I was scouring the web for news on Colombia and I stumbled across this article from the Miami Herald website! Am I in the "Twilight Zone" or have I come across a CIA plot?:-)
Solidarity, Dennis Grammenos
_________________________________________________________________________ MIAMI HERALD
Thursday, 29 April 1999
Posted at 3:17 p.m. EDT Thursday, April 29, 1999
END OF CASTRO'S ERA
Castro dies after years in power
--------------------------------
By MIMI WHITEFIELD and MARTIN McREYNOLDS
Herald Staff Writers
He towered over his Caribbean island for nearly fourdecades, a shaggy-bearded figure in combat fatigues whose long shadow spread across Latin America and around the world.
Fidel Castro Ruz holds a special place among world leaders in the 20th Century. Others held more power or won more respect. But none combined his dynamic personality, his longevity in office, his profound impact on his own country and his provocative role in international affairs.
Few inspired such intense loyalty or such a wrenching feeling of betrayal.
He was a spellbinding orator who was also a man of action. Tall and powerfully built, he had an enormous ego, boundless energy and extraordinary luck that carried him to victory as a guerrilla leader in 1959 against nearly impossible odds.
As a ruler, he transformed Cuba. He ended American domination of the island's economy, swept away the old political system and the traditional army, nationalized large land holdings and brought reforms in education and health care.
He was also a ruthless dictator, the Maximum Leader who reneged on his promise of free elections, executed hundreds of opponents, imprisoned thousands, installed a communist regime and made his island a pawn in the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union. His alliance with Moscow brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1962.
Faced with hostility from the United States, which sponsored an invasion by Cuban exiles in 1961 and hatched several plots to assassinate him, Castro turned the island into a fortress bristling with one of the region's most powerful military machines. He created a repressive state that rigidly controlled the arts, the press, radio and television. An efficient secret police force was aided by a system of neighborhood spies and pro-government mobs that attacked those who dared to call for democratic change.
Castro's economic blunders and his defiance of Washington brought decades of hardship to the Cuban people, due in part to a U.S. embargo dating to the 1960s.
The island, once an abused colony of Spain and then a virtual protectorate of the United States, became dependent on a foreign power based nearly 6,000 miles away in Moscow. It 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 took a nose dive.
Hundreds of thousands of people fled the society that Castro created. The exodus began early with the powerful and affluent, continued with former comrades who found themselves in opposition to his rule, then the middle class and professionals and, finally, just about anyone who had the courage to grab a boat or put together a raft for the perilous crossing of the Florida Straits.
Castro, always controversial, once seemed to embody a fresh approach to his island's conflicts.
Few moments in Cuban history can rival the euphoria of Jan. 8, 1959, when the black-bearded comandante rode a tank into Havana with his victorious rebel fighters, making their way slowly through streets filled with cheering citizens. President Fulgencio Batista had fled abroad days 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 1940 constitution. As his model, he held up Jose Marti, the Cuban poet cut down by a Spanish bullet in 1895 while leading the fight for a land free of foreign domination and cleansed of corruption.
This hopefulness was the source of bitter feelings of betrayal when Castro quickly pushed aside former comrades in arms, jailed those who protested, ridiculed the idea of holding elections and gradually converted Cuba to a one-party communist state and Soviet satellite. He then proclaimed that he had been a Marxist-Leninist all along.
Still, Castro was a hero for years throughout Latin America, especially to young people who longed for radical change in their own countries.
His speechmaking was legendary. Without a text, but with a crowd of massed supporters cheering him on in Havana's Plaza de la Revolucion, Castro could hold forth for hours. His record, in 1959, was a speech that lasted nearly nine hours.
FROM WHISPER TO ROAR
He repeated key phrases like
a tent-meeting evangelist
A Castro speech might start as a friendly chat, then turn 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 roars, repeating key phrases like a tent-meeting 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).
``Our priority is our own survival -- the survival of the revolution. We shall survive,'' he vowed in early 1992.
PRIVILEGED CHILDHOOD
Father was prosperous
immigrant from Spain
Castro was born Aug. 13, 1926, near the village of Biran on Cuba's northeastern coast.
His father, Angel Castro y Argiz, a native of Galicia, Spain, was a prosperous landowner who ran a lumber mill, leased sugar lands from the U.S.-owned United Fruit Co. and employed hundreds of workers.
One of Angel's servants, Lina Ruz, was the mother of Fidel and his six sisters and brothers. Angel and Lina were married after Fidel was born.
Fidel enjoyed the privileged, outdoor childhood of a land baron's son, climbing hills, swimming in rivers, hunting with a shotgun. Although he later spoke defensively of his own privileged origins, he accepted financial aid from his father until he was 30.
When Fidel was 15, in 1941, his father sent him to the Colegio Belen in Havana, an exclusive prep school for rich boys, where most of the teachers were Spanish Jesuit priests.
INTEREST IN SPORTS
But never tried out
for the major leagues
At Belen, Castro was remembered as imposing, good-natured, a talented student and a star athlete in basketball and baseball. He maintained an interest in sports in later life, making Cuba a regional power in amateur athletics and taking time out to be photographed pitching at baseball practices. But, contrary to a report widely circulated in the American press, he never tried out for the U.S. major leagues.
