightest doubt that our people and our revolution will fight to the last drop of blood to defend these and other ideas and measures that are necessary to safeguard this historic process.” — July 31, 2006, announcing he had undergone intestinal surgery and temporarily ceded his powers to younger brother Raul, Cuba’s defense minister.

“I am saying that I will neither aspire to nor accept — I repeat, I will neither aspire to, nor accept — the positions of president of the State Council and commander in chief.” — Feb. 19, 2008, announcing his resignation as president.

“I was at death’s door, but I came back,” speaking of his 2006 illness in an Aug. 30, 2010 interview with Mexican daily La Jornada.

“The new generation is being called upon to rectify and change without hesitation all that should be rectified and changed … Persisting in revolutionary principles is, in my judgment, the principal legacy we can leave them,” April 18, 2011 opinion piece written during key Communist Party Congress on the need to hand off to young leaders. At the Congress, Castro stepped down as head of the party. But despite talk of rejuvenation, he was replaced by his 79-year-old brother, with two grey-haired veterans of the revolution selected as Raul’s chief deputies.

“I’ll be 90 years old soon,” Castro said at an April 2016 communist party congress where he made his most extensive public appearance in years. “Soon I’ll be like all the others. The time will come for all of us, but the ideas of the Cuban Communists will remain as proof that on this planet, if one works with fervor and dignity, they can produce the material and cultural goods that human beings need and that need to be fought for without ever giving up.”</s>With a shaking voice, 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: “Toward victory, always!”

Castro’s reign over the island-nation 90 miles (145 kilometers) 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 10 years after ill health forced him to 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.

His commitment to socialism was unwavering, though his power finally began to fade in mid-2006 when a gastrointestinal ailment forced him to hand over the presidency to Raul in 2008, provisionally at first and then permanently. His defiant image lingered long after he gave up his trademark Cohiba cigars for health reasons and his tall frame grew stooped.

“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.

He survived long enough to see Raul Castro negotiate an opening with U.S. President Barack Obama on Dec. 17, 2014, when Washington and Havana announced they would move to restore diplomatic ties for the first time since they were severed in 1961. He cautiously blessed the historic deal with his lifelong enemy in a letter published after a month-long silence. Obama made a historic visit to Havana in March 2016.

Carlos Rodriguez, 15, was sitting in Havana’s Miramar neighborhood when he heard that Fidel Castro had died.

“Fidel? Fidel?” he said, slapping his head in shock. “That’s not what I was expecting. One always thought that he would last forever. It doesn’t seem true.”

“It’s a tragedy,” said 22-year-old nurse Dayan Montalvo. “We all grew up with him. I feel really hurt by the news that we just heard.”

Fidel Castro Ruz was born Aug. 13, 1926, in eastern Cuba’s sugar country, where his Spanish immigrant father worked first recruiting labor 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 defense into a manifesto that he smuggled out of jail, famously declaring, “History will absolve me.”

Freed under a pardon, Castro fled to Mexico and organized a rebel band that returned in 1956, sailing across the Gulf of Mexico to Cuba on a yacht named Granma. After losing most of his group in a bungled landing, he rallied support in Cuba’s eastern Sierra Maestra mountains.

Three years later, tens of thousands spilled into the streets of Havana to celebrate Batista’s downfall and catch a glimpse of Castro as his rebel caravan arrived in the capital on Jan. 8, 1959.

The U.S. was among the first to formally recognize his government, cautiously trusting Castro’s early assurances he merely wanted to restore democracy, not install socialism.

Within months, Castro was imposing radical economic reforms. Members of the old government went before summary courts, and at least 582 were shot by firing squads over two years. Independent newspapers were closed and in the early years, homosexuals were herded into camps for “re-education.”

In 1964, Castro acknowledged holding 15,000 political prisoners. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled, including Castro’s daughter Alina Fernandez Revuelta and his younger sister Juana.

Still, the revolution thrilled millions in Cuba and across Latin America who saw it as an example of how the seemingly arrogant Yankees could be defied. And many on the island were happy to see the seizure of property of the landed class, the expulsion of American gangsters and the closure of their casinos.

Castro’s speeches, lasting up to six hours, became the soundtrack of Cuban life and his 269-minute speech to the U.N. General Assembly in 1960 set the world body’s record for length that still stood more than five decades later.

As Castro moved into the Soviet bloc, Washington began working to oust him, cutting U.S. purchases of sugar, the island’s economic mainstay. Castro, in turn, confiscated $1 billion in U.S. assets.

The American government imposed a trade embargo, banning virtually all U.S. exports to the island except for food and medicine, and it severed diplomatic ties on Jan. 3, 1961.

On April 16 of that year, Castro declared his revolution to be socialist, and the next day, about 1,400 Cuban exiles stormed the beach at the Bay of Pigs on Cuba’s south coast. But the CIA-backed invasion failed.

The debacle forced the U.S. to give up on the idea of invading Cuba, but that didn’t stop Washington and Castro’s exiled enemies from trying to do him in. By Cuban count, he was the target of more than 630 assassination plots by militant Cuban exiles or the U.S. government.

The biggest crisis of the Cold War between Washington and Moscow exploded on Oct. 22, 1962, when President John F. Kennedy announced there were Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba and imposed a naval blockade of the island. Humankind held its breath, and after a tense week of diplomacy, Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev removed them. Never had the world felt so close to nuclear war.

Castro cobbled revolutionary groups together into the new Cuban Communist Party, with him as first secretary. Labor unions lost the right to strike. The Catholic Church and other religious institutions were harassed. Neighborhood “revolutionary defense committees” kept an eye on everyone.

Castro exported revolution to Latin American countries in the 1960s, and dispatched Cuban troops to Africa to fight Western-backed regimes in the 1970s. Over the decades, he sent Cuban doctors abroad to tend to the poor, and gave sanctuary to fugitive Black Panther leaders from the U.S.

But the collapse of the Soviet bloc ended billions in preferential trade and subsidies for Cuba, sending its economy into a tailspin. Castro briefly experimented with an opening to foreign capitalists and limited private enterprise.

As the end of the Cold War eased global tensions, many Latin American and European countries re-established relations with Cuba. In January 1998, Pope John Paul II visited a nation that had been officially atheist until the early 1990s.

Aided by a tourism boom, the economy slowly recovered and Castro steadily reasserted government control, stifling much of the limited free enterprise tolerated during harder times.

As flamboyant as he was in public, Castro tried to lead a discreet private life. He and his first wife, Mirta Diaz Balart, had one son before divorcing in 1956. Then, for more than four decades, Castro had a relationship with Dalia Soto del Valle. They had five sons together and were said to have married quietly in 1980.

By the time Castro resigned 49 years after his triumphant arrival in Havana, he was the world’s longest ruling head of government, aside from monarchs.

In retirement, Castro voiced unwavering support as Raul slowly but deliberately enacted sweeping changes to the Marxist system he had built.

