72-CW-5500 REVOLUTIONARIES AND PLANTATION OWNERS

Fidel Castro (actually Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz) was born in 1926 in the Cuban city of Biran, and died in 2016 in Havana. He was a Latin American revolutionist and de facto leader of Cuba from 1959-2008. Fidel Castro was a lawyer by profession, realizing himself in this profession in the late 1940s. In 1952 he was elected to the Cuban House of Representatives, which, however, was dissolved in a coup d'état organized by General Fulgencio Batista. In the same year, Fidel Castro began forming partisan units. Captured, imprisoned and released under an amnesty in 1955, he went to Mexico, where he formed the July 26 Movement, which ultimately brought down Batista's dictatorship and the victory of the Communist Revolution in Cuba in 1959, making Fidel Castro its leader. During his very long rule (1959-2008), he carried out an agrarian reform, organized economic life in the Soviet fashion, repressed the political opposition and was guided by the slogans of Marxism-Leninism. All this led to a significant impoverishment of the Cuban people. In foreign policy, it was based on the USSR during the Cold War and supported revolutionary actions in various parts of the globe. It also survived the Bay of Pigs invasion (1961) and the Cuban crisis (1962). He died on November 25, 2016.Che Guevara (actually Ernesto Guevara) was born in 1928 in the Argentine city of Rosario, and was killed in 1967 in Bolivia. He was a Latin American revolutionist and writer. He came from a family belonging to the Argentinean middle class, which, however, showed considerable left-wing political sympathies, quite clearly affecting the young Ernesto. The future revolutionary graduated from medical studies at the University of Buenos Aires and shortly afterwards, in 1953, left Argentina. He went down in history as a supporter of the Cuban Revolution, which he actively supported and participated in, and which led to the seizure of power in Cuba by Fidel Castro in 1959. After the victory of the communist revolution on the island, he became a member of the government, acting, inter alia, as the minister of agriculture. In 1965, he went to Congo to support the local revolution, and a year later he went to Bolivia - also with the aim of supporting the guerrilla fights taking place there. There he was captured by pro-government troops and murdered on October 9, 1967. Despite many critics, he is seen as one of the symbols of the 1968 youth revolution and a kind of revolutionary ideal.