Background

Raúl Modesto Castro Ruz was born on June 3, 1931, in Birán, Cuba to the family of Ángel María Bautista Castro y Argiz and Lina Ruz Gonzalez. The sixth of seven children born to a Spanish landowner and his Cuban wife of Canarian origin, Raúl Castro grew up on his father's farm.

Education

Raúl Castro attended Catholic school with his older brother, Fidel Castro. They were both eventually expelled for bad behavior. They both later attended the Jesuit School of Colegio Dolores in Santiago and Belen Jesuit Preparatory School in Havana. Castro later went to the University of Havana, although he is not believed to have received a degree. As a young man, Raúl Castro studied social sciences. Unlike his brother, Raúl proved to be a mediocre student, however, and after leaving school, he went to work in his father's fields. He also joined a socialist youth group and, with Fidel, began to take part in protests and other political activities.

Career

In 1953, Raúl Castro aided Fidel in an attempt to unseat the repressive Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, but the two brothers ended up in prison after a failed attack on a military base. When they were eventually pardoned and released in 1955, they fled to Mexico, where they planned their return to Cuba for the following year, when they would try, once again, to overthrow the Batista regime.

For the next few years, Castro assisted his brother in many ways, including leading a group of the movement's guerrilla fighters. Finally, in 1959, Batista fled Cuba, and Fidel assumed power. Castro was soon appointed head of the armed forces and subsequently ordered the execution of 100 of Batista's military officers, among others, earning himself a reputation early on as a hard-line communist.

As Fidel Castro's second in command, Castro held numerous government posts and played a significant part in the shaping of Cuba's political history. In addition to heading the military, Castro served as the country's defense minister from 1959 to 2008, during which time he had a key role in the events leading to the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1962 he was appointed deputy prime minister and in 1972 he became the first deputy prime minister. He also served as first vice president of the council of the state and the council of ministers, and when the collapse of the Soviet Union led to the economic fallout in Cuba, Castro implemented reforms to help the country recover.

It was long assumed that Castro would eventually succeed Fidel as Cuba's leader. In October 1997, Fidel officially named Castro his successor, and over the course of the decade that followed, Castro quietly began to assume more responsibilities. In 2006, Fidel placed Raúl Castro in charge of the Cuban government while he underwent surgery for gastrointestinal bleeding. It was the first time that Fidel had officially ceded power, and it spurred speculation that Fidel's health was in decline. Two years later, in February 2008, Fidel Castro officially resigned as Cuba's leader, and five days later Castro was chosen by the National Assembly to be the country's new president.

Despite his reputation as a dedicated communist, Raúl Castro went on to implement numerous social, economic, and political reforms, including the lifting of restrictions on commerce and travel for its citizens, allowing for the privatization of portions of military and government infrastructure and opening the country to foreign investment. These were part of an ambitious economic initiative that included 300 distinct reforms, many of which seemed to run counter to the economic policies established by Fidel Castro as part of the Cuban Revolution. In 2011, Raúl Castro also instituted a two-term limit for the office of president (each term is five years), and when he was reelected in 2013, he announced his plans to leave politics at the end of his second term.

In December 2013, Raúl Castro and American president Barack Obama were photographed shaking hands following a memorial service for South African president Nelson Mandela, offering evidence that decades of political tensions between the United States and Cuba might be abating. This was confirmed the following December when both Castro and Obama announced that they were working to normalize diplomatic relations, underlining these efforts by exchanging political prisoners.

In July 2015 the Cuban embassy reopened in Washington, D.C., for the first time in 54 years, and the following month an American embassy was reestablished in Havana. Previously, each country only had what was referred to as a "special interest section" in the other country.

It was revealed that the detente between Cuba and the United States had been initiated by Pope Francis, who in the fall of 2014 wrote separate letters to each leader in which he encouraged the presidents to "resolve humanitarian questions of common interest." The Pope then hosted a delegation from each country in a secret meeting at the Vatican in October, paving the way for a restoration of relations.

In September 2015, Castro hosted Pope Francis, the third pope to visit Cuba, for a papal tour named the Mission of Mercy. The visit made headlines for many reasons, not the least of which was the goodwill shared by the president and the pope. Castro even joked that he might even return to the church under the pope's influence.

