He outlasted 10 US presidents, brought free medical care to a small island nation, suppressed dissidents and infuriated his opponents at home and abroad after overthrowing a dictatorship in 1959.

Fidel Castro, Cuba's larger-than-life former leader, has died aged 90, according to Cuba's state-run television. The news was confirmed by his brother, current President Raul Castro, on Saturday.

Having passed on the leadership of Cuba's single-party state to Raul in 2008, Fidel played a ceremonial role during his twilight years, showing up to meet foreign leaders in a track suit, rather than his trademark military fatigues, and writing treatises on global warming and economic inequality.

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Friends and foes agree he was one of the most iconic and shrewd politicians of the 20th century; a consummate survivor and wily tactician.

"He was reasonable, not domineering, as one might expect," Wayne Smith, a former US ambassador to Cuba who knew Fidel, told Al Jazeera.

"He would listen to you."

'Rich kid radical'

The son of a wealthy landowner, Castro was born in 1926 and studied law before pulling together a band of fellow revolutionaries with the aim of overthrowing Fulgencio Batista, Cuba's dictator who had extensive links to the American mafia and other business interests.

Smith believes that the political awakening of Castro, who benefited personally from a near-feudal system of governance on the island, was "a similar trajectory to a rich kid radical".

Although intellectually gifted, Castro had more interest in sports [particularly baseball] than formal school as a child.

"Fidel had a strong will. He was convinced that after Cuba got its independence [from Spain], his home country had been forced into a new dependence with the US," one of Castro's biographers, Volker Skierka, told Al Jazeera.

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As a child he "had a good relationship with his mother" but spent much of his life fighting his father's bourgeois influence, Skierka said.

His early political convictions, formed while studying at the University of Havana, seemed steeped in progressive nationalism, rather than traditional Marxism, according to his biographers.


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Captured in 1953 for assaulting a military base, Castro was sentenced to 15 years in jail. He defended himself during his trial, announcing that "history will absolve me". He was later released as part of a political amnesty.

Writing off Castro would be no easy feat.

"The first time his photo appeared in the New York Times was in 1956 to report that he was killed," Anthony R DePalma, a former New York Times reporter in Cuba and author of The Man Who Invented Fidel, told Al Jazeera.

Newspaper editors around the world would come to know his beard and cigars following the revolution's victory.

'Bearded, youthful figure'

After sailing back to Cuba from Mexico with a group of would-be revolutionaries in 1956, Castro, Che Guevara and other revolutionaries began launching attacks on military bases and transportation infrastructure, in a bid to end what they considered to be a corrupt and exploitative dictatorship.

"His bearded, youthful figure has become a symbol of the continent's rejection of brutality and lying and shoddiness," the UK's Guardian newspaper reported in 1959. "The new democracy [in Latin America] owes its existence largely to the courage of young idealists."

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Of the words used to describe the departed leader, "democrat" isn't usually one of them. Some believe the young Castro always harboured authoritarian tendencies - the desire to reshape history with one's own hands does not usually meld well with consensus, compromise and relinquishing power. Others think he was pushed towards the role of the strongman by external pressures and the need to defend the revolution from outside attacks.

After the revolution, Castro and Guevar

Source: Al Jazeera http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/spotlight/castro/2014/01/obituary-fidel-castro-201417114425611330.html