Communist dictator Fidel Castro, who took hold of Cuba with a bloody revolution and ruled with an iron fist for five decades, died on Friday.
The ruthless leader, who impoverished his country and caused countless migrants to flee the island, died at 90 years old, his brother Raul, the country’s president, said on Cuban state television.
“Towards victory, always!” Raul said with a shaking voice after stating that his older brother died at 10:29 p.m. Friday.
Fidel’s body was scheduled to be cremated on Saturday, according to Agence France Presse.
The death comes just months after President Obama normalized diplomatic relations between the Cold War enemies.
As part of his brutal hold on power the Cuban leader executed thousands of innocent people. He once admitted to holding 15,000 political prisoners in the 60s, and forced gays into “re-education” camps.
At least 582 were shot by firing squads over two years. Independent newspapers were forced to close.
Still, the cold-blooded dictator was romanticized by leftists around the world, who hailed him as a hero.
His reign was marked by near-catastrophic Cold War relations with the US.
Diplomatic tensions between the two countries nearly led to a nuclear confrontation during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
President John F. Kennedy announced there were Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba and imposed a naval blockade of the island.
Humankind held its breath, and after a tense week of diplomacy, Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev removed them. Never had the world felt so close to nuclear war.
One year earlier, the US had helped launch a fruitless invasion of the country at the Bay of Pigs.
About 1,400 Cuban exiles stormed the beach on Cuba’s south coast. But the CIA-backed invasion failed.
The debacle forced the US to give up on the idea of invading Cuba, but that didn’t stop Washington and Castro’s exiled enemies from trying to do him in.
By Cuban count, he was the target of more than 630 assassination plots by militant Cuban exiles or the US government.
In 1980, about 10,000 Cubans who wanted to leave the country massed on the grounds of the Peruvian embassy. Castro then announced that anyone who wanted to leave could do so. The result was the Mariel boat lift to the US.
But Castro got the last laugh by opening prisons and mental institutions and encouraging their inmates to go to the US.
Fidel Castro Ruz was born Aug. 13, 1926, in eastern Cuba’s sugar country, where his Spanish immigrant father worked first recruiting labor for US sugar companies and later built up a prosperous plantation of his own.
Castro attended Jesuit schools, then the University of Havana, where he received law and social science degrees.
His life as a rebel began in 1953 with a reckless attack on the Moncada military barracks in the eastern city of Santiago. Most of his comrades were killed and Fidel and his brother Raul went to prison.
Fidel turned his trial defense into a manifesto that he smuggled out of jail, famously declaring, “History will absolve me.”
Freed under a pardon, Castro fled to Mexico and organized a rebel band that returned in 1956, sailing across the Gulf of Mexico to Cuba on a yacht named Granma. After losing most of his group in a bungled landing, he rallied support in Cuba’s eastern Sierra Maestra mountains.
He seized power in 1958, when his guerrilla forces overthrew of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.
On Jan. 8, 1959, tens of thousands spilled into the streets of Havana to celebrate Batista’s downfall and catch a glimpse of Castro as his rebel caravan arrived in the capital.
The US was among the first to formally recognize his government, cautiously trusting Castro’s early assurances he merely wanted to restore democracy, not install socialism.
Soon Castro moved into the Soviet bloc, and Washington began working to oust him, cutting U.S. purchases of sugar, the island’s economic mainstay. Castro, in turn, confiscated $1 billion in U.S. assets.
The American government imposed a trade embargo, banning virtually all US exports to the island except for food and medicine, and it severed diplomatic ties on Jan. 3, 1961.
Castro cobbled revolutionary groups together into the new Cuban Communist Party, with him as first secretary. Labor unions lost the right to strike. The Catholic Church and other religious institutions were harassed. Neighborhood “revolutionary defense committees” kept an eye on everyone.
Castro exported revolution to Latin American countries in the 1960s, and dispatched Cuban troops to Africa to fight Western-backed regimes in the 1970s. Over the decades, he sent Cuban doctors abroad to tend to the poor, and gave sanctuary to fugitive Black Panther leaders from the US.
But the collapse of the Soviet bloc ended billions in preferential trade and subsidies for Cuba, sending its economy into a tailspin. Castro briefly experimented with an opening to foreign capitalists and limited private enterprise.
As the end of the Cold War eased global tensions, many Latin American and European countries re-established relations with Cuba. In January 1998, Pope John Paul II visited a nation that had been officially atheist until the early 1990s.
Castro was the world’s third longest-serving head of state, after Britain’s Queen Elizabeth and the King of Thailand.
He temporarily ceded power to his younger brother Raul after undergoing surgery in 2006.
Castro permanently stepped down from office in 2008 when Raul took over officially.