Former Cuban President and Revolutionary Icon Fidel Castro Passes away at the Age of 90

Havana, November 26, 2016: Former Cuban President Fidel Castro who embraced Soviet-style communism and defied the power of 10 US Presidents during his 50 years of rule, has died at the age of 90.

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According to PTI, on Friday night, Raul Castro, his younger brother, announced with a shaking voice that Fidel Castro is no more and he passed away at 10:29pm.

• Fidel Castro was born August 13, 1926, in the eastern Cuba's sugar country, where his immigrant Spanish father worked for US sugar companies and later on built up his own prosperous plantation.

• Castro's reign was marked by the US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 over the island-nation 90 miles from Florida. A year later, in 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of a nuclear war.

• The revolutionary icon survived more than hundreds of assassination plots, but died after suffering for eight years due to ill health, and it forced him to formally hand power over to his brother, Raul Castro.

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• For decades, he was as an inspiration and a source of support to revolutionaries from Latin America to Africa.

• Castro's commitment to socialism was unwavering, in 2008, he had to hand over the presidency to Raul, at first provisionally and then permanently due to his ill health.

• Castro was committed to the Moto of "Socialism or death" even when Western-style democracy swept the other communist regimes across the globe, also in China and Vietnam.

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• His life as that of a rebel started in 1953 with a reckless attack on Moncada military barracks in the Santiago's eastern city.

prepared by NewsGram with inputs from different agencies