His longevity allowed the younger brother to consolidate control, perhaps lengthening the revolution well past both men’s lives. In February 2013, Raul announced that he would retire as president in 2018 and named newly minted Vice President Miguel Diaz-Canel as his successor.

“I’ll be 90 years old soon,” Castro said at an April 2016 Communist Party congress where he made his most extensive public appearance in years. “Soon I’ll be like all the others. The time will come for all of us, but the ideas of the Cuban Communists will remain as proof that on this planet, if one works with fervor and dignity, they can produce the material and cultural goods that human beings need and that need to be fought for without ever giving up.”

Cuba’s government announced that Castro’s ashes would be interred on Dec. 4 in the eastern city of Santiago that was a birthplace of his revolution. That will follow more than a week of honors, including a nearly nationwide caravan retracing, in reverse, his tour from Santiago to Havana with the triumph of the revolution in 1959.

Associated Press writer Michael Weissenstein reported this story in Havana and Peter Orsi reported from Mexico City. AP writer Anita Snow in Mexico City and AP news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.</s>Some sang the Cuban national anthem. Others shook up bottles of champagne and sprayed fizz among the revellers. (Photo: AP)

Miami: Cuban-Americans poured onto the streets of Miami early on Sunday to cries of "Cuba Libre!" and "Freedom! Freedom!" celebrating the death of their nemesis Fidel Castro. Revellers -- many exiled by Havana's communist regime -- honked car horns, banged on pots and drums, and danced, cried, and waved Cuban flags in a crush of communal euphoria.

Castro died late yesterday, his brother Cuban President Raul Castro announced on national television around midnight.

In Miami -- home to the largest concentration of Cuban-Americans in the US -- the news spread quickly and with fervour.

"It's sad that one finds joy in the death of a person -- but that person should never have been born," said Pablo Arencibia, 67, a teacher who fled Cuba 20 years ago.

"Satan is now the one who has to worry," because "Fidel is heading there and is going to try to get his job," joked Arencibia amid the loud party-like atmosphere.

Sensing the historic moment, younger revellers streamed the event on Facebook Live, posted pictures on Instagram, and broadcast the celebrations on FaceTime and Skype to friends and relatives on the island.

Little Havana and Hialeah -- Miami neighborhoods where many Cuban exiles settled -- saw people dance, hug, and exchange comments like "it took so long," and "now only Raul is missing."

"Cuba Libre" -- Free Cuba -- has been a rallying cry for exiles ever since the Castro brothers took over Cuba in 1959. The rum and Coke drink of the same name, however, predates the Castro regime.

Some two million Cubans live in the US, nearly 70 per cent of them in Florida.

The late-breaking news roused some out of bed to join the street party in pajamas.

Some sang the Cuban national anthem. Others shook up bottles of champagne and sprayed fizz among the revellers.

People of all ages gathered, mostly of Cuban descent, but also some Americans.

"It's a major moment for the Cuban community and I'm with them," said a retired Florida native named Debbie. "I live in Little Havana and this is a big part of our lives. The community always comes together here."

Debbie and her friend Cuban-American Aymara celebrated outside the Cafe Versailles, where exiles met for decades to plot their return to the island and strategies to protest the Castro regime.

"He should have died a long time ago! He's a criminal, a murderer and a wretched being!" screamed 78-year-old retiree Hugo Ribas in a voice full of rage mixed with euphoria.

"The brother should have died too -- in that family they're all criminals!" added Ribas, who has been in Miami for four years.

"It took too long," said Cuban immigrant Analia Rodriguez, 23, who has lived in Miami for a decade.</s>Raul Castro has introduced market-oriented reforms in recent years, but the pace of change has been slowed, many Cubans say, by Fidel Castro's continued influence over an old guard that mistrusts both markets and warming ties with Washington.

Two years ago, the more pragmatic, younger Castro engineered a detente with the old enemy that has seen commercial flights, dollar remittances and American tourists all flow into the cash-strapped Caribbean island.

Those advances could easily be reversed if Trump sticks to the harder line he took at the end of his election campaign, when he vowed to close the U.S. embassy, opened last year after half a century, and to renegotiate President Barack Obama's agreement to normalize relations with Cuba.

But Castro's death could also be an opportunity for Trump to keep up an engagement with Cuba that is popular with voters and U.S. businesses.

With Fidel Castro now dead at 90 and the 85-year-old Raul Castro promising to retire in early 2018, working with Cuba becomes easier on a symbolic level.

Trump had not mentioned Cuba since his election and in his first responses to the overnight news from Cuba, he gave little sense of which way he will go.

"Though the tragedies, deaths and pain caused by Fidel Castro cannot be erased, our administration will do all it can to ensure the Cuban people can finally begin their journey toward prosperity and liberty," Trump said in a statement.

Richard Feinberg, a former national security adviser to U.S. President Bill Clinton, said it is now less likely that Trump will reverse Obama’s opening to the island.

"The passing of Fidel Castro removes the object of hatred, fear and revenge of many Cuban-Americans, bringing to an end what has been one of history’s longest grudge matches, opening the gates for the reconciliation of the deeply divided Cuban family," he said.

"It is in the U.S. national interest to compete with China and Russia for influence in Cuba and the broader Caribbean, and to see Cuba as a natural ally in counter terrorism," said Feinberg, author of a book on the Cuban economy.

In the short term, Cuba may see from its government an orchestrated outpouring of support for Castro's undiluted idea of communism.

The first sign of that was a government campaign launched on Saturday to have millions of Cubans sign a pledge to be faithful to Castro’s revolution, “as an expression of the will to perpetuate his ideas and our socialism”.

Even years after stepping down from the presidency, Castro remained a buttress for the old guard among Cuba's political hierarchy and bureaucracy who are not convinced by Raul Castro's measures leading Cuba slowly toward a socialist economy with a strong role for private businesses.

Over time that influence will fade, potentially making it easier for reformers in Raul Castro's government and in the future.

"It removes a court of final appeal for the conservatives while giving hope to the usually younger reformers in the party for more rapid future economic change," said David Jessop, a UK-based business consultant on Caribbean affairs.

The inner workings of the Cuban power structure have always been tough to read, and not everyone believes Fidel Castro was behind a recent backtracking on market reforms, such as allowing farmers to sell products at market prices or permitting private imports and exports.

Mid-level bureaucrats fearful of losing power in the system are often seen as a major reason economic reforms have not been rolled out at the pace announced by Raul Castro in a 2011 policy paper.

"He was fully retired, so his passing is not likely to alter the course of Raul’s economic modernization program," said William LeoGrande, co-author of a book on U.S.-Cuba relations.

"Of course, there are bureaucrats still in office who share Fidel’s ideological hostility to markets. They have been and will continue to be an obstacle to change."

Trump may decide that Castro's demise is an opportunity to pressure the communist government into making concessions, such as freeing political dissidents or preferential access for U.S. products and services.

