LYCOS RETRIEVER
Fidel Castro: United States
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Fidel Castro is a communist, and he made Cuba the first socialist country of the Americas. During the Cold War he was a friend of the Soviet Union, and he depended on their help until the USSR collapsed. An important moment of the Cold War was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. In 1961 the United States of America discovered that the Soviet Union was placing missiles on Cuba, close to the United States. After very tense talking, a big nuclear war was avoided between the Soviet Union and the USA.
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Fidel Castro is the Cuban prime minister and first secretary of the Communist party of Cuba. A lawyer by training, Castro led the Cuban Revolution and transformed the island into the first communist state in the Western Hemisphere.
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Born in 1928 to a sugar cane contractor, Fidel Castro demonstrated an early affection for power, studying Hitler's Mein Kampf and spending hours mimicking before tape recorder and mirror the Italian Fascist Benito Mussolini. While some of his apologists have argued that Castro was somehow forced into communism (even after he boldly declared himself a Marxist/Leninist),his early history exposes him as a gangster and revolutionary. In 1947, for example, Castro participated in an invasion of the Dominican Republic. In 1948, when the meeting in Colombia of the Ninth International Conference of American States was attended by a large contingent of communist students, including Fidel, there were thousands killed in the Bogotazo riots. The bloody frenzy was touched off by the assassination of Liberal Party leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. Shortly before Gaitan's killing, Castro was seen in the presence of the assassin (who was himself killed); the communists were prepared to take advantage of the violence.
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On the eve of this May Day, Fidel Castro published some further reflections on energy, biofuels and sugar cane. oil. Fidel Castro's first deal with the Soviets was a sugar-for-fuel agreement, implemented immediately after the economic embargo was launched by the US in 1960. The embargo cut off Cuba's access to energy, so the revolutionary island state became entirely dependent on the Soviet Union which had to supply all of its fuels.
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Fidel Castro was married on December 12, 1948 to Mirta Díaz-Balart, a fellow student, whose father and brother were officials in the Batista regime. The marriage ended in divorce in 1955. Their son, Fidel, known as Fidelito, attended school in the united states and later studied at the University of Havana. According to Cuban exile sources, Castro was married again, in 1962, to Isabel Coto of Santiago.
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Fidel Castro came of age in a remote region of Cuba dominated by two sugar mills, the Preston and the Boston, owned by the United Fruit Company, a symbol of American dominance in Latin America. His father, Angel Castro, had come to Cuba to fight against the U.S. in the Spanish-American War. After Spain's defeat, Angel remained on the island and made a fortune growing sugar cane for the Americans. Though Angel Castro kept up good relations with his American neighbors, he likely harbored anti-American feelings in his Spanish soul.
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