Before leading a revolution, Fidel Castro ran a failing law practice
Fresh out of law school in 1950, Fidel Castro co-founded a practice serving poor Cubans. It lost money. Indifferent to material things, he let bills go unpaid until his furniture was repossessed and the electricity cut off. Within a decade that struggling lawyer would control Cuba, and he held power for roughly half a century.
Castro was born in 1926 on the farm of a wealthy migrant from Galicia in Spain and was educated in Jesuit schools. At the University of Havana, where student politics was entangled with armed gangs, he turned toward anti-imperialism and then Marxism. He joined an aborted 1947 expedition against the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo and was in Bogotá during the 1948 riots. By 1952 he was running for Congress, until General Fulgencio Batista seized power in a coup and cancelled the elections.
Legal challenges went nowhere, so Castro turned to force. His clandestine Movement recruited around 1,200 members, mostly from Havana's poorer districts, and in 1953 attacked the Moncada Barracks near Santiago, consciously echoing nineteenth-century independence fighters. The raid failed and he was jailed for a year. In Mexico he, Che Guevara and his brother Raúl founded the 26th of July Movement, then waged guerrilla war from the Sierra Maestra until Batista fell in 1959.
As prime minister and later president, Castro built the first one-party communist state in the Western Hemisphere, nationalising industry, expanding healthcare and education, controlling the press and suppressing dissent. Washington tried to remove him through assassination attempts, an embargo and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. Castro turned to Moscow and allowed Soviet nuclear missiles onto the island, triggering the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, one of the defining confrontations of the Cold War. Cuban troops later fought in wars from Angola to the Ogaden.
When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, Cuba endured a severe downturn known as the Special Period. Castro handed his duties to Raúl in 2006 and died in 2016 at 90, the longest-serving non-royal head of state of his era. Opinion remains sharply split. Supporters credit him with social justice and independence from American dominance; critics point to human rights abuses, a mass exodus of Cubans and a poorer economy.
Source: Fidel Castro