"President-elect Trump may simplistically see a chance to restart an adversarial relationship ... to prove he is the strong man he said he is," said Paul Hare, a former British ambassador to Cuba.

Cuba has relied heavily on Venezuela for economic help, but a deep economic and political crisis at home means Venezuela cannot provide the same volumes of subsidized oil that Cuba is accustomed to.

Closer relations with the United States have helped, and backsliding on the thaw could further weaken Cuba's economy, already battered by low commodity prices.

But an aggressive policy by Trump would close off lucrative opportunities to U.S. businesses and hand them to European or Asian firms. It would hurt companies like American Airlines, due to start commercial flights to Havana on Monday for the first time in half a century.

"Fidel's death is yet another reason to continue the policies of the last two years. Change is here to stay in Cuba and the U.S. can either be a part of it or sit on the sidelines in the next four years," said Jason Marczak at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington.</s>(CNN) When Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro's death was announced on Saturday, China's President Xi Jinpeng remembered him as a "great person of our era."

In a statement read out by a presenter on Chinese state-TV, Xi praised the founder of Communist Cuba. He said Castro had made "immortal historical achievements for the development of world socialism."

But decades earlier, Fidel Castro himself didn't have such praise for the founder of Communist China.

"I believe that Mao (Zedong) destroyed with his feet what he did with his head for many years. I'm convinced of that. And some day the Chinese people, the Communist party of China will have to recognize that," Castro told American journalist Barbara Walters in May 1977.

He went on to list what he said were Mao's grave mistakes: a cult personality and abuse of great power.

"I also acquired that power, but I never abused it, nor did I retain it in my hands," Castro said.

China and Cuba: Communists on opposite sides of the Cold War

Although both Cuba and China were functioning Communist states, Castro told Walters he viewed China as a "good ally" of the US, which was a bitter enemy of Cuba.

It was the height of the Cold War -- and Cuba and China found themselves seemingly on opposite sides: Cuba a strong ally of the Soviet Union, while China had split with the Soviets over their different interpretations of Marxism-Leninism. China was also slowly establishing ties with the US and was about to embark on major economic reform.

"China's working closely with the US played a big role in the fall of the Soviet Union," said Victor Gao, chairman of the China Energy Security Institute, who once worked as an interpreter for former Chinese President Deng Xiaoping.

"I think for Fidel Castro to feel a bit uncomfortable with China separating from the Soviet Union and getting closely involved with the US is fully understandable. He remained until very, very recently, opposed to involvement with the US. Using the Cuban benchmark -- it also made a lot of sense for them to think that China was betraying that ideology."

Havana and Beijing established diplomatic relations in 1960, but their opposing positions in the Cold War resulted in little substantive interaction between the countries for more than two decades, according to Chinese state media. Relations didn't fully resume until 1989, and Castro made his first and only state visit to China in 1995.

By then the Soviet Union had fallen and Cuba, still under a US economic blockade, needed to strengthen ties with other Communist allies. China quickly became one of Cuba's top trade partners and economics was the main focus of Castro's visit to China. He spent two days outside the capital observing economic changes in China, taking note of the successes and weaknesses of economic reform.

The cost of Cuba's defiance against America

It's economic development that differentiates the two communist nations, according to Gao.

"The economic development model based on socialist ideology, now when we look back, was a very misguided ideology," he told CNN. "Since 1978 China embarked on profound economic reform and today has become the world's second largest economy. Cuba throughout these years has not changed that profoundly."

But despite the differences, Gao said China remained loyal to its fellow Communist nation, recalling a meeting between Deng Xiaoping and then U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz in 1987, where Gao served as interpreter.

"He lobbied very hard for China to stand by the US in regards to Cuba and its blockade, but Deng Xiaoping reiterated that China would not do that," Gao said.

"I think it's truly remarkable for a small country like Cuba, just on the doorstep of the US, managed to really stand firm in what it believed to be the truth. That is truly an act of bravery and courage, even though the cost is to be on the lower level of economic development."

China awarded Fidel Castro the Confucius Peace Prize -- its own version of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, saying Castro did not use force in dealing with international disputes, especially against he US.

But Castro's unwillingness for decades to implement economic reforms will also serve as a lesson for many Chinese, Gao said.

"While Fidel Castro was a great political leader, he was not a great economic leader. Hopefully his passing will make it easier for the next generation to implement reforms and improve its economy."</s>He towered over his Caribbean island for nearly five decades, a shaggy-bearded figure in combat fatigues whose long shadow spread across Latin America and the world.

Late Friday night, Raúl Castro announced that his brother Fidel Castro died. He was 90.

Millions cheered Fidel Castro on the day he entered Havana. Millions more fled the communist dictator’s repressive police state, leaving behind their possessions, their families, the island they loved and often their very lives. It’s part of the paradox of Castro that many people belonged to both groups.

Few national leaders have inspired such intense loyalty – or such a wrenching feeling of betrayal. Few fired the hearts of the world’s restless youth as Castro did when he was young, and few seemed so irrelevant as Castro when he was old – the last communist, railing on the empty, decrepit street corner that Cuba became under his rule.

He held a unique place among the world’s leaders of the past century. Others had greater impact or won more respect. But none combined his dynamic personality, his decades in power, his profound effect on his own country and his provocative role in international affairs.

As he changed the face of Cuba, he remapped South Florida as well, transforming it from the southernmost tip of the United States to the northernmost point of Latin America. The suffering of the refugees he sent pouring into Miami eventually turned to triumph as they forged economic and political success.

He was a spellbinding orator who was also a man of action. His tall and powerful build was matched by an outsized ego, boundless energy and extraordinary luck that carried him to victory as a guerrilla leader in 1959 against nearly impossible odds, then helped him survive countless plots hatched by his countless enemies.

He ended American domination of the island’s economy, swept away the old political system and the traditional army, nationalized large and small land holdings and brought reforms in education and healthcare.

He also was a ruthless dictator, the Maximum Leader who reneged on his promise of free elections, executed thousands of opponents, imprisoned tens of thousands, installed a Communist regime and made his island a pawn in the Cold War. His alliance with the Soviet Union brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1962.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was neither Castro’s first nor last confrontation with the United States, though it was certainly the most epic. No other individual has ever tormented Washington more or longer. At age 12, Castro wrote to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, congratulating him on his third inauguration as president and impudently asking for a dollar. By the time he was 35, two American presidents had devoted a considerable amount of time and effort to killing him.

Over and over, whether by arming Latin American revolutionaries or sheltering fugitives from U.S. justice or unleashing great waves of refugees, Castro enraged his great enemy to the north — and often threw it into domestic disarray as well. The U.S. political controversies that followed the 1980 Mariel boatlift and the 2000 custody battle over Elián González played a large role in costing first Jimmy Carter and then Al Gore the presidency.

