Feb. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Fidel Castro resigned as president and commander-in-chief of Cuba, after almost 50 years as the country's leader, the official daily Granma said.
``I neither will aspire to nor will I accept, the position of president of the council of state and commander-in-chief,'' Castro wrote, according to Granma in its online edition. ``My only desire is to fight as a soldier for my ideas.''
Castro, 81, the world's longest serving president, seized power in Cuba almost a half-century ago promising liberty and economic justice only to turn the Caribbean island into a communist bastion and a flashpoint of the Cold War.
The resignation should be ``the beginning of a democratic transition for the people of Cuba,'' President George W. Bush said in a news conference in Kigali, Rwanda, and promised U.S. help. The international community should support ``free and fair elections, and I mean free and I mean fair, not these kinds of staged elections that the Castro brothers try to foist off.''
Raul Castro has been acting president since July 2006, when Fidel handed control to him after undergoing surgery to treat an intestinal ailment. Castro failed to attend the May Day parade in Havana last year, missing the celebration for only the third time since taking power in 1959.
By June, though, he was well enough to meet with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for six hours.
Castro, a lawyer by training, ruled the nation of 11 million people since the 1959 revolution. He boosted literacy and health care for the island's poor, while imprisoning thousands of dissidents, seizing private property and sparking an exodus of Cubans who braved treacherous, shark-infested waters on rickety, homemade boats to flee for the U.S.
Cold War
The Cuban leader took his place on the world stage at the height of the Cold War by making his country an outpost of the Soviet Union only 90 miles (145 kilometers) from Florida. In Latin America and Africa, Castro gave military and political support to revolutionary groups and Marxist governments for more than three decades after taking power.
He pushed the superpowers toward nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and turned the nation into the region's strongest military power until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
``This proves just how courageous he is,'' former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze said in a telephone interview. ``I'd say he is still very confident that the course he has set will continue even after he's gone.''
Unrepentant Revolutionary
Projecting the image of an unrepentant revolutionary dressed in green military fatigues, Castro was a stubborn nemesis for U.S. presidents, from Dwight Eisenhower to Bush. His regime survived a U.S.-sponsored invasion, known as the Bay of Pigs, and at least eight assassination plots. President John F. Kennedy imposed the embargo in 1962, which was tightened by successive U.S. leaders, depriving the country of its largest trade partner and starving the economy of dollars.
The loss of Soviet aid plunged Cuba's economy into a deep depression, forcing Castro to ration food and order people to ride bicycles to save gasoline. In recent years, Castro recovered from the loss of his Soviet patron to antagonize the U.S. once again. Castro has also inspired a new generation of Latin American leaders, including Chavez.
Bush drew up a plan to force Castro from power and tightened the embargo in 2004.
In the past decade, Castro's health deteriorated. In 2004, he made international headlines when he tripped and fell at a graduation ceremony, breaking his left knee and suffering a hairline fracture in his upper right arm.
Soviet Support
At the peak of his power in the 1960s through the 1980s, Castro used his clout and backing from the Soviet Union to aid leftist revolutionary groups, including sending troops to help Marxist governments in Angola, Grenada and Nicaragua.
The bearded Cuban leader communicated best to vast crowds, giving speeches that might last six hours. He often toured Havana in an open military jeep, clutching a Cohiba cigar.
After Cuba plunged into financial ruin following the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, Castro found ways to mitigate the loss of Soviet aid and the U.S. embargo. He generated foreign exchange by allowing Spanish-built hotels, filled with European tourists, to line the country's resort beaches.
He also cultivated his relationship with Venezuela, the largest oil exporter in the Americas.
``Castro managed to survive all the catastrophes that Cuba faced: droughts, financial and economic isolation, riots,'' said Wilson Borja, an opposition Colombian lawmaker who met with Castro three times.
Overthrow Trujillo
While still in school, the future Cuban leader joined 1,200 men who set out to invade the Dominican Republic and overthrow dictator Rafael Trujillo. The Cuban navy turned the expedition back.
After General Fulgencio Batista staged a coup in 1952 and canceled elections, Castro challenged him in court, lost and began a six-year effort to oust him.
On July 26, 1953, Castro led about 165 men in an attack on an army barracks, hoping to spark a popular uprising. The troops killed eight of Castro's men and executed scores. The survivors fled and were later captured and tried.
Batista released Castro in 1955 as part of a general amnesty. Castro went into exile in Mexico, where he joined forces with Argentine communist revolutionary Ernesto ``Che'' Guevara. In 1956, Castro and Guevara crossed the Caribbean with about 80 men on a yacht called the Granma to start a guerrilla campaign against Batista. Cuban forces killed all but 12 on landing.
Castro's Retreat
Castro retreated into the Sierra Maestra mountains with the survivors, rallied popular support and, at the age of 32, drove Batista into exile on Jan. 1, 1959.
Over the next two years, Castro transformed Cuba into a communist dictatorship, seizing land and nationalizing sugar mills, ranches and oil refineries owned by U.S. interests. His government imprisoned or killed political opponents and declared the country atheist.
On Sept. 29, 1960, amid the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, Castro embraced Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in the Theresa Hotel in New York's Harlem when the two visited the city for a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. The gesture deepened the rift with the U.S., which imposed the trade embargo.
Under Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, the U.S. made clandestine efforts to remove Castro. From 1960 to 1965, the Central Intelligence Agency mounted at least eight assassination plots, according to the 1975 report of a U.S. Senate committee headed by Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho.
Poisoned Cigar
The plots included lacing Castro's cigars with a botulinum toxin and enlisting Mafia bosses Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante Jr. to have someone add poison to one of Castro's drinks, the report said.
President Kennedy authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion. On April 17, 1961, refugees armed by the CIA staged an amphibious landing at the bay on the island's southwest coast with the goal of sparking an uprising. Castro's forces killed more than 100 invaders and captured more than 1,100
Eighteen months later, in October 1962, photographs taken by a U.S. spy plane showed Castro had allowed the Soviet Union to build nuclear-missile bases in Cuba. The discovery marked the start of the Cuban Missile Crisis, 13 days during which the world stared down ``the gun barrel of nuclear war,'' in the words of Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorensen.
Kennedy imposed a naval quarantine to block Soviet ships and said the U.S. would regard a strike by Cuba as a Soviet attack. As Soviet ships cruised toward Cuba, Kennedy ordered nuclear weapons loaded onto aircraft.
On the 12th day of the confrontation, Kennedy wrote to Khrushchev offering assurances that the U.S. wouldn't invade Cuba, eliminating Castro's stated reason for the missiles. The next day, Radio Moscow broadcast a statement by the Soviet leader that the weapons would be dismantled.
To contact the reporters on this story: Michael Smith in Santiago at mssmith@bloomberg.net
