US hopes for democratic transition post-Castro

Bush, speaking during a trip to Rwanda, urged the international community to help Cuba shift toward democracy, and said “the United States will help the people of Cuba realise the blessings of liberty”.

“The international community should work with the Cuban people to begin to build institutions that are necessary for democracy,” Bush said during a news conference with the President of Rwanda.

“Eventually, this transition ought to lead to free and fair elections — and I mean free, and I mean fair — not these kind of staged elections that the Castro brothers try to foist off as true democracy,” Bush said.

Fidel Castro had temporarily ceded his powers to his brother on July 31, 2006, when he announced that he had undergone intestinal surgery.

Bush received the news of Castro’s resignation by his national security adviser while traveling in Africa. He was expected to get a fuller briefing on the situation later in the day.

Meanwhile, Cuban exiles in Miami expressed quiet relief at Castro’s resignation on Tuesday but said their homeland had moved past the longtime leader and change was inevitable. The news that Castro would not seek a new term as president and military chief sparked no immediate celebrations in the streets of Little Havana, the community west of downtown Miami that is home to many of the city’s 650,000-strong exile community. “It’s very good that Fidel resigns. But if Fidel dies, it’s better,” said Juan Acosta, a Cuban who left the Caribbean island in 1980, as he stopped for a newspaper on Calle Ocho, Little Havana’s main street.

“The system there is almost over. You are seeing the end,” said Acosta, who like many Miami Cubans has relatives on the island, in this case his mother and sister.

“The dictatorship is over.”

The Cuban-American National Foundation, or CANF, a leading anti-Castro exile organisation, said Castro’s resignation “opens a new chapter in the history of the Cuban people.”

CASTRO’S CUBA

• 1953, July 26: Castro leads a force of 165 men against Moncada Barracks and the Bayamo garrison. Attacks fail with half of the rebels killed

•Fidel is imprisoned and sentenced for 15 years on the Isle of Pinos

• 1955, May 15:

Batista releases all political prisoners, including Castro, who emigrates to Mexico with other July 26 survivors

• July, Mexico City: Joins forces with Che Guevara and Cuban exiles to form the revolutionary “26th of July Movement”

• 1956, Nov 25: Castro, and 82 men including Guevara, sail to Cuba on the yacht “Granma”, intending to overthrow Batista and establish a revolutionary movement in the Sierra Maestra

• Dec 2: Arrives at Las Coloradas. Batista’s men intercept the group at Alegria del Pio killing the majority of them. Guevara is wounded Castro escapes to the Sierra Maestra where he develops his guerrilla warfare tactics

• Dec 21: Guevara’s group reunites with Castro. Only 15 fighters are left in rebel army

• 1958, April 1: Castro declares “total war” against the Batista regime. His guerrillas score many victories

• 1959, Jan 1: Batista flees to the Dominican Republic

• Jan 2: Fidel’s forces take Havana and later the city of Santiago.

A guerrilla force of 800 men had defeated a professional army of some 30,000 soldiers l1959, Feb 16: Castro becomes prime minister

• 1961, April 17: Invasion by 1,300 Cuban exiles, unofficially backed by the CIA, is defeated at the Bay of Pigs.

Declares himself a Marxist-Leninist. Wave of Cuban refugees begin to leave the country

• Dec 1961: Castro announces his plans to make Cuba a socialist nation. Later CIA Operation Mongoose attempts to kill him but fails.

Fidel-ities

• Fidel Castro was the world’s third longest-serving head of state, after Britain’s Queen Elizabeth and the King of Thailand. He was not been seen in public since illness forced him to hand over day-to-day control of the country to his brother Raul in July 2006.

•Castro holds the Guinness Book of Records title for the longest speech ever delivered at the United Nations: 4 hours and 29 minutes, on September 29, 1960. His longest speech on record in Cuba was 7 hours and 10 minutes in 1986 at the III Communist Party Congress in Havana.

•Castro claims he survived 634 attempts on his life, mainly masterminded by the Central Intelligence Agency. They allegedly included poison pills, a toxic cigar, exploding mollusks, and a chemically-tainted diving suit as well as powder to make his beard fall out so as to undermine his popularity.

• Castro, once a cigar-chomping guerrilla fighter, gave up cigars in 1985. Years later he summed up the harm of smoking tobacco by saying: “The best thing you can do with this box of cigars is to give them to your enemy.”

• Castro has eight children. His eldest son Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart, who is the image of his father and is known as Fidelito, is a Soviet-trained nuclear scientist. Daughter Alina Fernandez, the result of an affair with a Havana socialite when Castro was underground in the 1950s, escaped from Cuba disguised as a tourist in 1993 and is a vocal critic of her father’s rule from her Miami radio programme. Castro has five sons with his second wife Dalia Soto. Their names all begin with A.

•One of Castro’s pet projects was a cow called Ubre Blanca, or “White Udder”, that produced prodigious quantities of milk and became a propaganda tool for Cuba’s collectivized agriculture in the 1980s.