On August 2, 2006, towards the 80th birthday of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, a resident of the old city of Havana, cuba, hung a banner reading "Castro live 80 years again" outside his window. A Cuban critic once said that when you measure a person's strength, it is not to see how many times he falls, but how many times he stands up. Castro, who had stood up countless times. Fidel Castro, full name Fidel Alejandro Castro Russ, also known as castro the Elder Castro, was the main founder of the Republic of Cuba, the Communist Party of Cuba and the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces, known as the founding father of Cuba and the first supreme leader of Cuba.
Castro was born into a family of wealthy estate owners in the town of Biran, Inoguín province in eastern Cuba, to his parents' third child. His father, Angel, was a Spanish immigrant, a wealthy man because he grew sugar cane, and his mother was a domestic servant. Since the age of five, Castro has left home to attend primary and secondary schools in San Diego and havana. He defended poor students at school, protested against discrimination against poor students by teachers and classmates, and even funded poor students and organized poor students to launch protests. Because of Castro's performance in school, he was expelled from school. According to his younger brother Raul Castro, "He [Castro] was fiery and did not take into account the most powerful and strongest people. If he is defeated, he will fight again the next day and will not give up. ”
Castro was dissatisfied with his father's exploitation of the peasants, and he quarreled with his father many times for this. At the age of 13, he even organized sugarcane farmers against his father's exploitation. His father, Angel, finally ended his first marriage at the age of 15 and officially married Castro's mother. At the age of 17, he was officially recognized by his father. At the same time, after learning the name of the famous Greek warrior in school, he changed the middle name to Alejandro. Although there are different views on his early experiences with his education, most sources prove that Castro was a gifted student, interested in sports and scholarship, and spent much of his time in private Catholic boarding schools, and finished attending a Jesuit school in Havana in 1945. In the same year, he entered the Faculty of Law of the University of Havana. After graduating from university, he considered whether to study law at Columbia University in the United States, but his love for the country and the nation led him to return to his hometown of Havana University to study for a doctorate in law, graduated from the University of Havana in 1950 with a doctorate in law, and worked for a law firm in Havana.
While studying in Havana, Castro was quickly drawn to the political atmosphere at the University of Havana. At that time, the political situation in Cuba was turbulent, and the campus was also permeated with a strong political atmosphere, and many political gangs were formed. These organizations are an important political tool for students who aspire to become political leaders. The school's political activities are also centered on these gang organizations, and there are often confrontations of political views between the various organizations, in which Castro is also involved. In 1947, Castro was extremely dissatisfied with the rule of then-Cuban President Ramón Grau San Martín and joined the Cuban People's Party led by Eduardo Chivas that year.
In 1948, Castro traveled to Bogotá, Colombia, to attend the anti-imperialist and anti-colonial student congress organized by Latin American students and distributed anti-imperialist and anti-colonial leaflets in the streets. These acts caused dissatisfaction among the authorities, intensified the contradictions, and caused a very large-scale riot at the time. Castro, like most students, threw himself into the riot, and because Castro was prominent in the riot and was inevitably wanted by the authorities, Castro had to flee to the Cuban Embassy and then secretly returned to Cuba in a bullfighting vehicle. Although the rebellion failed, Castro experienced first-hand the power of the people.
Castro graduated from the University of Havana in 1950 with a bachelor's degree in law, and after graduation worked as a lawyer, defending mainly some poor people. In 1952, Castro officially became a candidate for parliament of the Cuban People's Party. But Fulhencio Batista staged a military coup with the support of the United States, toppling the then Cuban government and enforcing the abolition of congressional elections, crudely establishing a dictatorship. Frustrated, Castro quit the Cuban People's Party and began collecting evidence of State theft by Fuerhencio Battista and prosecuting Furhencio Batista, but was unable to shake The dictatorship of Fuerhencio Battista, a series of events that greatly shocked Castro. Since then, Castro has abandoned the peaceful way to change Cuban politics.
On 26 July 1953, Castro led an uprising of 160 youths against military strongholds such as the Moncada Barracks and bayamo Barracks in Santiago de Cuba in order to unleash a national revolution to overthrow Batista's rule. Due to the disparity in power between the two sides, the uprising eventually failed, and Castro was arrested and imprisoned and sentenced to 15 years in prison. In court, he defended himself with righteous words and made a series of claims for a democratic revolution, which was later published in the famous "History Will Acquit Me.".
