Castro: The revolutionary beard

Ultimately, Batista fled Cuba for the rebels to take power on January 1, 1959.

Castro was then barely 32 years old.

He was first named commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary Armed Forces while Manuel Urrutia was installed as president.

Castro later became premier of the Revolutionary Government in February 1959, a position he held for almost 18 years.

From December 1976 to February 2008 he was president and commander-in-chief.

His younger brother, Raul Castro Ruz, was elected president on February 24 to replace him.

“My elemental duty is not to cling to positions, much less to stand in the way of younger persons, but rather to contribute experience and ideas whose modest value comes from the exceptional era in which I lived. It would be a betrayal of my conscience to accept a responsibility requiring more mobility and dedication than I am physically able to offer. This I say devoid of all drama,” Castro wrote in his resignation letter dated February 18, 2008.

He continued writing the column, Reflections of Comrade Fidel, published and broadcast in the country.

Castro reveals that Ernest Hemingway’s novel about the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls, helped him conceive the Cuban irregular war.

The book deals, among other things, “with a struggle in the rear of a conventional army. And it talks about life in the rear; it tells of the existence of a guerrilla force, and how that force may act in a territory that’s supposedly controlled by the enemy.”

“I’m referring to the very precise descriptions of war written by Hemingway in that novel. Because, in all his books, Hemingway describes things in a very realistic way, with great clarity. So that book became a familiar part of my life. And we always went back to it, consulted it, to find inspiration, even when we were already guerrillas.”

Hemingway had a house in Cuba for 20 years, leaving for the last time a year after the revolution and a year before his suicide, and was reported to have been on good terms with Castro and the new regime, who turned his house into a museum.

Castro says immediately after the triumph of the revolution, the conspiracies began.

“Sabotage, the infiltration of men and the draining off of military equipment in order to sabotage us and encourage uprisings and terrorist activities. Our country has been the object of the most prolonged economic war in history, and of a fierce and unceasing campaign of terrorism that has lasted more than 45 years. They sent in planes to spray the cane fields with incendiary materials...”

In December 1959, US President Eisenhower approved a CIA-proposed plan whose objective was to “topple Castro in one year and replace him with a junta friendly to the Unites States.”