Cuban president and perpetual thorn in the side of US administrations, Fidel Castro has outwitted the United States for over forty years, withstanding the Bay of Pigs invasion, CIA assassination attempts, blockades and other efforts to destabilize his regime. Castro came to power in 1958 after overthrowing Fulgencio Batista, a corrupt and unpopular dictator whose own rise to power had been facilitated by President Roosevelt. Castro began as a baseball-loving Social Democrat, with considerable support from Americans initially until he declined to accept American bank loans, believing that they had so many strings attached that they could not help bring development to Cuba. Instead, he began nationalizing US property and, by the end of 1959, announced that he was going to join the communists and begin receiving aid from the Soviet Union. After this declaration, the US began to prepare to overthrow Castro. He survived the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and Robert Kennedy’s “Operation Mongoose.” Castro then began to export his revolution, offering support to rebels and nations from Chile to Grenada in the western hemisphere, and aiding Angola in its efforts to fight the forces of apartheid in South Africa. The Cuban economy meanwhile collapsed, especially after the end of the Cold War with Soviet loans drying up, and, while the country managed to keep a social welfare system in place, opposition grew. Thus Castro met with growing repression, censoring the press, imprisoning many opponents of the regime and forcing others into exile in the US, where they joined exiles from the revolution in large Cuban communities in Florida. Efforts to liberalize Cuba in the 1990s have led many to believe that Castro’s rule may be nearing a close, but the final chapter has yet to be written.
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