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Fidel
Castro is the current dictador of Cuba; he has been in power since 1959. He is a spellbinding orator, he has a magnetic personality, and he has rigid ideas about both the efficacy of his brand of Stalinist communism
1926 – 2009 Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz (FC) was born in Birán, Mayarí (Holguín province, formerly Oriente Province). His father, who was from Galicia, Spain, was Ángel Castro Argiz (1875-1956); his mother was Lina Ruz González (1903-1963); Fidel Castro had six siblings, the most important of whom was Raúl (b. 1931). His family was the richest in this poor, rural region, with a farm, buildings, and a lot of land.
1930 – 1932 FC attends school in rural Birán.
1932 – 1942 FC attends 3 schools in Santiago de Cuba, the largest nearby city: first a private school, then a school run by the La Salle Catholic teaching order; then a Jesuit school.
1942 – 1945 FC is a student at the prestigious Jesuit Colegio de Belén Prep School in La Habana.
1945 – 1950 FC attends the College of Law and Social Sciences at the University of La Habana; in 1947 he joins a group of student organizers who make a failed attempt to overthrow the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo; 1948, he participates in a student conference in Bogotá, Colombia, and he joins demonstrations protesting the assassination of a Colombian populist leader; FC gets his law degree and becomes a lawyer.
1948 – 1955 FC marries wealthy Mirtha Díaz-Balart (divorce, 1955); their first child is Fidel Félix Castro Díaz-Balart.
1953 July 26th, FC leads an attack against the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista on the Moncada barracks; he's captured, tried, gives a famous self-defense speech, "History Will Absolve Me," and is sentenced to 15 years in prison. (While FC is in prison, in 1954, Che Guevara is present in Guatemala when the CIA overthrows the democratic government of President Jacobo Arbenz, ushering in a series of violent military dictatorships in Guatemala.)
1955 FC is released from prison with his brother Raúl by Batista under strong popular pressure to grant amnesty to the survivors of the Moncada attack; FC and friends found the 26th of July Movement; FC goes into exile in Mexico, where he meets Che Guevara; FC goes to USA to gather support for an invasion of Cuba.
1956 – 1959 The Cuban Revolution
December 2, 1956: FC and supporters sail from Mexico to Cuba on the ship Granma in order to start an armed rebellion against Batista; fighting centers in the
Sierra Maestra.
1957: Herbert Matthews of the New York Times interview FC in the Sierra
Maestra; FC commands the José Martí column, the first front; his combined
forces are known as the Rebel Army; Che Guevara commands the 4th front and is
promoted to comandante (Major);
1958: the Rebel Army creates two more fronts; the tide turns in FC's favor when
his Rebel Army defeats Batista's forces in a number of major battles; FC is
victorious thus opening the road to Santiago de Cuba.
January 1, 1959: Batista flees Cuba; FC takes over Cuba; Batista dies in
Spain in 1973.
1959 Revolutionary government created: FC is commander-in-chief of Revolutionary Armed Forces; President is Manuel Urrutia; Prime Minister is José Miró Cardona: FC replaces him a month later; FC tours US and meets VP Nixon; Pres. Eisenhower starts cover actions against FC's Cuba; Che Guevara becomes president of the Banco Nacional de Cuba
1960 Soviet Union begins economic support of Cuba; photographer Alberto Korda takes famous photo of Che Guevara as "guerrilla hero;" FC nationalizes banks and the oil industry; FC addresses UN; Operation Peter Pan brings 14,000 children out of Cuba
1961 The USA breaks diplomatic relations with Cuba; national literacy campaign begins; Che Guevara heads Ministry of Industry; FC declares that "Cuba is Socialist;" April 17th: the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs; FC makes famous "A few words to intellectuals" speech in which he says: "Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing."
1962 Cuba banned from the OAS (Organization of American States); Cuba creates rationing; USA begins Operation Mongoose to bring down Castro and communism in Cuba; Cuban missile crisis between USA and USSR over ballistic missiles in Cuba; Moscow withdraws missiles; Pres. Kennedy promises not to invade Cuba; Bay of Pigs survivors returned to USA.
1965 Che Guevara goes to Congo as mercenary revolutionary fighter; Cuban Communist Party (PCC) is created; FC is first secretary of PCC; Newspapers Revolución and Hoy abolished; Granma created as official State newspaper.
1966 US Congress passes Cuban Adjustment Act, which gives Cubans escaping from Cuba exceptional privileges; many Cuban families risk crossing the Staits of Florida.
1967 Che Guevara captured and killed in Bolivia.
1968 Cuba expropriates almost all private businesses on Island.
1970 FC announces that the goal of a 10,000,000 ton sugar harvest (la zafra) failed.
1971 Padilla Affair: Poet Heberto Padilla (Fuera del juego, 1967) is arrested for "acts against state security;" international intellectuals protest persecution of Padilla; Padilla recants; Padilla exiled 1980 and teaches at Princeton U. and Auburn U.; FC visits Pres. Salvador Allende in Chile.