In 1955, Castro and his comrades were unexpectedly released because Batista was winning the hearts and minds of political prisoners and amnesty for his presidential campaign. Unable to continue his revolutionary activities in Cuba, Castro left Cuba for Mexico and founded the July 26 Movement. In December 1956, Castro led 81 comrades on the yacht Gramar to land on the southern shore of the Orente province of Cuba. After several days and nights of hard fighting, they established a base in the Maestra Mountains, by which time they had only 12 men left. It was from these 12 men that Castro led the remnants to the Maestra Mountains to carry out guerrilla warfare and distribute the land to the peasants in order to gain their support. By the spring of 1958, the Maestra Mountains had formed a base area of 50,000 people, and in October of the same year, Castro issued a third decree in the base area, distributing the land to the landless peasants, thus obtaining the peasants as a strong ally, and miraculously liberating the country in only two years. Batista fled abroad on 1 January 1959.
The rebel army entered Havana and the Provisional Revolutionary Government was proclaimed. In order to fulfill his pre-war wishes, Castro decided to establish a socialist regime in Cuba, and after the formation of the revolutionary government, Castro became the Prime Minister of Cuba and commander-in-chief of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces. In order to maintain the nascent regime, Castro had to negotiate with the two great powers of the time, the Soviet Union and the United States, in order to gain international recognition. Due to the conflict between the nascent regime and the interests of the United States, Castro's visit to the United States in 1959 was not smooth, and there was no agreement with the then US President Eisenhower. In September 1960, Castro went to New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly, where he spoke for four and a half hours, exposing the crimes of the United States with his characteristic revolutionary demeanor. His speech was warmly welcomed by the representatives of many countries, and the long applause and cheers resounded twenty or thirty times, which greatly embarrassed the United States and further aroused the hatred of the United States for Castro.
After 1960, successive U.S. administrations have targeted Castro for assassination. According to a 1997 CIA file declassification, the CIA orchestrated 637 assassinations against Castro over a period of 40 years, setting a world record for assassinations. Later, the Bay of Pigs incident in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 completely turned Cuba and the United States into a complete hostility and completely severed diplomatic relations.
After the 1960s, Castro carried out various economic reforms against Cuba, which caused many unnecessary attempts due to the blind copying of the Soviet model in economic reforms. In the late 1980s, Castro began to emphasize many times in the correction movement that the Soviet model and experience should not be copied, and that he should find his own path. For various reasons, the Cuban economy did not develop in the 1980s, but the positive role of the Cuban correction movement cannot be ignored, which ensured that the Cuban leader headed by Castro adhered to the socialist direction, avoided imitating the reforms carried out by the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries at that time, and enabled Cuba to withstand the huge impact of the drastic changes in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba lost the assistance of the Soviet Union, and the United States seized the opportunity to tighten the blockade against Cuba, which caused Cuba in the 90s to experience a four-year economic downturn. In order to prevent the economy from continuing to decline, Castro carried out a series of new measures of reform and opening up, such as relaxing the conditions for foreign investment, carrying out major reforms to the foreign trade system, abolishing the monopoly of the state over foreign trade, allowing the establishment of individual and private enterprises, and implementing fiscal and taxation and price reforms, which stopped the economic downturn, achieved economic recovery, and avoided Cuba from repeating the collapse of the Soviet Union.
After Cuba's economic situation stabilized, Castro began a visit. In November 1995, Castro visited China and Vietnam and attached great importance to the experience of reform and opening up in these two countries under the premise of adhering to socialist and communist leadership. In 2000, Cuba's public expenditure on health care exceeded 10 per cent of gdp, while the average for public health expenditure in Latin America and the Caribbean was 3.3 per cent. The national enrolment rate of school-age children in Cuba was 100 per cent, and after completing six years of primary education, 99 per cent of pupils had access to secondary education, were exempt from all tuition and fees, and a plan for the popularization of higher education was being implemented. In the World Bank's World Development Report 2004, the Cuban miracle was mentioned for the first time, and the infant mortality rate in economically poor Cuba was lower than that of many industrialized countries.
Focusing on the poor, focusing on health, and focusing on education are Castro's tenets. In Cuba, government office buildings are often dilapidated, while hospitals and schools are well-equipped, spacious and comfortable. Castro himself has maintained a simple style, and his monthly salary as a leader is only about $40. In addition, Castro was very opposed to the cult of personality, and he did not want to see his bronze statues, statues or portraits of him on stamps or various securities, clothing or souvenirs in Cuba, which he felt was wrong, that it was against the morality of revolutionaries. As a result, publicity material about him is rarely seen in cuba.
On November 25, 2016, the macho man passed away at the age of 90. In the early hours of November 26, 2016, the Cuban government announced a nine-day state mourning service in memory of the late revolutionary leader Fidel Castro.