Raul Castro has played an important role in Cuban politics for decades since his older brother, iconic revolutionary Fidel Castro, took power in 1959, but he has largely remained in the shadows.
When Fidel Castro fell ill in mid-2006, Raul took leadership of the communist island and proved capable of firmly maintaining the established party direction while also undertaking some economic, political, and diplomatic reforms.
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Raul officially became the president of the country in February 2008, and in April 2011, he took over the leadership of the Communist Party. As a firm but not as dazzling substitute for the charismatic Fidel, Raul Castro embarked on a mission of irreversible “updating” of the Cuban socialist economy.
A father of four from his marriage to the late revolutionary Vilma Espin (1930-2007), Raul is known as a pragmatic manager with both feet firmly on the ground.
When he became president, this general of the Cuban army claimed that Cubans faced an “economic” battle and that their survival depended on their willingness to correct decades-old mistakes.
“Either we correct them or we sink. There is no time to stand on the edge of the cliff,” he said in 2010.
He opened the doors to moderate private entrepreneurship, but he still left the reins of management of strategic parts of the economy firmly in the hands of the state.
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Family restaurants, food stores, film and music shops, and workshops for repairing household appliances sprang up and are now part of Cuba’s entrepreneurial landscape. In addition, private sales of houses and cars are legally permitted in Cuba, citizens can own mobile phones, exchange text messages, and farmers can own arable land.
In December 2014, he negotiated with then U.S. President Barack Obama the release of a significant number of political prisoners in exchange for the establishment of diplomatic relations, severed for more than five decades.
Raul was the one who made global headlines when the United States and Cuba restored ties, and Obama visited Havana in July 2015.
However, Cuban-American relations froze again when Donald Trump entered the White House, whose administration returned to familiar paths of anti-Cuban rhetoric and reintroduced travel and business restrictions with the island.
From Jesuits to Communists
Raul Castro was born on June 3, 1931, in the town of Birán in the east of the country to a family of Spanish immigrants and attended, like Fidel, a Jesuit school. As a young man, he joined the People’s Socialist Party, which had Moscow as its model.
He fought alongside his brother in the Cuban revolution that began with a failed coup in 1953, which landed him in prison, after which he was amnestied.
After exile in Mexico, the Castro brothers returned to Cuba in 1956 with about eighty supporters on the Granma yacht and led a guerrilla war that ended in 1959 with the flight of dictator Fulgencio Batista.
After the revolution, Raul commanded the liquidation of Batista’s supporters and is believed to be responsible for waves of political purges that lasted for years.
As one of the longest-serving defense ministers in the world, Raul built the Cuban army, with the support of the USSR, into one of the strongest in Latin America.
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He commanded the Cuban ground forces in the conflict against Cuban emigrants who, with U.S. support, attempted to overthrow Fidel Castro in the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
Raul was tasked with transforming the Cuban government into a Soviet-style regime and is believed to be responsible for the placement of Soviet nuclear missiles in 1962, which triggered the Cuban Missile Crisis and brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
As he prepared to inherit his ailing brother, critics, especially the Cuban emigration in Florida, claimed that Raul was a greater Marxist than Fidel, that he was more capricious and sharper than him.
Those milder observers, on the other hand, described him as neat, organized, and approachable.
Raul Castro avoids the spotlight, and his aides claim he is sensitive and humorous.
Raul announced last year that he would step down when his second term expires in 2018, and he is expected to be succeeded by his deputy Miguel Diaz-Canel.