Faced with hostility from the United States, which sponsored an invasion by Cuban exiles in 1961 and relentlessly (if sometimes comically) plotted his assassination, Castro turned the island into a fortress guarded by one of the region’s most powerful military machines.

But the guns pointed inward, too. He created a repressive state that rigidly controlled the arts, the press, the airwaves. An efficient secret police force was aided by neighborhood spies and pro-government mobs that attacked those who dared to call for democratic change. Cultural enemies were vulnerable, too; well into the 1970s, Castro was imprisoning gays and long-haired young people in work camps.

Castro bragged that he would free his island of economic dependence on the United States, and he did – but only by becoming even more dependent on another foreign power based nearly 6,000 miles away in Moscow. Cuba ran up billions of dollars in debt for weapons, oil, machinery, food and other supplies. And when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba’s crippled economy imploded, bringing new hardships to a population that already had suffered decades under his mismanagement.

Hundreds of thousands fled the society Castro created. The exodus began early with the powerful and affluent and continued with former comrades who found themselves in opposition to his rule. Next to go were the middle class and professionals and, finally, just about anyone who had the courage to grab a boat or cobble together a raft for the perilous crossing of the Florida Straits.

Castro, although always controversial, once seemed to embody a fresh, youthful approach to his island’s conflicts. Few moments in Cuban history rival the euphoria of Jan. 8, 1959, when the black-bearded comandante rode a tank into Havana with his swaggering rebel fighters, making their way through streets filled with cheering throngs. President Fulgencio Batista had fled a week earlier.

To his followers — and admirers around the world — Castro offered a vision of liberation, morality and enlightenment. Many believed his promise of a “humanistic” revolution based on nationalism — not communism — with agrarian reform, free elections and the restoration of the liberal 1940 constitution.

For millions of Cubans, hope turned to bitter feelings of betrayal as Castro quickly pushed aside former comrades in arms, jailed those who protested, ridiculed the idea of elections and converted Cuba to a one-party Communist state and Soviet satellite. He then proclaimed that he had been a Marxist-Leninist all along.

If his open embrace of communism made him a pariah not only to Washington but to many of his own countrymen, Castro nonetheless became an icon to young leftists around the world disillusioned with the revolutionary sclerosis of the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands would give their lives in fruitless guerrilla movements he inspired in places like El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Namibia, Angola and Zaire.

In his final years, Castro seemed curiously unconcerned with his image, at times lurching dangerously close to self-parody. Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer, in his book Castro’s Final Hour, described a three-hour speech on Che Guevara’s application of dialectics that Castro delivered in 1991 – to an audience of 6-year-olds.

“As you may well know,” Castro said during a 1993 speech, “my job is to talk.” His orations were legendary. Without a text, but with a crowd of supporters cheering him on in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución, Castro could hold forth for hours. His record, in 1968, was a meandering discourse that lasted nearly 12 hours. On the day he officially stepped down from the Cuban presidency in 2008, a biologist in Havana told a Miami Herald reporter with obvious relief: “Now I can watch my Brazilian telenovelas without worrying that they’re going to be interrupted by a six-hour speech.”

A Castro speech might start as a friendly chat, then morph into a dry report on sugar production statistics or a scholarly lecture on the benefits of hygiene. As the pace picked up, the voice would dip to a hoarse whisper or launch a series of ringing questions that drew shouted responses from the multitude.

Warming to a theme — perhaps the supposed threat of a Yanqui invasion — the whisper would grow to a roar and then a rhythmic wave of shouts, repeating key phrases like a tent-revival evangelist reaching out to save souls. The words would tumble out, by turns high-flown, vulgar, jovial, indignant — finally winding down in raspy exhaustion with the benediction: Patria o muerte, venceremos! (Fatherland or death, we shall triumph!)

In later years, as the former Soviet bloc nations moved toward open societies and capitalism, leaving him virtually alone as a hard-line Communist, the tag line changed to a defiant Socialismo o muerte — socialism or death.

Castro was born Aug. 13, 1926, near the village of Birán on Cuba’s northeastern coast.

His father, Angel Castro, a native of Galicia, Spain, started out laboring in sugar fields for the U.S.-owned United Fruit Co. but worked his way up until he owned a 10,000-acre farm with hundreds of workers.

One of Angel’s servants, Lina Ruz, was the mother of Fidel and his six siblings — including Raúl, who assumed power on July 31, 2006, after Fidel fell ill. Angel and Lina were married several years after Fidel was born, and Fidel was not legally recognized as a Castro until he was 17. Despite the household’s rocky domestic issues, Fidel mostly enjoyed the privileged, outdoor childhood of a land baron’s son, climbing hills, swimming in rivers, hunting with a shotgun.

When Fidel was 15, in 1941, his father sent him to Colegio Belén in Havana, an exclusive Jesuit prep school for rich boys.

At Belén, Castro was remembered as an imposing figure — good-natured, a talented student and a star of the basketball and baseball teams. He maintained an interest in sports in later life, making Cuba a regional power in amateur athletics. But, contrary to a report widely circulated in the American press, he never tried out for the U.S. major leagues.

His love for baseball would last a lifetime and was perhaps the only one of his interests to rival politics.

In October 1945, Castro enrolled at Havana University’s law school. He immediately plunged into student politics at a time of gangsterismo — battles between armed rival gangs. Castro carried a pistol and was accused, though never convicted, of involvement in two murders and another attempt.

There were Communist groups at the university, but Castro didn’t join them. He remained independent for a time, then in 1947 aligned himself with the Ortodoxos, a party led by liberal reformer Eduardo Chibás. Castro served as a top aide until Chibás fatally shot himself in 1951 during a dramatic radio broadcast, attempting to awaken Cubans to what he called social injustice.

As a student, Castro twice became enmeshed in violent international incidents that marked his developing obsession for revolutionary politics.

In 1947, he joined a group plotting to overthrow the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Cuban police crushed the expedition before it could leave the island; Castro escaped by swimming across a bay.

In April 1948, as diplomats gathered in Bogotá to found the Organization of American States, Castro and other young Cubans traveled there to help organize a student anti-imperialist movement. He met Colombian populist politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and was on his way to see him again when Gaitán was assassinated on the street, a killing that set off two days of rioting later known as the Bogotazo.

Castro, then 21, joined in the street fighting, seizing a rifle at a police station that had been stormed by a mob. His activities in Bogotá prompted a cable to Washington from the U.S. Embassy in Havana on April 26, 1948, the first of what eventually would be hundreds of thousands of official U.S. documents pondering Castro’s intentions.

Observed an embassy staffer in Havana: “It must be concluded that, while no proof has been offered of his being a Communist, there is ample proof that he is a thoroughly undesirable character and a potential gangster.”

On Oct. 12, 1948, while still in law school, Castro married Mirta Díaz-Balart, a philosophy student. The couple honeymooned in the United States, and a son, Fidelito, was born the next year. But owing to Castro’s frenetic political activity and his voracious appetite for women, the marriage was doomed. They were divorced in 1955. Mirta Díaz-Balart remarried and moved to Spain. The estrangement, both social and political, extended to the rest of the Díaz-Balart family — most of which moved to Miami, where several Castro nephews eventually would become powerful politicians and journalists.

