Sarah Marsh
Raul Castro, who is retiring from high public office, for most of his life toiled in the shadow of his older brother, Fidel Castro. Yet he also played a key role in Cuba’s 1959 leftist revolution and the preservation of Cuban socialism.
While Fidel was the charismatic leader who rallied Cubans to defend the revolution and defy the United States, Raul, 89, built the military into a formidable fighting force that saw off enemies including a US-backed invasion at the Bay of Pigs.
Later, after the fall of former benefactor the Soviet Union sent Cuba into an economic tailspin and left it politically isolated, he launched market-style reforms to its centralised economy and sought to normalise relations with Western powers.
But he leaves office amid an economic crisis that has caused shortages of even basic goods and is threatening the universal access to quality healthcare and education hailed by supporters of Cuban socialism as among the most important achievements of the revolution.
Former US president Donald Trump unravelled a detente Castro reached with his predecessor Barack Obama and tightened the decades-old US trade embargo. The rollout of Internet has fuelled internal dissent.
Still, some thirty years after the end of the Cold War, Cuba remains one of the last Communist-run countries in the world. “Always preferring the supportive role to his brother and carrying out that role brilliantly, Raul eventually had to take on Fidel’s leadership himself at a time when the revolution showed every sign of faltering,” said Hal Klepak, a Canadian historian living in Havana who wrote a book on Raul’s military life.
“That it is still there, wounded and shaken but still there, in the face of massively powerful forces out to destroy it, is no small part a result of his leadership.”
Raul backed Fidel in his revolution against the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista since the beginning in 1953, when they led a failed assault on the Moncada military barracks. An early admirer of communism, it was Raul and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine-born doctor turned Marxist revolutionary, who persuaded Fidel to seek support from the Soviet Union.
But he was also quick to launch reforms to move Cuba away from a Soviet-style command economy
after the fall of the Berlin Wall plunged the Caribbean island nation into economic crisis.
First he established thriving enterprises within the armed forces — which now control much of the economy. — Reuters
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