Ramón Eusebio Castro Ruz was the eldest brother of Fidel and Raúl Castro and a key figure of the Cuban Revolution.
Background
Ramón, the eldest of the Castro brothers, the son of Angel Castro, a Spanish-born rancher, and his second wife, Lina Ruz, attended Roman Catholic schools as a boy and then studied engineering at the University of Havana and returned home to manage the family farm in Birán in rural Oriente Province. He remained there and looked after his mother–his father died in 1956–during the revolution that brought his brother Fidel to power in 1959.
Career
He also established and maintained pipelines from the cities to the troops in the field He also manufactured an alcohol-based fuel for Cuba during a gasoline shortage. He later said he led a network of 1,200 men: "All of them were thieves.
We stole things for the war." After the revolution, the 87.6 km2 (338 sq mi) family farm that employed 400 people and produced sugar cane, oranges, cattle and lumber, along with its core 26 buildings became legal property of the state.
He was allowed to retain 4 km2 (15 sq mi). He was occasionally at odds with the new government.
In November 1959, after Fidel denounced the newspaper Prensa Libre for opposing the revolution, Ramon came to the newspaper"s defense. A year later he was attacked for his role in the Cuba Cane Growers Association, an organization that had been dissolved for its association with United States. interests before the revolution and a lack of enthusiasm for the revolution after it succeeded.
Before that season"s harvest concluded, he called for raising wage rates for 200,000 laborers on private sugar cane farms to match those paid on cooperative farms.
He worked as a consultant to government ministries and founded the state-owned companies that managed the production of oranges and the transportation of sugarcane. he was one of the founders of the Communist Party of Cuba in 1965 and served as a deputy in the National Assembly, the Cuban legislature. He studied and implemented improved production techniques in sugarcane and dairy farming. In the 1990s, he helped facilitate the importation of cattle from Florida, which led to the creation of a new breed of cattle.
Of his brother"s fame he said: "Fidel has one ambition.
I have another. Mine is the street. I am free, and he"s in a kind of a prison." Castro died on 23 February 2016.
His death was announced in Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party.
Politics
His thing is political. In 2007, when Fidel was recovering from surgery, Ramon told an interviewer that he "is doing very well, protected by the socialist saints.