11 October 2017 - FIDEL CASTRO

FIDEL CASTRO

G'day folks,

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was a Cuban revolutionary and politician who governed the Republic of Cuba as Prime Minister from 1959 to 1976 and then as President from 1976 to 2008.

Cuban leader Fidel Castro (1926-2016) established the first communist state in the Western Hemisphere after leading an overthrow of the military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959. He ruled over Cuba for nearly five decades, until handing off power to his younger brother Raúl in 2008. During that time, Castro’s regime was successful in reducing illiteracy, stamping out racism and improving public health care, but was widely criticized for stifling economic and political freedoms. Castro’s Cuba also had a highly antagonistic relationship with the United States–most notably resulting in the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The two nations officially normalized relations in July 2015, ending a trade embargo that had been in place since 1960, when U.S.-owned businesses in Cuba were nationalized without compensation. Castro died on November 25, 2016, at 90.

Fidel Castro: Early Years 

Castro was born on August 13, 1926, in Birán, a small town in eastern Cuba. His father was a wealthy Spanish sugarcane farmer who first came to the island during the Cuban War of Independence (1895-1898); his mother was a domestic servant for his father’s family who bore him out of wedlock. After attending a couple of Jesuit schools–including the Colegio de Belén, where he excelled at baseball–Castro enrolled as a law student at the University of Havana. While there, he became interested in politics, joining the anti-corruption Orthodox Party and participating in an aborted coup attempt against the brutal Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo.

 In 1950, Castro graduated from the University of Havana and opened a law office. Two years later, he ran for election to the Cuban House of Representatives. The election never happened, however, because Batista seized power that March. Castro responded by planning a popular uprising. “From that moment on, I had a clear idea of the struggle ahead,” he said in a 2006 “spoken autobiography.”

Castro’s Revolution Begins 

In July 1953, Castro led about 120 men in an attack on the Moncada army barracks in Santiago de Cuba. The assault failed, Castro was captured and sentenced to 15 years in prison, and many of his men were killed. The U.S.-backed Batista, looking to improve his authoritarian image, subsequently released Castro in 1955 as part of a general amnesty. Castro ended up in Mexico, where he met fellow revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara and plotted his return.

The following year, Castro and 81 other men sailed on the yacht “Granma” to the eastern coast of Cuba, where government forces immediately ambushed them. The estimated 18 survivors, including Castro, his brother Raúl and Guevara, fled deep into the Sierra Maestra Mountains in southeastern Cuba with virtually no weapons or supplies.

 According to Castro, the revolutionaries started reorganizing with only two rifles, but by early 1957 they were already attracting recruits and winning small battles against Rural Guard patrols. “We’d take out the men in front, attack the center, and then ambush the rear when it started retreating, in the terrain we’d chosen,” Castro said in his spoken autobiography. In 1958, Batista tried to snuff out the uprising with a massive offensive, complete with air force bombers and naval offshore units. The guerrillas held their ground, launched a counterattack and wrested control from Batista on January 1, 1959. Castro arrived in Havana a week later and soon took over as prime minister. At the same time, revolutionary tribunals began trying and executing members of the old regime for alleged war crimes.

Castro’s Rule 

In 1960, Castro nationalized all U.S.-owned businesses, including oil refineries, factories and casinos. This prompted the United States to end diplomatic relations and impose a trade embargo that still stands today. Meanwhile, in April 1961, about 1,400 Cuban exiles trained and funded by the CIA landed near the Bay of Pigs with the intent of overthrowing Castro. Their plans ended in disaster, however, partially because a first wave of bombers missed their targets and a second air strike was called off. Ultimately, more than 100 exiles were killed and nearly everyone else was captured. In December 1962, Castro freed them in exchange for medical supplies and baby food worth about $52 million.

 Castro publicly declared himself a Marxist-Leninist in late 1961. By that time, Cuba was becoming increasingly dependent on the Soviet Union for economic and military support. In October 1962, the United States discovered that nuclear missiles had been stationed there, just 90 miles from Florida, setting off fears of a World War III. After a 13-day standoff, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove the nukes against the wishes of Castro, who was left out of the negotiations. In return, U.S. President John F. Kennedy publicly consented not to reinvade Cuba and privately consented to take American nuclear weapons out of Turkey.

