But it is also possible to discuss the historical "essences" of Fidel Castro. He emerged out of a history shaped by a century of Cuban national frustration, heir to a legacy of unfulfilled hopes for national sovereignty and self-determination, aspirations that put Cuba on a collision course with the United States. The collision of the early s served to fix the trajectory of the 50 years of ruptured relations that followed.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies. Fidel Castro exhales cigar smoke during a March interview at his presidential palace in Havana, Cuba.
Castro died at age 90 on November 25, , Cuban state media reported. Click through to see more photos from the life of the controversial Cuban leader who ruled for nearly half a century:. A portrait of Castro in New York in He was in exile after being released as part of a general amnesty for political prisoners in Cuba.
Two years earlier, he and about others staged an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the regime of Fulgencio Batista. Castro with Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara during the early days of their guerrilla campaign in Cuba's Sierra Maestra mountains. Guevara, Castro and Castro's brother Raul organized a group of Cuban exiles that returned to Cuba in December and waged a guerrilla war against government troops.
Castro and his revolutionaries hold up their rifles in January after overthrowing Batista. Crowds cheer Castro on his victorious march into Havana in Surrounded by rebels who came with him from the mountains, Castro gives an all-night speech.
Castro, left, became Cuba's prime minister in February His brother Raul, right, was commander in chief of the armed forces. During a visit to New York in , Fidel Castro spends time with a group of children. American talk-show host Ed Sullivan interviews Castro on a taped segment in That month, a group of about 1, Cuban exiles, armed with US weapons, made an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Castro. Castro announces general mobilization after the announcement of the Cuban blockade by President John F Kennedy in October Castro raises arms with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev during a four-week visit to Moscow in May Castro in July Castro plays baseball in Fidel Castro: A life in pictures.
Cuba march called off after Castro death. Image source, Reuters. Image source, Getty Images. Cubans in Miami, Florida, celebrated the news of Castro's death. Related Topics. Published 26 November Cubans found teaching jobs, and in Miami schools became officially bilingual, leading the nation in a seismic cultural shift that is still underway.
There were business fronts, safe houses and back-room plotting. With a population that included Jews and other educated seasonal residents, Miami was oddly both Southern and Northern liberal. Locals figured the newcomers would replicate previous immigrant groups and quickly assimilate. There was no significant backlash at first against the immigrants — except from African Americans.
Fresh from the heady victories of the Civil Rights movement, blacks had raised their expectations only to see the communist-hating Cubans reap the societal benefits, or so it seemed to some. By the s, local whites were experiencing their own surge of resentment. Upper-class whites, with an appreciation for the economic opportunities, stayed and embraced Miami as the capital of Latin America.
By the late s a reverse assimilation was underway, with elite whites and their children hiring Spanish tutors and immersing themselves in Latino culture. Cuba opened its borders and some , refugees inundated South Florida in a matter of months. It was an era of high crime and fear.
It was the height of the Cold War, and a Marxist revolutionary, Fidel Castro, had just taken power in a rebellion against Cuba's pro-American dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Castro nationalized all American businesses in Cuba — taking them over without compensating their owners — and declared ideological allegiance to the Soviet Union. The US immediately set about trying to topple Castro; the embargo was part of that, along with some really ill-conceived assassination plots and, in , Kennedy's disastrous effort, known as the Bay of Pigs, to send CIA-trained, anti-Castro Cubans to invade the island.
The US eventually stopped trying to topple Castro by force, but it kept up the embargo as a means to weaken him until That's when President Jimmy Carter let part of the embargo lapse, in what looked like a possible first step toward dropping it. The embargo had failed, after all, to remove Castro. President Ronald Reagan reinstated the full embargo when he came into office in , as part of his global effort against the Soviet Union and its allies.
Something else happened in Castro tried to relieve some internal political dissent by briefly allowing Cubans to leave the country. As a result, , migrated to the US, mostly to Florida.
Many of these new Cuban-Americans, like the political exiles who had fled in the s and '70s, hated Castro for what he had done to them, their families, and their country. And they voted on that.
By the time that the Cold War ended in , Cuban-Americans had enough sway to make the embargo good politics. The fact that they are centered in Florida, an often-decisive swing state, meant that a presidential candidate's hopes and dreams could turn on whether or not his Cuba policy was sufficiently anti-Castro. Cuban-Americans march in Miami in support of Cuban pro-democracy dissidents.
To understand that, it's not enough to just say that supporting the embargo will help presidential candidates win Florida. You have to go back to President Bill Clinton's first term, when a handful of decisive events set the embargo in stone for the next 20 years.
When Clinton came into office in , lifting the embargo seemed obvious. The Cold War was over, and, in any case, the embargo had failed to remove Castro.
But the Cuban-American community, which had grown prosperous since , believed that Castro was moments from falling Communist regimes across the world had collapsed in and By , Clinton had given up, and it became political conventional wisdom that the embargo was unopposeable.
But in those four crucial years from to , neither the Cuban-American lobby or the Cuban-American vote, as important as they are, fully explain why the embargo continued to survive. Rather, the decisive event came in That February, Castro's military shot down two private planes flown by members of a refugee organization that had reportedly previously dropped fliers over Cuba, and four Cuban-Americans were killed.
The shootdown outraged Americans and moved popular and political opinion against opening relations. The following month, Congress overwhelmingly passed the Helms-Burton Act, which restricted the president's ability to end the embargo without Congressional approval and essentially promised to keep it in place, even if it didn't work. Popular support for Helms-Burton was so strong that Clinton signed it, even though the law limited his own authority over Cuba policy.
Pushing the bill was a politically brilliant move by Cuba hard-liners, including the Cuban-American community, but it could not have happened without Castro's decision to shoot down those two planes — and the moment of widespread American outrage against him that it had sparked. In explaining his decision to sign the bill, Clinton later wrote in his memoir : "[It] was good election-year politics in Florida, but it undermined whatever chance I might have if I won a second term to lift the embargo in return for positive changes in Cuba.
Great idea! But rather than listening to the Afro Cuban All-Stars or Buena Vista Social Club , which are excellent groups in Cuba's traditional folk-jazz tradition, let's try something more modern and more in touch with Cuba's special history as a melting pot of Caribbean culture — which includes the US. Soon, thanks to the US-Cuba deal, you will finally be able to legally kick back with a Cuban cigar and a glass of Cuban rum, both long banned, while you listen to this.
It turns out that Cuban cigars aren't just popular because they're banned, they really are better — it's been confirmed by actual scientific studies. There are a few reasons. With the Cold War over, Cuba is no threat to the US, and the US, having given up its imperial ambitions in the s and its anti-Castro plots in the s, is no threat to Cuba. The events of to delayed the end of the embargo, but it was probably inevitable. Also, within the US, popular opinion has turned sharply against the embargo.
People just don't fear Cuba or Communism anymore, and they would like to go on vacation there. Even among Cuban-Americans in Florida, public opinion now supports, if very slightly, lifting the very embargo that community has spent decades lobbying to keep.
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