WASHINGTON -- What the CIA couldn't do with exploding seashells, poison cigars and chemicals to make his beard fall off, Fidel Castro has done alone. He removed himself from a world stage that he seemed to dominate for nearly 50 years.
So compelling was this 6-foot-3-inch, Jesuit-trained former lawyer that he inspired and drove revolutionary movements across Central America and Africa.
He twisted American policymakers into such awkward knots that the United States has maintained severe economic sanctions against Cuba, and at the same time a naval station on the island's southeastern tip, housing the most notorious alleged terrorists in captivity at Guantanamo Bay.
"He survived paramilitary invasions, assassination attempts, trade embargoes, travel bans, diplomatic isolation. He stood up to 10 American presidents, all of whom to some degree were dedicated to doing him in," said Peter Kornbluh, a Cuba specialist with the nonpartisan National Security Archive in Washington.
Castro has been at the center of some of the most notable U.S. adventures and misadventures of the past half-century: the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion fiasco and the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the world to the edge of nuclear war in 1962; proxy wars in Central America and Africa; the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada against Cuban defenders; the Iran-contra affair and the CIA's long and unsuccessful obsession with using underworld gangsters to assassinate him.
"Few issues have challenged ... our nation longer than the situation in Cuba," President Bush said in a speech last fall.
If there is an emblematic image of the Cold War, it might well be the beard, military cap and jaunty cigar of Castro.
"And the ego!" said Vicki Huddleston, a retired ambassador who led the U.S. Interests section in Havana from 1999 to 2002. Castro, she said, "is driven by ego and power. Everything he does is very calculated."
Seizing power from a tottering dictatorship in 1959, Castro initially was seen as a Robin Hood figure who sought to eradicate Cuba's extremes of wealth and poverty. But his socialist goals clashed with powerful U.S. economic interests in Cuba and the region.
"The American government became an obstacle to some of the changes he wanted to make," said Warren Cohen, professor of U.S. foreign relations at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