On November 25, 2016, Castro announced on Cuban state television the death of his brother Fidel at the age of 90. He ended his announcement with a revolutionary slogan: "Towards victory, always!"

Despite his many notable achievements, Raúl Castro stressed that he did not want to follow in his brother's footsteps by holding office for decades. During a late 2015 state visit to Mexico, Castro reiterated his intentions to resign in 2018, telling the Mexican president and press, "I will not become the great-grandfather nor the great-grandson because otherwise, Cubans would get bored of me."

Castro followed through with his promise in 2018, stepping aside to allow a National Assembly vote for his hand-picked successor, Miguel Díaz-Canel. With Díaz-Canel's April confirmation, Cuban leadership fell outside the control of a Castro brother for the first time in nearly 60 years, though Castro was expected to remain head of the Communist Party for the foreseeable future.

Achievements

• Raúl Castro played a pivotal role in the 26th of July Movement, which brought his brother Fidel Castro to power in 1959. Castro has made his own very distinctive mark on the island's history with a program of economic reforms, an easing of travel restrictions, and the restoration of diplomatic relations with the United States. The reforms have allowed small new businesses to bloom, notably restaurants, guesthouses, and stalls.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Cuba y Angola: Luchando por la libertad de África y la nuestra 2013

Religion

Raúl Castro was baptized Roman Catholic but due to his political ideology became a non-practicing one. After a meeting with Pope Francis in Vatican City on 10 May 2015, Castro said that he would conditionally consider returning to the Roman Catholic Church. He said in a televised news conference, "I read all the speeches of the pope, his commentaries, and if the pope continues this way, I will go back to praying and go back to the [Roman Catholic] church. I am not joking." The pope visited Cuba before his September 2015 visit to the United States. Castro said: "I promise to go to all his Masses and with satisfaction," when Pope Francis visited Cuba in 2015. Castro considered Christ a communist stating, "I think that's why they killed Jesus, for being a communist, for doing what Fidel defined as revolution... changing the situation."

Politics

Raúl Castro is deeply committed to the political primacy of the Communist Party of Cuba, which he helped develop and institutionalize. He also forged strong links with the Soviet Union and traveled there in 1962 to seek arms for Cuba's armed forces.

A handshake between Raúl and United States President Barack Obama in December 2013, at a memorial for South African leader Nelson Mandela, seemed to offer symbolic new hope for improved Cuban-United States relations. Roughly a year later, in December 2014, after 18 months of secret negotiations fostered by Canada and the Vatican, Raúl and Obama stunned the world with the announcement that Cuba and the United States would be normalizing relations that had been suspended in January 1961. Both leaders appeared before national television audiences to make the announcement, though Raúl downplayed it somewhat as he emphasized the necessity of removing the United States economic, commercial, and financial blockade of Cuba, which, because it was codified by United States law, was beyond the scope of Obama's executive authority and would require congressional action.

In July 2015, more than 50 years after they severed diplomatic relations, the United States and Cuba officially reopened their embassies in each other’s capital. Cuba-United States relations warmed further in March 2016 when Obama became the first sitting United States president to visit the island in more than 80 years. The rapprochement between the two countries also included the loosening of travel and economic restrictions. Nonetheless, in the wake of Obama's visit, Raúl remained wary of American influence on Cuba, cautioning that the United States was using its advocacy of the country’s growing private sector to undermine the Cuban system. In his speech to the Cuban Communist Party Congress in April, Raúl alternated between criticism of Cubans who had been resistant to the changes he had overseen and a warning not to rush headlong into change. To the disappointment of some younger party members who thought the time had come for a new generation to lead the country, the Congress opted for Raúl and his 85-year-old lieutenant, Jóse Ramón Machado Ventura, to lead the party into the next five-year period. Raúl already had indicated, however, that he planned to step down from the presidency in 2018.

Views

An avowed Marxist, Raúl Castro nevertheless demonstrated greater interest in economic reform than his older brother did. In the mid-1980s he allowed the Cuban army to experiment with reforms in several state-owned enterprises controlled by the military. The positive results gave him ample evidence to argue for greater reform when the collapse of Soviet subsidies provoked an economic crisis on the island. Thought to be the more-traditional communist of the two Castro brothers, Castro supported many of the economic and agricultural reforms that helped to partially revive the failing Cuban economy in the mid-1990s.

