Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary leader who built a communist state on the doorstep of the United States and for five decades defied US efforts to topple him, died on Friday, state-run Cuban Television said. He was 90.
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Castro had been in poor health since an intestinal ailment nearly killed him in 2006.
The bearded Fidel Castro took power in a 1959 revolution and ruled Cuba for 49 years with a mix of charisma and iron will, creating a one-party state and becoming a central figure in the Cold War. He governed the country as Prime Minister and later President.
He was a dogged survivor, politically and personally. He was demonised by the United States and its allies but admired by many leftists around the world, especially socialist revolutionaries in Latin America and Africa.
But he was reputedly the target of several CIA assassination attempts.
A former Cuban intelligence chief told Reuters the closest attempt on Castro's life was in 1963, with a poison pill intended to be dropped in a chocolate milkshake.
Other plots included poisoned cigars for his famous vice, and a diving wet suit laced with toxins.
Transforming Cuba from a playground for rich Americans into a symbol of resistance to Washington, Castro outlasted nine US presidents in power.
He fended off a CIA-backed invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961.
His alliance with Moscow helped trigger the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, a 13-day showdown with the United States that brought the world the closest it has been to nuclear war.
Wearing green military fatigues and chomping on cigars for many of his years in power, Castro was famous for long, fist-pounding speeches filled with blistering rhetoric, often aimed at the United States. Castro holds the record for the longest speech ever delivered to the United Nations: 4 hours and 29 minutes in 1960, according to the UN website. One of his longest speeches on record lasted 7 hours and 30 minutes in 1998 after the national assembly re-elected him to a five-year term as president.
In Cuba, he swept away capitalism and won support for bringing schools and hospitals to the poor. But he also created legions of enemies and critics, concentrated among Cuban exiles in Miami who fled his rule and saw him as a ruthless tyrant.
In the end it was not the efforts of Washington and Cuban exiles nor the collapse of Soviet communism that ended his rule. Instead, illness forced him to cede power to his younger brother Raul Castro, provisionally in 2006 and definitively in 2008. At the time he was the world's third longest-serving head of state, after Britain's Queen Elizabeth and the King of Thailand.
Although Raul Castro always glorified his older brother, he has changed Cuba since taking over by introducing market-style economic reforms and agreeing with the United States in December to re-establish diplomatic ties and end decades of hostility.
Six weeks later, Fidel Castro offered only lukewarm support for the deal, raising questions about whether he approved of ending hostilities with his longtime enemy.
Barack Obama commenced two years of secret talks in 2012 that would eventually led to the restoration of diplomatic relations in 2014. The warming ties culminated in a three-day visit by Mr Obama to Havana in March this year - the first by a US president since before the revolution.
"Havana is only 90 miles from Florida, but to get here we had to travel a great distance - over barriers of history and ideology; barriers of pain and separation," Mr Obama said at the time.
In his final years, Fidel Castro no longer held leadership posts. He wrote newspaper commentaries on world affairs and occasionally met with foreign leaders but he lived in semi-seclusion.
His death - which would once have thrown a question mark over Cuba's future - seems unlikely to trigger a crisis as Raul Castro, 85, is firmly ensconced in power.
Reuters with Dan Flitton
