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Fidel Castro announces retirement

After a half century of defying the US and making the world think he would die with his boots on, iconic communist leader Fidel Castro announced yesterday the end of his era at Cuba's helm.

A guerrilla revolutionary and great survivor, Castro dodged all his enemies could throw at him in almost 50 years in power, including assassination plots, a US-backed invasion bid and a punishing US trade embargo.

Famed for his olive fatigues, straggly beard and the cigars he reluctantly gave up for his health, Castro kept a tight clamp on dissent at home while defining himself abroad with his defiance of Washington.

But the Cuban leader, who once said he would never retire from politics, finally announced yesterday that he would not return as president or commander of the armed forces, 19 months after he was stricken with illness that forced him into seclusion.

Born Aug. 13, 1926, to a prosperous Galician immigrant landowner and a Cuban mother of humble origins, Castro was a baseball prospect who dreamed of a golden future playing in the US big leagues.

But his young man's dreams evolved not in sports but in politics and he went on to form the guerrilla opposition to the US-backed government of Fulgencio Batista, who seized power in a 1952 coup.

That involvement netted the young Castro two years in jail and he subsequently went into exile to prepare the revolt he and his followers launched on Dec. 2, 1956, when they landed in southeastern Cuba on the ship Granma.

Twenty-five months later, against great odds, they ousted Batista and Castro was named prime minister.

Once in undisputed power, Castro, a Jesuit-schooled lawyer, aligned himself with the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, which bankrolled his communism until the Soviet bloc's own collapse in 1989.

Castro saw 10 US presidents come and go, each seeking to pressure his regime over the decades following his revolution, which closed a long era of Washington's dominance over Cuba dating to the 1898 Spanish-American War.
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