During his first few months as the leader of Cuba, Castro implemented various reforms, most notably the removal of wage restraints that had been in place in Cuba since the early 1960s. Other reforms included allowing Cubans to purchase cellular phones and personal computers, as well as to stay at hotels formerly reserved for foreigners. In September 2010 Castro went even farther when he declared increased official toleration of private enterprise and announced that some 500,000 government employees would be laid off. In 2011 he succeeded Fidel as secretary-general of the Communist Party of Cuba. In August of that year, Castro oversaw the introduction of still more reforms, including a significant reduction in the role of the state in several important economic sectors, yet another round of massive layoffs of government workers, and the removal of a number of travel restrictions.

In 2012 Castro declared that "the members of the generation who made the revolution have had the historic privilege of correcting the errors that they themselves have made."

Among the most important reform measures, Castro introduced was the liberalization of restrictions regulating Cuban travel abroad. The long-standing requirement of obtaining official authorization for foreign travel was suspended, as was the requirement of a letter of invitation from a person or an institution abroad. The new terms of travel also increased the maximum length of time residents could remain away from the island to two years - or longer. Moreover, expatriate Cubans could return to the island and reside for periods as long as three months at a time.

Enabling Cubans to take up temporary residence abroad to obtain employment generated a new stream of foreign exchange for the country, and remittances (which originated largely from Cuban American communities) developed into one of Cuba’s principal sources of hard currency. Castro’s economic reforms continued to enlarge the scope of the country’s increasingly mixed economy, with the number of state-operated enterprises that were transferred to private ownership growing markedly.

Castro began to advance political reforms cautiously, and, by the July 2013 arrival of the 60th anniversary of the assault on the Moncada Barracks, the long-awaited generational transition within the leadership of the Communist Party and government appeared to have commenced. In his speech commemorating the anniversary, Castro acknowledged that more than 70 percent of the Cuban population had been born after the triumph of the revolution. He noted that the "Historic Generation" of men and women who had participated in the toppling of the Batista government in 1959 was "yielding to the new [generation] with tranquility and serene confidence, based on [its] preparation and demonstrated capacity to uphold the banners of the Revolution and Socialism." Among the most-notable personnel changes was the appointment of 52-year-old Miguel Díaz-Canel to replace the 82-year-old José Ramón Machado Ventura as first vice president, the designated successor to Castro.

Personality

Castro has a sharp wit and while he typically avoids the hours-long discourses, both public and private, that characterized his brother's leadership, he does not shy away from elaborating on his political and philosophical views at length, whether in speech or writing. In a 2008 interview with the American actor and activist Sean Penn, Castro joked, "When Fidel finds I have spoken to you for seven hours, he will be sure to give you seven and a half when you return to Cuba."

Interests

• Sport & Clubs

  baseball

Connections

In January 1959, Raúl Castro married Vilma Espín, a woman who was part of the Castros' revolution and acted as a messenger for them when they were exiled in Mexico. Raúl and Vilma were together until her death in 2007, during which time they had three daughters and one son: Déborah, Mariela, and Nilsa, and Alejandro.

Father:

Ángel María Bautista Castro y Argiz

Mother:

Lina Ruz Gonzalez

Brother:

Fidel Castro Ruz

Wife:

Vilma Lucila Espín Guillois

Daughter:

Déborah Castro

Daughter:

Mariela Castro

Daughter:

Nilsa Castro

Son:

Alejandro Castro Espín

colleague:

Che Guevara

Acquaintance:

Barack Obama

Acquaintance:

Pope Francis

References

• A Contemporary Cuba Reader: The Revolution under Raúl Castro
  2014
• Young Castro: The Making of a Revolutionary
  2019
• Revolutionary Cuba: A History
  2014
• The Guerrilla Legacy of the Cuban Revolution
  2019
• Heroes, Martyrs, and Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba, 1946-1958
  2018
• The Cuban Revolution: A Captivating Guide to the Armed Revolt That Changed the Course of Cuba, Including Stories of Leaders Such as Fidel Castro, Chè Guevara, and Fulgencio Batista
  2019
• After Fidel
  2007
• This Is Cuba: An American Journalist Under Castro's Shadow
  2018
• Raúl Castro and the New Cuba: A Close-Up View of Change
  2011
• Cuban Foreign Policy: Transformation under Raúl Castro
  2018
• My Brothers Fidel and Raul
  2016