Cuban Life under Castro 

After taking power, Castro abolished legal discrimination, brought electricity to the countryside, provided for full employment and advanced the causes of education and health care, in part by building new schools and medical facilities. But he also closed down opposition newspapers, jailed thousands of political opponents and made no move toward elections. Moreover, he limited the amount of land a person could own, abolished private business and presided over housing and consumer goods shortages. With political and economic options so limited, hundreds of thousands of Cubans, including vast numbers of professionals and technicians, left Cuba, often for the United States.

 From the 1960s to the 1980s, Castro supplied military and financial aid to various leftist guerilla movements in Latin America and Africa. Nonetheless, relations with many countries, with the notable exception of the United States, began to normalize. Cuba’s economy foundered when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s and the United States expanded sanctions even further. Yet Castro, who by this time had switched his title from prime minister to president, found new trading partners and was able to cling to power until 2006, when he temporarily gave control of the government to Raúl after undergoing emergency intestinal surgery. Two years later, in 2008, he permanently resigned.

In 2015, U.S. and Cuban officials announced they had agreed to terms on the normalization of relations between the two nations, with mutual embassies and diplomatic missions opening in each country.

 Castro died on November 25, 2016, at the age of 90. His death was announced on state television and later confirmed by his brother Raúl. 

Clancy's comment: I've read that he survived more than 600 assassination attempts; most by the CIA.

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22 July 2016 - GENERAL FRANCO

GENERAL FRANCO

G'day folks,

I guess most of you have heard about this man. Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teódulo Franco Bahamonde, more commonly known as Francisco Franco, was a Spanish general and the Caudillo of Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975.

Francisco Franco led a successful military rebellion to overthrow the Spanish democratic republic in the Spanish Civil War (1936—1939), subsequently establishing his lasting dictatorship.

Synopsis

Born in El Ferrol, Spain, in 1892, Francisco Franco was a career soldier who rose through the ranks until the mid-1930s. When the social and economic structure of Spain, in the governing hands of the left, began to crumble, Franco joined the growing right-leaning rebel movement. He soon led an uprising against the Republican government and took control of Spain following the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). From then until his 1975 death, he presided over a repressive military dictatorship.

Military Bloodlines

Francisco Franco was born on December 4, 1892, in El Ferrol, Spain, a north western port city with a long history of shipbuilding. The men in his family had served in the navy for generations, and the young Franco expected to follow in their footsteps. However, the economic and territorial aftermath of the Spanish-American War led to a reduction in the navy, and after completing his primary education at a Catholic school, Franco was forced to enlist at the Infantry Academy at Toledo instead. He graduated three years later with below-average marks. 

After an initial posting to El Ferrol, Franco volunteered to serve in Spain’s recently acquired protectorate Morocco, where the country’s native population was staging a resistance to Spain’s occupation. Stationed there from 1912 to 1926, Franco distinguished himself with his fearlessness, professionalism and ruthlessness and was frequently promoted. By 1920 he had been named second in command of the Spanish Foreign Legion, and three years later took full command. He also married during this period, to Carmen Polo y Martínez Valdéz, with whom he had one daughter.

In 1926, Franco’s role in suppressing the Moroccan rebellion earned him an appointment as general, which, at age 33, made him the youngest man to hold that post in all of Europe. Two years later he was also named director of the General Military Academy in Zaragoza, a position he would hold until three years later, when political changes in Spain would temporarily halt Franco’s steady rise.

Unrest

In April 1931, general elections led to the ousting of King Alfonso XIII, whose military dictatorship had been in place since the early 1920s. The moderate government of the Second Republic that replaced it led to a reduction in the power of the military, which resulted in the closing of Franco’s military academy. However, it also led to a deepening, often violent, social and political unrest in Spain, and when new elections were held in 1933, the Second Republic was replaced by a more right-leaning government and Franco returned to a position of power, which he wielded the following year in a ruthless suppression of a leftist revolt in north western Spain. 