Castro always maintained a careful reserve about his private life. “In this sense, I have reserved for myself a total freedom,” he said in a 1999 interview. It was only then that it was publicly acknowledged in Cuba that he had been living since the 1960s with a schoolteacher named Dalia Soto del Valle, from the city of Trinidad on the south side of the island. They have five sons, all born since the mid-’60s.

In all, Castro is known to have fathered as many as 11 children by four different women. There were rumors of others by his many mistresses.

His relations with his children were distant and sometimes strained. His only daughter, Alina Fernández, aligned herself with Cuba’s dissident movement and tried for years to leave the island before she escaped in 1993 with a false passport.

Now living in Miami, Fernández is a harsh critic of her father. “When people tell me he’s a dictator, I tell them that’s not the right word,” she said. “Strictly speaking, Fidel is a tyrant. I have looked up the two words in the dictionary. A dictator is ‘a person who is granted absolute powers to face a national emergency on a temporary basis.’ A tyrant is an ‘absolute ruler unrestrained by law, who usurps people’s rights.’ ”

Perhaps the closest relationship Castro ever had with a woman was with Celia Sánchez, a thin, prim doctor’s daughter who joined Castro at his guerrilla hide-out in the Sierra Maestra in 1957.

Eight years older than Castro, she became his personal secretary, never far from his side. Some believe she was also his lover. Though Castro never talked about his feelings for her, it was clear that she was the one who brought order to his chaotic life. He declared a national day of mourning when Sánchez died in 1980.

After Castro graduated from law school in 1950, he became a lawyer-politician, representing poor clients and investigating government corruption. In 1951, he launched a vigorous campaign for a seat in Cuba’s congress.

But his dreams of traditional politics ended abruptly in 1952, when Batista — a one-time populist reformer who had grown fond of power — seized the government in a coup and canceled the election.

While older politicians pondered how to respond, Castro, 25, declared personal war on the new dictatorship. Over the next 16 months, he built a clandestine, armed revolutionary organization, recruiting from the ranks of the Ortodoxo Party.

He opened his war July 26, 1953, leading a dawn attack by 111 poorly armed young rebels on Cuba’s second-largest army base, the 400-man Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba on the eastern end of the island. The idea was to seize weapons, take control of a strategic portion of Cuba and call for a nationwide uprising.

But everything went wrong from the beginning. Shooting started prematurely, only three rebels actually fought their way into the base and Castro’s fighters made a disorderly retreat.

Sixty-nine rebels were killed — most of them tortured to death or executed after capture. The army and police lost 19 men. Castro escaped, only to be captured a few days later.

The Moncada attack was a military disaster, but it made Castro the top anti-Batista leader overnight. He turned his trial in Santiago into an indictment of the dictatorship. In his final courtroom speech, he reportedly concluded with the phrase: “Condemn me, it does not matter! History will absolve me!” (It would be years before scholars would note the ringing phrase was lifted from another dramatic courtroom oration — by Adolf Hitler, on trial in Germany for an attempted 1923 coup.)

In prison, Castro wrote furiously, converting his trial speech into a formal document smuggled out for publication. It became his platform during the struggle against Batista.

Batista released Castro on May 15, 1955, as part of a general amnesty, 18 months into his sentence.

Castro traveled briefly the same year to Miami, where he spoke at the old Flagler movie theater downtown, asking supporters for funds. “I swear to you,” he promised the cheering crowd, “in Cuba, it’ll be us or them.” Then he went to Mexico, where he rebuilt his tiny revolutionary band and organized an invasion.

There Castro met and recruited Ernesto “Che” Guevara, a 27-year-old Argentine physician with Marxist ideas who had been expelled from Guatemala after a CIA-backed coup there the previous year.

On Dec. 2, 1956, Castro, Guevara and 80 followers reached the shore of Cuba’s Oriente province in a battered American cabin cruiser, the Granma, wretchedly seasick after a seven-day voyage. The men leaped into hip-deep mud and struggled through a mangrove swamp to reach land. Most were killed or captured in the first hours.

Only 16 made it safely to the 4,500-foot ridges of the Sierra Maestra. There they began a guerrilla campaign to oust Batista, who was backed by a 40,000-strong security force equipped with tanks, artillery and U.S.-supplied warplanes.

Castro’s force, however, slowly began to grow. He recruited peasants as guerrilla fighters and organized intellectuals and middle-class followers into an urban underground railroad of funds and supplies.

His recruiting was aided immeasurably by his skills at propaganda and psychological warfare. Castro’s greatest ploy was luring a New York Times correspondent named Herbert Matthews to his mountain camp. Though the rebels had barely 20 bedraggled men, Castro marched the same group past Matthews several times and also staged the arrival of “messengers” reporting the movement of other (nonexistent) units.

Matthews, convinced Castro controlled a huge army, wrote: “From the look of things, General Batista cannot possibly hope to suppress the Castro revolt.” A wave of favorable coverage followed in the foreign press, and with it, international support.

During the war, Castro’s already profound anti-U.S. feelings deepened when he saw American-supplied bombers used against his positions.

“The Americans will pay dearly,” he wrote to Celia Sánchez at the time. “When this war is over, a much longer and bigger war will begin for me: the war I will make against them. I realize that this will be my true destiny.”

After Batista’s ouster, Castro installed a government with a democratic cast under President Manuel Urrutia, a former judge, and Prime Minister José Miró Cardona, a leading lawyer. Within weeks, however, Castro had taken Miró Cardona’s place as prime minister. On July 17, Urrutia resigned, accusing Castro of leading Cuba toward communism.

In the first months, Castro cut rents, lowered telephone rates, reformed the income tax system and passed a land reform law that nationalized estates larger than 1,000 acres, benefiting thousands of peasants. In 1961, the government launched a campaign aimed at ending illiteracy, though critics said it had more to do with political indoctrination than reading and writing.

Even more disturbing was the March 1959 trial of 44 pilots, bombardiers and mechanics from Batista’s air force. A revolutionary tribunal acquitted them of crimes against Castro’s guerrillas. An enraged Castro instantly created a right of appeal for prosecutors. Told Cuban law did not permit it, he replied: “Revolutionary justice is not based on legal precepts but on moral conviction.” A second tribunal sent the men to prison for 30 years.

At that, the airmen were lucky. Though Cuban law did not allow capital punishment, the revolutionary tribunals were sending a steady stream of men to the firing squad, often after trials televised from sports stadiums where handpicked mobs of Castro supporters howled in unison, paredón! — to the wall!