1972 Cuba joins COMECON (CMEA), the "common market of socialist nations."
1975 Cuba sends thousands of mercenaries to Angola to save Angolan independence from invasion by South Africa.
1976 Cuban referendum by 99% in favor ratifies socialist constitution; José Lezama Lima (Paradiso, 1962) dies in La Habana.
1980 FC marries Dalia Soto del Valle, a teacher from Trinidad; they had 5 children; Mariel Exodus: 125,000 Cubans leave Cuba.
1984 FC visits Spain and meets Prime Minister Felipe González.
1986 Rectification Campaign to correct "errors" in Cuban Communist Party running of country: microbrigades work double shifts to correct these errors.
1988 FC rejects USSR prime minister Gorbachev's call for perestroika.
1989 Berlin Wall comes down; end of USSR.
1990 Cuba restricts use of oil and electricity.
1991 End of USSR economic support for Cuba.
1992 FC visits his father's birthplace in Láncara, Galicia, Spain; pro-Franco politician Fraga Iribarny, from Galicia, hosts FC, who has relatives in Galicia.
1993 FC becomes president of Council of State and Council of Ministers; dollar economy and small-scale private business, and tourism allowed in Cuba.
1994 FC prohibits continued emigration from Cuba; thousands of balseros (rafters) try to reach Florida; US and Cuba negotiate 20,000 visas per year for Cubans to immigrate to US legalls by getting visas in Cuba.
1996-1997 US Helms-Burton Act strengthens economic blockade of Cuba; continuing small anti-Castro terrorist attack at Havana hotels and by airplanes from Miami;.
1997 FC renamed as first secretary and Raúl as second secretary of PCC.
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1998 Pope John Paul II visits Cuba; Nobel winning writer García Márquez delivers letter from FC to Pres. Clinton warning that anti-Castro Cubans based in Miami are planning terrorist attacks at Cuban resorts; FBI investigates these alleged terrorists in Florida; Cuban Luis Posada Carriles admits to NYTimes that he committed terrorist attacks in Cuba paid for by anti-Castro Cuban Jorge Mas Canosa and the Cuban-American National Foundation; FBI arrests anti-anti-Castro Cuban agents in Miami.
1999 King Juan Carlos I of Spain visits Cuba; 6-year-old Elián González Affair in Miami streets and in courts in US and Cuba; the boy is returned to his father in Cuba in 2000; Clinton and FC greet each other briefly at UN.
2000 Venezuela's Hugo Chávez agrees to exchange oil for Cuban doctors going to Venezuela (15,000 Cuban medical professionals care for 17,000,000 poor Venezuelans; Cuba also supplies teachers in Venezuelan literacy program).
2002 USA establishes prison on Guantánamo Naval Base in Cuba for Afghanistan terrorists; Jimmy Carter visits Cuba.
2003 Compay Segundo (Máximo Francisco Repilado Muñoz, 1907-2003; great Cuban jazz performer) dies in La Habana; Ibrahim Ferrer, also a member of the Buena Vista Social Club musicians, dies in La Habana in 2005.
2004 Cuba restricts access to Internet of the 270,000 computer in Cuba; Robert Redford meets FC when Redford gives premiere of the movie The Motorcycle Diaries (i.e., Che Guevara's diaries), which Redford produced; Oliver Stone produces and directs his documentary, Looking for Fidel (in 2006, O. Stone gets fined in US by Foreign Assets Control for going to Cuba); USA limits aid and visits by Cuban Americans to and for their families in Cuba; FC falls and breaks his left knee and right arm giving a speech at Che Guevara's tomb; FC announces end of "dollar economy" (i.e., back to the Cuban peso); Cuba frees a number of dissident intellectuals from prison.
2005 UN Commission on Human Rights condemns Cuba's bad record on human rights; dissidents meet in private in La Habana to discuss transition to democracy (meeting allowed by PCC), but dissidents are detained when they try to demonstrate in public; Sept. 8th: Cuba prohibits Catholic procession at the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre (Cuba's patron saint); FC vociferates against corruption throughout Cuba; the population of Cuba reaches 12,000,000; tourism total in 2005: 2.3 million; in 2005 the Cuban economy grew 11.8%.
2006 FC suffers severe case of phlebitis; undergoes operation; relinquishes power; long recuperation; Miami Cubans think he's dying or dead (they were premature); FC recuperates for months; but Cuban economy grew in 2006 by 12.5%.
2007 FC reappears in public and looks old but better; Vilma Espín, Raúl Castro's wife, dies in La Habana; they had four children; she had been president of the Federation of Cuban Women for 40 years.
2009 FC returns to health without taking over day-to-day power.
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Selected
Resource Works:
Castro, Fidel and Ignacio Ramonet. Fidel Castro: a Spokien Autobiography. New York: Scribner, 2008.
