Fidel Castro, the leader of the Cuban Revolution, died at the age of 90. Cuba declares a nine-day period of national mourning.
In the eyes of the enemy, he is a "tyrant" and a "dictator", while in the hearts of Cubans, he is a "leader" and a "savior". Fidel made Cuba a socialist regime, escaping more than 600 assassinations in his lifetime and single-handedly confronting the superpower United States for half a century.
He lived through revolutionary movements, economic depressions, and political upheavals, but he stood firm. Cigars, bearded beards, raised fists and an olive green are his eternal logo.
He was an eagle, and now the Latin American eagle is gone, and his life has made a cross-century legend.
Yesterday, Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang sent a telegram of condolences to Raúl Castro, chairman of the Cuban Council of State and President of the Council of Ministers, expressing their deepest condolences on the death of Comrade Fidel Castro and extending their most sincere condolences to his family.
"Judge me,
History will acquit me."
Castro was born on 13 August 1926 in Oriente province to a sugarcane estate family. His father was a Spanish soldier who developed sugar cane.
At the age of 13, Castro was firmly whipped by his father. The reason was that he organized a strike against the abused wage-workers in the manor, and the object of opposition was his father.
When he grew up, Castro was known as a bearded man who was "not afraid, invincible, and invincible", and unbeknownst to him, he had a stubbornness when he was a handsome teenager without a beard. If he loses a ball or fight to someone else, he will never give up. At school, Castro organized his classmates to protest the unequal treatment of food.
Castro became Cuba's best all-around athlete at the age of 18 and was admitted to the law faculty of the University of Havana the following year.
Cuba in the 1950s was shrouded in batista dictatorship. Castro, who received his juris doctorate from the University of Havana, quickly became a well-known figure in the anti-government, anti-oligarchy, anti-authoritarian regime, and resistance to US imperialist rule.
Castro joined forces with other opponents of the Batista regime in 1953 to attack the Moncada barracks, and after the defeat, he defended himself in court, chanting "Judge me, history will acquit me" and eventually went to prison for 18 months.
After his release from prison, Castro continued his revolutionary struggle. In November 1956, Castro created an insurgent army and base in the Sierra Maestra Mountains of Cuba.
In 1959, batista government forces collapsed, and young guerrilla fighters entered Havana amid cheers.
Standing on the podium, Castro declared Cuba's true independence, several white pigeons flew over his shoulders, and an era began.
The "Backyard" in the United States
Stick a steel needle
When the Cuban Revolution triumphed, Castro was in his early 30s. Two years later, Castro declared cuba to begin a socialist revolution. Since then, the seeds of communist ideals have taken root in this Caribbean land.
However, Cuba's socialist road is not easy to follow. In 1961, after the United States severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, it launched the infamous "Bay of Pigs Operation" to support cuban mercenaries landing in the Bay of Pigs in an attempt to overthrow the Cuban revolutionary regime by force. A year later, then-U.S. President John F. Kennedy signed a decree marking the official start of a half-century-long U.S. trade embargo and economic embargo against Cuba.
At that time, Cuba was in ruins, blockaded by the United States embargo, and the economic shortage was getting worse and worse, and Castro led the Cuban people through such difficult conditions, and his figure frequently shuttled between the people. At that time, every year when the sugarcane harvest season came, Castro took a machete and went to the field to cut the sugarcane with the farmers.
Castro is indeed a great man, 1 meter 8 tall, tall, angular face, bright eyes, plus a green military uniform and a beard... He was a confident and determined leader.
He promoted the socialist system in Cuba, making the Caribbean island nation like a steel needle, deeply rooted in the "backyard" of the United States. He nationalized the land, including his own family's land, for which his mother did not forgive him for the rest of her life.
Escaped 638 CIA assassinations
Castro can be described as the confidant of the 11th president of the United States, and how many people want to get rid of him and then quickly. Castro escaped 638 assassinations orchestrated by the CIA in his lifetime. Killers put poison in their boots, bombs in cigars, train beautiful agents... And he was able to turn the tide of the situation every time, in his own words: "I have escaped countless assassination plots, and if this is an Olympic event, I will definitely win the gold medal." ”
Is this tough guy really not afraid of death? Castro has his own answer to this. In 1960, when he was flying to New York for the United Nations General Assembly, he was asked if he was wearing body armor, and Fidel slowly unbuttoned his shirt and revealed his belly. "I have a mental body armor," he said.
That moment will come,
But the ideal is immortal
No matter how great a hero is, there is also a twilight day.
Castro struggled all his life, winning the United States, but losing to the years. In 2006, at the age of 80, Castro underwent surgery for intestinal bleeding and handed over power to his younger brother Raúl, who was the first vice-president of Cuba's Council of State.
When Raul took office, he did something astonishing — he began economic reforms. However, for a long time, the market was regarded as a flood beast in Cuba, and the implementation of economic reforms would break the "egalitarianism" that the revolution had painstakingly established, and the introduction of a market economy would break the distribution system, which in the eyes of many people was more powerful than the Yankees.
However, after retirement, Castro's grasp of national policy and the path of reform is as detached as possible. For reform, he blessed. He changed his column in the newspaper Gramma, "Reflections of the Commander-in-Chief," "Reflections of Comrade Fidel," and in his own words he would continue to direct the country as a "commoner."
After all, a serious illness has turned the formerly burly and heroic revolutionary into an old man with a hunched back and a faltering old man. Soon, Fidel's hair and beard were completely white, his face was covered with age spots, and his forehead was a knife-like wrinkle.
In April, at the closing ceremony of the Seventh National Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba, Fidel appeared on the rostrum. In the past, he had delivered hours of gushing speeches here countless times, but this time, it had a strong sense of "farewell speech":
"Soon I will be 90 years old, which I never thought of, nor did I make a lot of effort to get to this age, it is purely accidental. Soon I will face the day that will come, like everyone else." "But the ideals and convictions of the Cuban communists will remain unchanged and will continue to prove on this planet that if people work hard and with dignity, they can produce the material and cultural products that humanity needs."