A steady stream of Cubans began leaving the island for Miami. Those who couldn’t leave sent their children. From Dec. 26, 1960, to Oct. 22, 1962, more than 14,000 children between the ages of 6 and 18 were flown to the United States in Operation Pedro Pan, a Catholic Church-backed initiative that turned into the largest exodus of unaccompanied children in the history of the Western Hemisphere. By the end of the century, an estimated three million of its citizens, more than a fifth of the population, would be living outside Cuba.

Castro’s radical domestic policies appeared likely to sour Cuba’s relations with the United States, but he didn’t wait to find out. He moved almost immediately to confront Washington, while courting surprised Soviet leaders.

He brushed aside U.S. offers of economic aid, and he refused to discuss compensation for U.S.-owned estates confiscated under the agrarian reform. Meanwhile, in February 1960, Castro signed a trade pact with the Soviet Union and, three months later, established full diplomatic relations.

As Castro’s leftward march continued, President Dwight Eisenhower secretly ordered the CIA to begin training Cuban exiles in Guatemala for an invasion and to explore the possibility of assassinating him.

Between August and October 1960, Castro’s government ordered the expropriation of the Texaco, Esso and Shell oil refineries, plus more than 150 other U.S. firms, including Sears Roebuck and Coca-Cola, and all privately owned sugar mills, banks, large industries and commercial real estate.

Eisenhower responded by slapping an embargo on all U.S. exports to Cuba and slashing Cuba’s sugar quota to zero. Before leaving office in January 1961, Eisenhower broke diplomatic relations.

In April 1961, just three months into John F. Kennedy’s presidency, about 1,400 CIA-trained exiles invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs on the southern coast. Castro turned the greatest threat to his political career into his greatest success. He marshaled his army to defeat the outgunned, outmanned invasion force in three days.

Enraged at their humiliation on the world stage, President Kennedy and his brother Robert, the attorney general, redoubled their efforts against Castro. CIA officials would complain later that from 1961 to 1963, they were under almost constant pressure to come up with new ways to destabilize Castro — or kill him.

Virtually everything, from poisoned scuba-diving suits to exploding seashells, was considered, and eventually the CIA even turned to the Mafia to get the job done; all to no avail.

Some historians and intelligence officials believe, however, that the assassination plots did claim a victim: President Kennedy himself. On Sept. 7, 1963, Castro made an unusual appearance at a routine diplomatic reception held at the Brazilian Embassy in Havana. There he approached an American reporter for the Associated Press.

“If U.S. leaders are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe,” Castro pointedly said. “Let Kennedy and his brother Robert take care of themselves since they too can be a victim of an attempt that can cause their deaths.”

Ten weeks later, President Kennedy was killed in Dallas by a sniper’s bullet fired by a young American admirer of Castro named Lee Harvey Oswald, who had recently visited the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City seeking a visa. Over the years, several assassination investigators have suggested that Oswald’s action was either inspired — or, more sinisterly, ordered — by Castro.

On Dec. 2, 1961, in a dramatic late-night speech, Castro announced to the nation: “Do I believe in Marxism? I believe absolutely in Marxism! Did I believe on Jan. 1 [1959]? I believed on Jan. 1! Did I believe on July 26 [1953]? I believed on July 26!”

But had Castro really been a Communist all along? In his past, there was no clear evidence to suggest it, although his brother Raúl and Che Guevara were both Marxists. That question intrigued scholars throughout his life. Some, noting that in his student years Castro was fascinated by European fascists, even argued that political thought was irrelevant to Castro, that his only real interest was in wielding power.

Castro himself always said there were no clues to his Marxism because he carefully concealed it, especially during the war against Batista. Cubans were not ready for Marxism, he said.

“Our people could not understand a larger plan,” Castro recalled. “We supported at that time a program that was within the reach of the people... My own ideas were more advanced, but I certainly could not be preaching them publicly to everybody... because that would not have had a practical result.”

In the end there was no doubt about Castro’s embrace of Marxism. In 1961, he fused his July 26 Movement with Cuba’s old Communist Party (known as the Popular Socialist Party) and in 1965 formally established the Cuban Communist Party with himself as first secretary.

His impact on Communist ideology extended far outside Cuba. Before Castro, the world’s Communist parties were fairly conservative, arguing that revolutions first required years of political organizing.

But Castro, backed by the force of his own victory over Batista, argued that armed struggle itself was the best way to create the proper conditions for revolution. “The duty of a revolutionary is to make the revolution,” he proclaimed in 1962 in the so-called Second Declaration of Havana, a clarion call for Communist insurrections throughout the developing world.

That call was answered by nascent guerrilla movements everywhere from Argentina to Zaire. The front lines of the confrontation between communism and the West shifted from Europe to the jungles of the Third World. The Cold War, which began with tanks facing off in the streets of Berlin, would turn into peasant skirmishes in villages in Nicaragua and Angola.

Between July and September 1962, the Soviet Union began to ship medium-range and tactical missiles, IL-28 bombers capable of carrying nuclear bombs and MiG-21 jet fighters to Cuba. Soviet troop strength in Cuba grew to about 40,000.

In October, Kennedy cited intelligence detailing the presence of the weapons in Cuba, demanded their removal and ordered U.S. ships to blockade the island. (Secretly, he extended some carrots with the sticks, offering to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey as well as a promise not to invade Cuba again.)

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev blinked. Without consulting Castro, he worked out an agreement with Kennedy to withdraw the missiles. The deal barred the Soviets from establishing a naval base in Cuba and included a U.S. commitment not to invade the island.

Castro — who, years later, admitted he had urged Khrushchev to fire the missiles in the event of an American invasion of Cuba — was furious about being left out of the decision-making. Nonetheless, his dependence on the Soviets steadily grew. Moscow poured tens of billions of dollars in direct aid into the island and countless more through a tangled web of subsidized commercial transactions. For instance, not only could Castro purchase below-cost Soviet oil and resell it at a profit to other Latin American countries, but Moscow bought Cuban sugar at premium prices.

For all the Soviet largess, though, the Cuban economy rolled steadily downhill. Castro’s attempts to bend the laws of economics to his personal will generally ended in disaster. To fulfill his decree that the 1970 sugar cane crop would be 10 million tons, twice that of the year before, the Cuban government diverted nearly all its resources into the harvest, doubled the cutting season, and sent the army, college students, government bureaucrats and anyone who had applied for an exit visa into the fields.

Vast sectors of the Cuban economy were paralyzed by the herculean effort, and the harvest still fell short by 1.5 million tons. But the distortions Castro induced into the economy reverberated for years. Future harvests never got anywhere near 10 million tons.

The pent-up desperation on the island was never more apparent than in April 1980, when six Cubans broke into the grounds of the Peruvian Embassy and promptly were granted political asylum. Enraged, Castro ordered all guards removed from the embassy, only to see nearly 11,000 asylum-seekers crowd into the compound in 28 hours.