But like the Second Republic before it, the new government could do little to quell the growing divide between left- and right-leaning factions in the country, and when elections held in February 1936 led to a shift in power to the left, the country slipped further into chaos. For his part, Franco was once again marginalized, with a new posting to the Canary Islands. Though Franco accepted what amounted to banishment with the professionalism for which he was known, other high-ranking members of the military began to discuss a coup. 

The Spanish Civil War

Though he initially kept his distance from the plot, on July 18, 1936, Franco announced the Nationalist manifesto in a broadcast from the Canary Islands as the uprising began in the northwest of Spain. The next day, he flew to Morocco to take control of the troops, and shortly thereafter gained the support of both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, whose planes were used to shuttle Franco and his forces to Spain. Establishing his base of operations in Seville the following month, Franco began his military campaign, advancing north toward the seat of the Republican government in Madrid. Anticipating a swift victory, on October 1, 1936, the Nationalist forces declared Franco head of the government and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. However, when their initial assault on Madrid was repelled, the military coup evolved into the protracted conflict known as the Spanish Civil War.

 Over the next three years, the Nationalist forces—led by Franco and backed by right-wing militias, the Catholic Church and Germany and Italy—battled the left-wing Republicans, who received aid from the Soviet Union, as well as brigades of foreign volunteers. Though the Republicans were able to resist the Nationalist advance for a time, with far-superior military strength Franco and his forces were able to systematically and mercilessly defeat them, eliminating their opposition region by region. 

By the end of 1937, Franco had conquered the Basque lands and the Asturias and had also combined the fascist and monarchist political parties to form his Falange Española Tradicionalista while dissolving all others. In January 1939, the Republican stronghold of Barcelona fell to the Nationalists, followed two months later by Madrid, and on April 1, 1939, after receiving an unconditional surrender, Francisco Franco announced the end of the Spanish Civil War. Sources vary, but many estimate the number of casualties resulting from the war as high as 500,000, with perhaps as many as 200,000 the result of executions perpetrated by Franco and his forces. 

El Caudillo

For nearly four decades following the conflict, Franco—who became known as El Cedillo (the Leader)— would rule Spain through a repressive dictatorship. Immediately following the war, military tribunals were held that led to tens of thousands more being executed or imprisoned. Franco also outlawed unions and all religions except for Catholicism, as well as banning the Catalan and Basque languages. To enforce his power over Spain, he established a vast network of secret police.

However, five months after taking control of the country, Franco’s rule and Spain’s position in the international community were further complicated by the start of World War II. Initially declaring Spain’s neutrality, Franco was ideologically sympathetic to the Axis powers and met with Adolf Hitler to discuss the possibility of Spain joining them. Though Hitler ultimately rejected Franco’s conditions—which he deemed far too high—Franco would later send some 50,000 volunteers to fight alongside the Germans against the Soviets on the Eastern Front as well as opening Spain’s ports to German ships and submarines. 

When the tide of the war turned began to turn against the Axis powers in 1943, Franco once more declared Spain’s neutrality, but in the aftermath of the conflict his former allegiances were not forgotten and Spain was ostracized by the United Nations, placing significant economic strain on the country. However, circumstances changed with the advent of the Cold War, when Franco’s status as a staunch anti-communist led to economic and military assistance from the United States in exchange for the establishment of several military bases in Spain. 

Valley of the Fallen

Over time, Franco began to relax his control of Spain, removing some of the restraints of censorship, instituting economic reforms and promoting international tourism while at the same time maintaining his position as its head of states. In 1969, amidst a period of declining health, he also named his successor, Prince Juan Carlos, whom he believed would maintain the political structure that Franco had established and rule as a king. However, two days after Franco’s death on November 20, 1975, Juan Carlos I set about dismantling Spain’s authoritarian apparatus and reintroduced political parties in the country. In June 1977, the first elections were held since 1936. Spain has remained a democracy ever since. 

Francisco Franco was buried in a massive mausoleum at the Valley of the Fallen, constructed by Franco—with the use of forced labor—as a monument to the dead of the Spanish Civil War. In the decades since Franco’s rule, it has been the subject of frequent controversy, with many advocating for the removal of his remains. But amidst the often-fractured political environment in post-Franco Spain, the site remains more or less unchanged.

 

Clancy's comment: Another powerful figure in history.

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