Fidel Castro (1926-2016)
Batista took power in a coup d’etat on March 10, 1952, to prevent the general election that was supposed to take place—and which he was certain to lose—on June 1 of the same year. By late 1956, a little over two years before Batista was overthrown, Castro’s 26th of July Movement, named after the day of his failed armed attack in 1953, had begun to emerge as the hegemonic pole of opposition to the dictatorship.
In the first couple of years after the revolution, Fidel Castro cemented his overwhelming popular support with a radical redistribution of wealth that later turned into a wholesale nationalization of the economy that included even the smallest retail establishments. This highly bureaucratic economy led to very poor performance which was greatly aggravated by the criminal economic blockade that the United States imposed on Cuba as early as 1960. It was the massive Soviet aid that Cuba received that made it possible for the regime to maintain an austere standard of living that guaranteed the satisfaction of the most basic needs of the population, especially education and health.
Under his leadership, the Cuban one-party state was established in the early 1960s and was legally sanctioned by the Constitution adopted in 1976. The ruling Communist Party uses the “mass organizations” as transmission belts for the party’s “orientations.” When these “mass organizations” were originally established in 1960, all the previously existing independent organizations that could have potentially competed with the official institutions were eliminated.