Whether in embarrassment or crafty calculation — it was never clear which — Castro then announced that anyone who wanted to leave Cuba could go. That launched the astonishing Mariel boatlift, a flotilla of yachts and fishing boats shuttling back and forth between Key West and the port of Mariel. When Castro closed it down five months later, more than 120,000 Cubans had fled.

The direct face-off between Castro and Washington eased after the Kennedy administration. Though the CIA continued to support sporadic raids and sabotage inside Cuba until 1965, the battle was increasingly conducted through proxies. In El Salvador and Guatemala, Castro supported Marxist guerrilla movements against U.S.-backed governments; in Angola and Nicaragua, things were reversed, with Castro backing the governments and the United States siding with the guerrillas.

Only once in Castro’s 47-year rule did Cuban and American troops face one another on a battlefield — when the United States invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983, after a Castro-backed government there dissolved into murderous anarchy. The result: Castro’s soldiers retreated so ignominiously that Cubans joked that a running shoe should be named after their commanding officer.

Military tensions eased further after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 eliminated the financial backing for any further Castro adventures overseas. But if the temperature dropped a couple of degrees between Washington and Havana, it blew out the end of the thermometer between Miami and Castro.

Cuban exiles, taking up where the CIA had left off 30 years earlier, launched several botched attempts to assassinate Castro. Castro, for his part, sent a detachment of spies to South Florida with instructions not only to infiltrate U.S. military installations but to worm their way inside exile politics.

Thousands of pages of decoded communications between Havana and the agents — introduced at a 2001 spy trial that resulted in convictions of five of the men — showed that they were tasked with spreading disinformation about exile leaders, fomenting dissent within their groups, ruining Cuban-American politicians and sabotaging the airplanes of the group Brothers to the Rescue, which patrolled the waters between Florida and Cuba, looking for rafters fleeing the island.

One spy also was convicted of a murder conspiracy charge after the jury decided he had helped lure two Brothers to the Rescue planes into a 1996 ambush by Cuban MiGs that ended with the death of four Brothers pilots. That incident led to one of the most memorable exchanges between Washington and Havana during Castro’s rule.

Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, released a declassified intelligence transcript of cockpit chatter among the MiG pilots immediately after the small, unarmed Brothers planes were shot down, congratulating one another on their “cojones,” or testicles. “This is not cojones,” snarled Albright. “This is cowardice.”

Nothing, however, demonstrated the extent to which Castro and the Miami exile community had become blood enemies like the saga of Elián González, the little boy who washed up in South Florida in November 1999 after his mother and 10 others died while bolting Cuba on a raft.

The custody battle over the boy — whether he should stay with relatives in Miami, or be returned to his father in Cuba — immediately turned into a political death struggle between some exiles and Castro. Exiles said returning Elián to Cuba would be like sending a runaway slave back to the plantation; Castro referred to the exiles as “the Miami mafiosi” and accused them of “kidnapping” the boy.

Like a general at war, Castro deployed every resource at his command. He closed factories and schools so that millions of Cubans (some of them transported hundreds of miles by bus) could join demonstrations demanding Elián’s return. State radio and TV stations devoted at least four hours a day to the case. Castro spent, by his own admission, $2 million on T-shirts, posters and billboards to promote the protest, and even built an amphitheater — Cubans called it the “protest-o-drome” — in front of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana.

His moves paid off. Outside Miami, American public opinion swung in favor of returning the child to Cuba, and the Clinton administration did just that.

If the Elián affair was a victory for Castro, it was one of the few after the Soviet bloc began to crumble in 1989. The loss of $4 billion a year in aid from Moscow touched off an economic holocaust in Cuba; by 1993, the economy had shrunk nearly 40 percent.

Castro warned Cubans that they were entering a harsh new “special period,” with even more stringent rationing. Severe shortages cropped up in virtually every sector of the economy.

By 1994, Castro’s government was in its most perilous state since the days of the Bay of Pigs. Several small riots erupted, and thousands of Cubans hurled themselves lemming-like into the sea on flimsy rafts of plywood and inner tubes, praying to catch a lucky current to Miami.

When Cuban government ships spotted a tugboat full of refugees headed for Florida on July 13, 1994, they blasted it to pieces with high-pressure fire hoses. “Our tugboat started taking on water,” recounted one of the survivors, María Victoria García. “We shouted to the crewmen on the boat, ‘Look at the children! You’re going to kill them!’ And they said, ‘Let them die! Let them die!’ ” Forty-one of the refugees did.

Cornered, Castro loosened some of the strings on the economy. For the first time, he tried to develop a tourist industry, opening several luxury hotels in joint ventures with foreign partners. Small businesses like mom-and-pop restaurants were permitted, and possession of U.S. dollars was legalized.

In a mark of just how close to the brink the Cuban economy really was, Castro even welcomed the large-scale return of prostitution, which he had called a “social illness” in the early days of the revolution. But in a 1992 speech to the National Assembly, he bragged that the army of freelance hookers who swarmed through Havana’s streets every night in search of tourists were the most cultured in the world.

“There are no women forced to sell themselves to a man, to a foreigner, to a tourist,” Castro said of the women, known as jineteras in local slang. “Those who do so do it on their own, voluntarily, and without any need for it. We can say that they are highly educated and quite healthy.”

The fledgling tourist industry (and a steady flow of subsidized oil from Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, the latest in a series of Latin American admirers), succeeded in lessening some of the pressure on Castro’s government. But by the turn of the millennium, it was apparent that it also had brought the revolution full circle.

The dream of a Marxist society without social or economic distinctions was gone. In its place was a rigid class system: those with dollars and those without. Doctors, lawyers and even nuclear engineers were abandoning their professions in droves to drive taxis or work as tour guides, anything to get their hands on dollars instead of nearly worthless Cuban pesos.

Tenants in Havana’s low-cost colonial tenements watched fearfully as their neighbors were evicted and their buildings torn down to make room for quaint new tourist hotels and restaurants. And the Internet bristled with endorsements of Havana as one of the world’s top sex-tourism spots, with thousands of pretty women available for the price of a cheap dinner.

If Castro could accept all of that, though, there was still one thing he couldn’t swallow: political liberalization.

“Do you desire the ruin of Cuba?” he scolded a Canadian journalist who asked in 2000 if some of the political changes in Russia might not be good for Cuba, too. “What was the result of Gorbachev’s politics? ... They destroyed the history of the country, demoralized and disarmed the country, and didn’t do what they should have, and what without a doubt wanted to do: improve socialism.”

Roundups of dissidents continued regularly through the final years of Castro’s rule. He might ease the pressure occasionally for public-relations purposes — several hundred prisoners were released in advance of Pope John Paul II’s visit to the island in January 1998 — but inevitably resume when the spotlight moved elsewhere.

“Cuba remains a Latin American anomaly: an undemocratic government that represses nearly all forms of political dissent,” the independent group Human Rights Watch observed in 2008. “Cubans are systematically denied basic rights to free expression, association, assembly, privacy, movement, and due process of law.”

