7 Fidel Castro 7

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 took Castro

by surprise and meant the end of generous Soviet subsi-

dies to Cuba. Castro countered the resulting economic

decline and shortages of consumer goods by allowing some

economic liberalization and free-market activities while

retaining tight controls over the country’s political life.

In 2003 the National Assembly confirmed Castro as

president for another five-year term. On July 31, 2006,

while recovering from surgery, Fidel Castro passed power

on a provisional basis to his brother Raúl. It was the first

time since the 1959 revolution that he had ceded control.

In February 2008, just days before the National Assembly

was to vote for the country’s leader, Fidel Castro offi-

cially declared that he would not accept another term

as president.

Che Guevara

(b. June 14, 1928, Rosario, Argentina—d. October 1967, Bolivia)

E

rnesto “Che” Guevara, a noted theoretician and tac-

tician of guerrilla warfare, played a major military

role in the Cuban Revolution of the late 1950s. After his

execution by the Bolivian army, he was regarded as a mar-

tyred hero by generations of leftists worldwide, and his

image became an icon of leftist radicalism and anti-

imperialism.

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was the eldest of five chil-

dren in a middle-class family of Spanish-Irish descent and

leftist leanings. Although suffering from asthma, he

excelled as an athlete and a scholar, completing his medi-

cal studies in 1953. He spent many of his holidays traveling

in Latin America, and his observations of the great pov-

erty of the masses convinced him that the only solution

lay in violent revolution. He came to look upon Latin

America not as a collection of separate nations but as a