Early life

Castro was born in Birán, near Mayarí, in the modern-day province of Holguín (then a part of the now-defunct Oriente province), into a wealthy farming family. The son of Ángel Castro y Argiz, an immigrant from Galicia, Spain, and Lina Ruiz González, Castro was educated at Jesuit schools, including the La Salle private school and the preparatory school Colegio Belén, both in Havana, graduating in 1945, before going to the University of Havana to study law.

At university, Castro became involved in the often violent political disputes engaged in by the students as a part of the Insurrectional Revolutionary Union (UIR). In the summer of 1947, he was apart of a group who attempted a sea journey to the Dominican Republic in order to overthrow the dictatorship of that country, but they were prevented from succeeding by the intervention of the Cuban police. He also became known through local radio, and through the Alerta newspaper.

In 1950, Castro graduated and began practicing law in a small partnership. He intended to stand for parliament in June 1952 for the "Orthodox Party", of which he had become leader in 1951 after the suicide of its founder Eduardo Chibás, but a coup d'état on March 10, led by General Fulgencio Batista, overthrew the government of Carlos Prío Socarrás and the elections were cancelled. Castro broke with the Orthodox party and charged Batista with violating the Constitution in court, but his petition was refused.

Attack on Moncada Barracks

A member of the group Radical Action (AR), Castro responded to Batista's moves by organizing an armed attack on the Moncada Barracks in Oriente province on July 26, 1953.

Castro escaped into the mountains but on August 1 was taken prisoner along with his brother Raúl Castro and various other members of the group.During the trial, Castro used the closing arguments in the case to deliver a impassioned speech, "History Will Absolve Me" , in which he defended his actions and explaining his political views, but was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He was released in a general amnesty in May 1955 and went into exile in Mexico on July 7.

The road to power

Once in Mexico, Castro reunited with other exiles and founded the 26th of July Movement. They went to the United States, where they gathered funds from Cubans living in that country. Medical doctor Che Guevara joined the group during this time. On November 26, 1956 they returned to Cuba, clandestinely sailing from Tuxpan to Cuba on the 60-ft pleasure yacht Granma.

They landed in Los Cayuelos near the eastern city of Manzanillo on December 2, 1956. Only sixteen of the original eighty-two men survived a surprise ambush from the Cuban army and they were forced to retreat into the Sierra Maestra mountains. The survivors, who included Guevara, Raúl Castro, and Camilo Cienfuegos, reformed into the José Martí column under Castro's command. Castro's movement gained popular support and grew to over eight hundred men.

On May 24, 1958, Batista launched seventeen battalions against Castro in Operación Verano. Despite being outnumbered, Castro's forces scored a series of stunning victories, aided by massive desertion and surrenders from Batista's army. On the night of December 31, 1958, Batista and president-elect Carlos Rivero Agüero fled the country to the Dominican Republic and then to Franco's Spain.

Bay of Pigs

Main article: Bay of Pigs Invasion

On April 15, 1961, the day after Castro described his revolution as socialist, four Cuban airfields were bombed by A-26s bearing false Cuban markings. These bombing runs were part the beginning stages of the Bay of Pigs invasion. The United States staged an unsuccessful attack on Cuba on April 17, 1961. Brigade 2506, a force of about 1,400 Cuban exiles, financed and trained by the CIA, and commanded by CIA operatives Grayston Lynch and William Robertson, landed south of Havana at Playa Girón on the Bay of Pigs. The CIA assumed that the invasion would spark a popular uprising against Castro. There was, however, no such uprising. Part of the invasion force who made it ashore was captured, while President Kennedy withdrew support for the invasion at the last minute. Two U.S. supplied support ships, the Houston and the Río Escondido, were sunk by Cuban propeller-driven aircraft. Nine people were executed in connection with this action while Castro gained even more support from ordinary Cubans due to his actions during the attempted invasion. In a nationally broadcast speech on December 2, Castro declared that he was a Marxist-Leninist and that Cuba was going to adopt Communism.

On February 7, 1962, the U.S. imposed an embargo against Cuba, which included a general travel ban for American tourists. This has been repeatedly cited by Castro as a major factor in Cuba's economic troubles.

Cuban Missile Crisis

Tensions between Castro and U.S. heightened during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, which nearly brought the USSR and the US in direct confrontation. Khrushchev conceived the idea of placing missiles in Cuba as a deterrent to further U.S. aggression against the island. After consultations with his military advisors, he met with a Cuban delegation led by Raúl Castro in July in order to work out the specifics. It was agreed to deploy Soviet R-12 MRBM on Cuban soil; however, American U-2 reconnaissance discovered the construction of the missile installations on October 15, 1962 before the weapons had actually been deployed. The U.S. government viewed the installation of Soviet nuclear weapons 90 miles south of Miami as an aggressive act and a threat to U.S. security. As a result, the U.S. publicly announced its discovery on October 22, 1962 and implemented a quarantine around Cuba that would actively intercept and search any vessels heading for the island.

On November 4, 1975, Castro ordered the deployment of Cuban troops to newly-independent Angola in response to the South African invasion of that country. Moscow aided the Cuban initiative with the USSR engaging in a massive airlift of Cuban forces into Angola.

Criticisms of the United States

Castro remains a vocal critic of United States policies, speaking against the continuing economic embargo and past U.S. attempts to topple his government in the '60s. He has also condemned what he sees as exploitation of developing countries by U.S. corporations and even the state of public health care in the United States. Recently, he has harshly condemned U.S. immigration policies, which severely limit travel between the U.S. and Cuba. Castro also opposes the growing costs of servicing foreign debt.

Castro claims that, during the Cold War, the United States engaged in a variety of covert, and often deadly attacks against Cuba in order to weaken the entire country as a way of weakening Castro's government. He has also claimed that, between 1960 and 1965, the U.S. government made plans to assassinate him; he has accused the CIA of, among other things, having his Havana broadcasting studio sprayed with a mind altering chemical, poisoning his cigars, dusting his boots with a chemical that would cause his beard to fall out, and planting an explosive seashell in the area where he was known to scuba dive. (Vail 108). He alleges that, in 1971, Cuban pigs were infected with African swine fever, a disease not normally found in the Americas, by anti-Castro organizations with past ties to the CIA.Those infected pigs started an epidemic which forced the Cuban government to destroy half of all the pigs on the island in order to get it under control. 2

In 2000, four Cuban exiles with ties to the Cuban-American National Foundation were convicted in a Panamanian court of plotting to assassinate Castro during a regional summit. The four were pardoned in 2004 and all but Luis Posada Carriles entered the United States. Posada appeared in the U.S in May 2005, but was arrested and faces extradition to Venezuela. All four men have been accused of working for the CIA at one time or another.

Recent years in power

Religion

After the Pope's death in April 2005, Castro attended a mass in his honor in Havana's cathedral. His previous visit to the cathedral had been in 1959, 46 years earlier, for the wedding of one of his sisters. Cardinal Jaime Ortega, who led the mass, welcomed Castro, who was dressed in a dark suit, and expressed his gratitude for the "heartfelt way the death of our Holy Father John Paul II was received (in Cuba)."