The beleaguered Cuban population’s response was a retreat into sullen despair. By the 1990s, the island’s suicide rate had trippled from pre-revolutionary levels, and one of every three pregnancies ended in abortion. The birth rate dropped so low that Cubans weren’t even replacing themselves: Women average fewer than two children apiece.

By the time Castro left the Cuban presidency in early 2008, the country’s rapidly aging population was the second-oldest in Latin America. A fifth of the country had hit retirement age, and the percentage was steadily rising. The workers weren’t the only thing geriatric about the Cuban economy: Its industrial underpinning of ancient Soviet factories and machinery was crumbling. In 2007, production of 14 of Cuba’s 20 key products was lower than in 1989. One, the sugar crop, was the smallest in a hundred years.

If any of this concerned Castro, it was not apparent. Though he churned out a copius stream of essays and op-ed pieces for the Cuban press in his final years, they were markedly devoid of regrets or even introspection. “I distrust the seemingly easy path of apologetics or its antithesis of self-flagellation,” he wrote in the letter announcing his 2008 retirement.

That letter marked a formal end to a process that began in August 2006 when Castro said an abdominal illness would require surgery and he was placing the reins of government in the hands of his brother Raúl. The illness was never precisely identified, though it was widely speculated to be some form of gastrointestinal cancer.

Whatever it was, it took an abrupt and catastrophic toll. Castro was rarely seen again in public for the rest of his life, though he occasionally appeared in photos or videos released by the government — a slow and shaky man, dozens of pounds wasted from his once imposing frame, but still capable of needling his enemies to the north. In a video released shortly after news stories circulated that the George W. Bush administration believed he had terminal cancer, Castro snorted: ‘Now they’ll have to resuscitate me, huh?”

Nevertheless, his decline continued. He occasionally met or spoke by phone with the new generation of leftist leaders popping up around Latin America like Ecuador’s Evo Morales, Panama’s Martin Torrijos and especially Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, who used his oil money to prop up Cuba’s economy with billions of dollars of aid. But the chats with Chávez, the new icon of the Latin American left, only served as a reminder that Castro had, without anyone noticing, slipped from the headlines into history.

Even the rambling columns Castro published after his official retirement dwindled to disjointed notes of a couple paragraphs each, cryptic haikus about ancient communist feuds, miraculous health foods and the mystic powers of yoga. By mid-2012, they had vanished altogether.

The most conclusive evidence that age or illness had reduced Castro to irrelevance came in December, when President Obama and Raúl Castro jointly announced that the two nations had agreed to not only swap captured spies (including the Cuban intelligence officer convicted of conspiracy to murder in the shootdown of the Brothers to the Rescue planes) but resume full diplomatic relations.

Obam, in his speech, called the developments the “most significant changes” in America’s Cuba policy in more than 50 years and said they were negotiated in a series of secret meetings that lasted 18 months and ended with an hour-long phone call between the president and Raúl Castro. He didn’t speak the name Fidel Castro once. And in Havana, at the various ceremonies hailing the new agreement, Fidel was neither seen nor heard of.

Will history absolve Fidel Castro, as he allegedly told the court in Santiago in 1953?

His revolution made undeniable gains in education and health care, raising literacy and slashing infant mortality. But his critics note that other Latin American nations like Costa Rica made improvements, too, without sacrificing their economies or their civil liberties.

Even Cuba scholars who think that Castro made significant achievements in the early years of the revolution believe that his insistence on clinging to power seriously damaged the country.

“By hanging onto power even into the early twenty-first century, all he did was to tarnish his past accomplishments. It is almost as if he had a self-destructive streak for his last twenty years in office,” said Harvard political scientist Jorge Domínguez.

“History cannot absolve Fidel Castro by the standards he set over 60 years ago,” he added, “but history will surely record him as the most significant political leader who reshaped Cuban history and as one of the world’s leading political figures of the second half of the 20th century.”

Others are less charitable. “To think that he had in his hands the possibility of making a country great and he made it tiny and poor,” said Ana Rodríguez, a Miami medical technician who spent 19 years in prison under Castro, the regime’s longest-held female political prisoner. “It is sad.”

Castro could be stunningly acute when it came to politics. Not long before Chilean President Salvador Allende was toppled in a 1973 military coup, Castro warned him that his government was in danger. When Nicaragua’s Communist Sandinista government signed a regional accord calling for political liberalization in 1987, Castro accurately predicted that the Sandinistas had opened a Pandora’s box that would destroy them. In a 1989 speech, he forecast the demise of the Soviet Union.

But his perceptions seemed to fail him when it came to Cuba. “Now that the capitalists and imperialists think that the ideas of socialism, communism and Marxism-Leninism are collapsing, we are more confident than ever in the ideas of Marxism-Leninism,” Castro said in a speech Nov. 7, 1989, just two days before the Berlin Wall fell, committing his country to go it alone.

In his final years, Castro seemed curiously unconcerned with his image, at times lurching dangerously close to self-parody. Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer, in his book Castro’s Final Hour, described a three-hour speech on Che Guevara’s application of dialectics that Castro delivered in 1991 — to an audience of 6-year-olds.

Soon after, Castro allowed his photo be used in advertisements for the Benetton shops. The ember-eyed young man who vowed to destroy bourgeois decadence and the conspicuous consumption of capitalism had become one of its throw-away poster boys.

Perhaps it was the only way the world’s last, lonely Communist could get anyone’s attention.</s>"Fidel Castro is dead!" Trump tweeted on the news of the 90-year-old's death.

The longtime revolutionary leader died Friday, presenting more potential opportunities for change in a country whose relations with the United States recently began to improve

Castro's death came just weeks after Trump, a frequent critic of the deal that lead to a reopening of diplomatic relations with Cuba, was elected president.

Trump had threatened to undo efforts by President Barack Obama to bring the US and Cuba closer together calling the recent agreement "weak."</s>Post was not sent - check your email addresses!

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Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.</s>Fidel Castro's ashes will be buried at a ceremony on December 4 in Santiago de Cuba. (Photo: AP)

Havana: Cuba declared nine days of public mourning Saturday for its late revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, and said his ashes will be buried at a ceremony on December 4 in Santiago de Cuba.

From November 26 to December 4, "public activities and shows will cease, the national flag will fly at half mast on public buildings and military installations," a statement from the state executive said.

Castro's ashes will be buried in the historic southeastern city of Santiago on December 4 after a four-day procession through the country, it added.

President Raul Castro earlier said that his older brother Fidel was to be cremated early Saturday.

Castro, who led a rebel army to improbable victory in Cuba, embraced Soviet-style communism and defied the power of 10 US presidents during his half century rule, died at age 90 in Havana.

His demise was announced by his brother and current President Raul Castro on national television. "The commander in chief of the Cuban revolution died at 22:29 hours this evening," the president announced.
Fidel Castro, founder of the Communist Party of Cuba, former Prime Minister and former President of Cuba, dies at the age of 90.