At school, he remained something of a guajiro, a country bumpkin, more at ease camping in the mountains than attending a school dance, the Rev. Armando Llorente, leader of his Explorers troop, told The Herald in 1983.
Castro was so unkempt that other students called him bola de churre -- dirt ball.
In October 1945, Castro enrolled at Havana University's law school at the age of 19. He immediately plunged into student politics at a time of gangsterismo -- battles between armed rival gangs. Castro carried a gun and was accused of involvement in shooting incidents.
He also quickly earned a reputation as a powerful orator. By the end of his first year at the university, he was being quoted in Havana's morning papers.
ALIGNED WITH REFORMER
Party leader's life ended
with dramatic shooting
There were communist groups at the university, but Castro didn't join them, nor did they support him. He remained independent for a time, then in 1947 aligned himself with the Ortodoxos, a party of liberal reformers led by Sen. Eduardo Chibas.
Castro served as one of Chibas' closest youth aides until Chibas fatally shot himself in August 1951 during a dramatic radio broadcast, attempting to awaken Cubans to 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 attempting to overthrow the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Cuban police crushed the expedition before the conspirators could leave the island; Castro escaped by swimming across a bay.
VIOLENT EPISODE IN BOGOTA
Castro joined in fighting
that followed assassination
In April 1948, he and other young Cubans traveled to Bogota, Colombia, to organize an anti-imperialist movement among Latin American students, as diplomats gathered to found the Organization of American States. Castro met Colombian populist politician Jorge Eliecer Gaitan and was on his way to see him again when Gaitan was assassinated on the street. This set off two days of mass violence 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.
In 1948, while still in law school, Castro married Mirta Diaz-Balart, a philosophy student and the sister of Rafael Diaz-Balart, one of Castro's student friends. The couple honeymooned in the United States -- apparently visiting Miami and New York.
A son, Fidelito, was born in 1949. After Castro took power, he sent his son to the Soviet Union for an education in nuclear engineering. The son became chief of Cuba's Atomic Energy Commission, but was removed from the post in 1992.
Castro's marriage was strained from the beginning because his frenetic political activity left him little time to spend with his wife. They were divorced in 1955. Mirta Diaz-Balart remarried and moved to Spain.
PERSONAL LIFE A MYSTERY
Was known to have fathered
children by various women
Castro maintained a careful reserve about his private life, although he was known to have fathered several children by various women. Naty Revuelta -- a Cuban actress who had a daughter, Alina, by Castro -- remembered him as a man who could be charming and even tender, but who had no sense of humor.
``He really doesn't have a personal life, or just for very brief moments,'' she said in 1991.
The person most closely identified with him was Celia Sanchez Manduley, a thin, prim doctor's daughter who joined Castro at his guerrilla hideout in the Sierra Maestra in 1957.
She became his personal secretary, never far from his side. Some believe she was Castro's mistress, and though he never talked about his feelings for her, it was clear that she was the one who brought order to his chaotic life.
Celia Sanchez's power over him was shown in 1958, when a reporter visited Castro in the Sierra. Castro announced grandly to his rebels that they would leave immediately on a two-day march. Sanchez objected: ``You can't leave now. Dinner is cooking.'' Castro obediently waited to eat.
Castro declared a national day of mourning when Sanchez died in 1980.
RUNNING FOR CONGRESS
But dreams of election
ended with a coup
After Castro graduated from law school in 1950, he became a lawyer-politician, representing the poor in legal cases and investigating government corruption. In late 1951, he launched a vigorous campaign for a seat in the Cuban Congress.
But his dreams of traditional politics ended abruptly in 1952, when Batista seized power in a military coup and called off the election.
While older politicians pondered how to respond to the coup, Castro, 25, declared personal war on the new dictatorship. Over the next 16 months, he built a clandestine, armed revolutionary organization, recruiting followers from the ranks of the Ortodoxo party.
He opened his war on 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 the island and call for a nationwide uprising.
But things went wrong from the beginning. Shooting started prematurely, only three rebels actually fought their way into the Moncada barracks, and Castro's fighters made a disordered retreat.
`History will absolve me!'
he declared at his trial
Sixty-nine of the rebels were killed -- most of them tortured and executed after capture -- and five wounded. The army and police lost 19 dead and 27 wounded. Castro escaped into the hills, only to be captured several 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 concluded with the phrase: ``Condemn me, it does not matter! History will absolve me!''
Imprisoned on the Isle of Pines (now the Isle of Youth) off Cuba's coast, Castro wrote furiously, converting his trial speech into a formal document that supporters smuggled out for publication. It became his platform during the struggle against Batista.
Batista released Castro May 15, 1955, as part of a general amnesty 18 months into his sentence.
FUND-RAISING IN MIAMI
Then on to Mexico, to build
a force for invasion
Castro traveled briefly to Miami the same year, where he spoke at the old Flagler movie theater downtown, asking supporters for funds. 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 revolutionary ideas who had been expelled from Guatemala after a CIA-sponsored coup the year before.
