Re: [CubaNews] REUTERS: Facts about Cuba's Fidel Castro

[IbuAlaIna98@xxxxxxx]

Fact check?? Fidel was only head of the armed forces after the 1959 revolution, later becoming prime minister (a former Batista judge was president), and not until 1975 was he made president [head of state] with a reform in Cuba's Constitution. - Lowell
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Facts about Cuba's Fidel Castro

Wed Aug 13, 2008 12:00pm EDT



Aug 13 Reuters) - The following are some facts about former Cuban leader

Fidel Castro, who turned 82 on Wednesday.



* Fidel Castro led Cuba for 49 years and was the world's third

longest-serving head of state, after Britain's Queen Elizabeth and the King

of Thailand. He has not been seen in public since illness forced him to hand

over day-to-day control to his brother Raul Castro in July 2006. The

transfer of power was formalized in February, when the National Assembly

elected Raul Castro as president.



* Castro holds the Guinness Book of Records title for the longest speech

ever delivered to the United Nations: 4 hours and 29 minutes, on September

29, 1960. His longest speech on record in Cuba was 7 hours and 10 minutes in

1986 at the III Communist Party Congres
s in Havana.



* Castro claims he survived 634 attempts on his life, mainly masterminded by

the Central Intelligence Agency. They allegedly included poison pills, a

toxic cigar, exploding mollusks, and a chemically-tainted diving suit as

well as powder to make his beard fall out so as to undermine his popularity.



* Despite the CIA plots, a U.S.-backed exile invasion at the Bay of Pigs and

four and a half decades of economic sanctions, Castro outlasted nine U.S.

presidents, from Eisenhower to Clinton, and faced increased hostility under

President George W. Bush, who tightened enforcement of financial sanctions

and a travel ban.



* Castro, once a cigar-chomping guerrilla fighter, gave up cigars in 1985.

Years later he summed up the harm of smoking tobacco by saying: "The best

thing you can do with this box of cigars is to give them to your enemy."



* Castro has at least eight children. His eldest son Fidel Castro

Diaz-Balart, who is the image of his father and is known as Fidelito, is a

Soviet-trained nuclear scientist. Daughter Alina Fernandez, the result of an

affair with a Havana socialite when Castro was underground in the 1950s,

escaped from Cuba disguised as a tourist in 1993 and is a vocal critic of

her father's rule. Castro has five sons with his second wife Dalia Soto.



(Reporting by Anthony Boadle and Jeff Franks; Editing by Kieran
 Murray)



=========================================

WALTER LIPPMANN

Los Angeles, California

Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/

"Cuba - Un ParaÃso bajo el bloqueo"

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