The center of the exile community is Miami, where the Cuban American National Foundation became a powerful lobbying group courted by US politicians. Thousands died from drowning or exposure to the brutal Caribbean sun. ![]() Among them were criminals released from Cuban jails who brought a violent crime wave to Florida.Īt other times, desperate Cubans fled the island nation in makeshift boats across the treacherous Straits of Florida. In 1980, Castro let another 125,000 leave in the chaotic Mariel boatlift. More than 260,000 Cubans left in a US-organized airlift between 19. “And the days turned into weeks, and the weeks to months, and the months to years.”Ĭastro occasionally allowed disenchanted Cubans to leave, with most going to the United States. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who arrived in Florida as a child and later became the first Cuban-American elected to Congress. “We came here with a round-trip ticket … because we thought the revolution was going to last days,” said US Rep. “What Fidel achieved in the social order of this country has not been achieved by any poor nation, and even by many rich countries, despite being submitted to enormous pressures,” said Jose Ramon Fernandez, a former Cuban vice president.Ĭastro’s political staying power was a source of puzzling consternation and bitter frustration for Cuban exiles, who never imagined he would rule so long.Ĭuban exiles in Miami protest the move to normalize US-Cuba relations. Instead of blaming an inept socialist system, they fault the US embargo for the country’s economic woes. “The most vulnerable part of his persona as a politician is precisely his continued defense of a totalitarian model that is the main cause of the hardships, the misery and the unhappiness of the Cuban people,” said Elizardo Sanchez, a human rights advocate and critic of the Castro regime.īut Castro’s defenders in Cuba point to what they see as social progress, including racial integration, universal education and health care. Until his last breath, Castro held tightly to his belief in a socialist economic model and one-party Communist rule, even after the Soviet Union disintegrated and most of the rest of the world concluded state socialism was an idea whose time had passed. “I have never been concerned about death.” “I have never been afraid of death,” Castro said in 2002. He took delight in pointing out how none of them succeeded, not even the plot that called for explosives to be placed in the ubiquitous cigars he later would quit smoking for health reasons. “He taunted, antagonized and irritated the United States for more than a half century,” said Dan Erikson, a senior adviser for Western Hemisphere affairs at the US State Department and author of “The Cuba Wars: Fidel Castro, the United States and the Next Revolution.”Ĭastro also survived numerous assassination attempts by the CIA and anti-Castro exiles in the early 1960s. In doing so, Castro defied a hostile US policy that sought to topple him with a punishing trade embargo that started in 1962 and continued for the rest of his life. “Fidel Castro came to power with a conviction that he was going to have a major revolution in Cuba, that he was going to stay in power indefinitely, that he was going to fight American imperialism and that he needed a ‘daddy’ and his ‘daddy’ was the Soviet Union,” said Jaime Suchlicki, director of the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami. ![]() ![]() Castro, who had long blamed many of Cuba’s ills on American influence and resented the US role in hemispheric politics, quickly intensified cooperation with the Soviet Union, which began sending large subsidies. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.Īt the height of the Cold War, Castro used a blend of charisma and repression to install the first and only communist government in the Western Hemisphere, less than 100 miles from the United States.Ĭuba and the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations on May 8, 1960, further eroding the relationship with the United States. Fidel Castro outlived six of those presidents, including Cold War warriors John F. ![]() One Castro or another has ruled Cuba over a period that spans almost 60 years and 11 US presidents. Castro survived 600 assassination attempts.
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