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, many of them seasick after a seven-day crossing from Mexico. The men leaped into hip-deep mud and struggled through a mangrove swamp to reach land. Many were killed or captured by government troops in the first hours. Only a handful 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 recruited peasants as guerrilla fighters and organized intellectuals and middle-class followers into an urban underground that provided his rebels with funds and supplies.
`THE AMERICANS WILL PAY'
He saw his true destiny
in battle against U.S.
During the war, Castro's anti-U.S. feelings deepened when he saw American-supplied bombers used against his positions.
``The Americans will pay dearly,'' he wrote to Celia Sanchez 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 Jose Miro Cardona, a leading lawyer.
Within weeks, however, Castro had taken Miro Cardona's place as prime minister. On July 17, President Urrutia resigned, accusing Castro of leading Cuba toward communism. Castro installed Osvaldo Dorticos, former head of the Havana Bar Association, as president.
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.
CONFRONTING WASHINGTON
He brushed aside offers
of U.S. economic aid
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 a month after his first Washington visit refused to discuss compensation for U.S.-owned estates confiscated under the agrarian reform.
In February 1960, Castro signed a trade pact with Moscow and three months later established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.
Meanwhile, President Eisenhower secretly ordered the CIA to begin training Cuban exiles in Guatemala for an invasion, and the CIA began plotting to assassinate the revolutionary leader.
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.
INVASION DEFEATED
Bay of Pigs disaster
became his triumph
In April 1961, some 1,400 CIA-trained exiles invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs on the southern coast. Castro turned this, the greatest threat to his political career, into his greatest success. He marshaled his army to defeat the invasion in three days.
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 been a Communist all along? In his past, there were no clear indications of Marxism -- although his brother Raul and Che Guevara were both Marxists. That question intrigued scholars throughout his life.
COMMUNISM TAKES HOLD
July 26 Movement is fused
with old-line Marxists
In the early 1980s, Castro said he avoided discussion of his real feelings during the guerrilla war because Cubans were not yet ready for Marxism.
``Our people could not understand a larger plan... 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 1961, Castro 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.
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 some 40,000 soldiers.
1962 MISSILE CRISIS
United States prepared
to invade the island
In October of 1962, President Kennedy cited intelligence detailing the presence of the weapons in Cuba, demanded they be removed and ordered U.S. ships to blockade Cuba until they were.
The crisis escalated when Soviet troops in Cuba shot down an American U-2 spy plane over the island on Oct. 27. The United States prepared for a possible invasion of Cuba.
Khrushchev blinked. Without consulting Castro, he worked out an agreement with the Kennedy administration to withdraw the missiles. The agreement barred the Soviets from establishing a naval base in Cuba and included a U.S. commitment not to invade the island. Castro was furious about being left out of the decision-making.
As early as 1959, expeditions left Cuba aiming to overthrow the governments of Panama, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Castro's indiscriminate support of revolution lost him the friendship of many Latin leaders at a time when Washington was trying to destroy his government.
He later modified his stance and tried hard to win back a place in the inter-American system.
The collapse of the Soviet Union left Castro isolated, with an economy devastated by the loss of Moscow's financial support and its crucial petroleum shipments. He cracked down on dissent and held tenaciously to a hard Marxist line, while trying to rally his people to greater sacrifices.
Cuban exile visits were encouraged and modest free-market reforms were made to attract dollars and shore up the economy, but the result appeared to be greater discontent. The number of Cubans fleeing to the United States in makeshift vessels or stolen boats rose dramatically.
ACHIEVEMENTS TARNISHED
Did self-destructive streak
cause him to hang on too long?
Will history absolve Fidel Castro, as he told the court in Santiago?
By the end of his rule, many of his international successes had turned to dust; there was a drastic decline in Cuba's standard of living; and the government's capacity to deliver the social benefits that Castro had been so proud of was deeply eroded.
``By hanging onto power past the mid-1980s, all he has done is to tarnish his past accomplishments. It is almost as if he has had a self-destructive streak for the past several years,'' Jorge Dominguez, a Cuba scholar at Harvard University, said in 1992.
Problems that had always plagued the revolution -- Cuba's enormous housing deficit, disguised unemployment, consumer scarcities and a poor record of economic growth -- grew steadily worse.
``History cannot absolve Fidel Castro by the standards he set 40 years ago,'' said Dominguez, ``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 this century.''
The man who thrilled the youth of Latin America with his wild manner, rumpled fatigues, his unkempt beard and his rifle, had become a gray-bearded oldster in a well-pressed general's uniform.
Instead of a fresh challenge to the old order, he had become a rigid symbol of a bankrupt communist system abandoned around the world by most of those who once practiced it. The young rebel's appeal finally wore off or wore old -- with journalists, intellectuals, world leaders and much of the Cuban population -- particularly with a new generation for whom the revolution meant only hardship and lack of opportunity.
Copyright 1999 Miami Herald _______________________________________________________________________