Castro (Ruz), Fidel 1927-
Cuban revolutionary

Born near Bir�n, he was the son of a successful sugar planter. He studied law and practised in Havana, fighting cases on behalf of the poor and against the official corruption and oppression which were rife under President Fulgencio Batista. In 1953, with his brother Ra�l, also an ardent revolutionary, he led an unsuccessful rising and was sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment, but, released under an amnesty within a year, he fled to the USA and thence to Mexico, all the time organizing anti-Batista activities. In 1956 he landed in Cuba with a small band of insurgents, but he was betrayed and ambushed, barely escaping into the Sierra Maestra mountains, from where he waged a relentless guerrilla campaign. The degeneration of Cuba into a police state brought many recruits to his cause, and in 1958 he mounted a full-scale attack and Batista was forced to flee. Castro, Prime Minister from February 1959, proclaimed a 'Marxist-Leninist programme' adapted to local requirements. He set about far-reaching reforms in agriculture, industry, and education, not all immediately successful, but sufficiently so to enable his regime to gather strength. His overthrow of US dominance in the economic sphere and routing of the US-connived �migr� invasion at the Bay of Pigs (1961) was balanced by consequent dependence on communist (mainly Russian) aid and the near-disaster of the 1962 missile crisis. Despite problems in sugar and tobacco production and two mass exoduses, Castro's popularity remained high. In 1979 he became president of the non-aligned countries movement despite Cuba's continuing substantial economic and political involvement with the Kremlin, but by the late 1980s, Cuba's status as the world's largest supplier of sugar was beginning to suffer because of the industry's outdated and unrepaired equipment. The start of 1991 ominously heralded Cuba's worst economic crisis in its 32 years of Communist rule, caused mainly by flagging economic aid and a drastic fall in basic supplies from the economically-compromised USSR on which Cuba had come to rely for almost all the oil imports on which 90 per cent of the island's energy industry is based. In 1994 Castro suffered great embarassment when his daughter fled Cuba and sought asylum in the USA, where she publicly criticised the way her homeland was being run. He published an autobiography, Fidel, in 1987 (with Frei Betto) amongst other books.