The Political Beliefs Of Fidel Castro

Abstract

The significance of this cultural research paper regarding Fidel Castro is to enlighten on his life, motives, and significant parts of his political reign. The information depicted here is to help expand knowledge and opinions on capitalist and communist governments, and to show how violent governments affect their peoples. This reflectance on Fidel Castro may even help the reader develop a more intellectual opinion on the current nuclear crisis with North Korea. This paper is framed out to highlight Fidel’s background, his early life and education, inspirations, and motivations for his political beliefs, how Fidel came into power, what Fidel organized during his leadership of Cuba, his infringements of human rights, and his death.

With this realization of the inequalities, Fidel Castro began to strongly resent the current Cuban political leaders, American business owners in Cuba, and the upper classes. One of Fidel’s earliest and biggest inspirations for his political beliefs is Jose Marti. Jose Marti was a Cuban national hero and famous Latin American writer, many of his works centralized on Cuban independence from Spain. Jose Marti is one of the centralized characters for the reasoning behind Fidel being a Cuban Nationalist (Montaner, 2001). Another huge inspiration to Fidel Castro was Karl Marx. Karl Marx was a philosopher, political theorist, economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Karl Marx is the founder of Marxism, a socioeconomic platform that supports classless, stateless, and communistic society (Murguia, 2011). Fidel also referred to Leninism. Leninism proposes a vanguard party and dictatorship to construct socialism. Fidel gains ultimate inspiration from these and is a Marxist-Leninist, a state of socialism, under a vanguard party, derived from the aware working class (Chambers Dictionary of World History,

On February 13, 1959, Castro is officially deemed as the Prime Minister of Cuba, and later he declares his revolution to be socialist. Fidel Castro believed that the reason so many Cubans lived in poverty at the time was due to capitalism and corrupted government, so obviously Fidel decided to take Marxism-Leninism route with the country. After nationalizing lands of the wealthy and American business owners, America cuts off ties with Cuba. This eventually leads to the Bay of Pigs, a failed attempt of the US trying to seize Cuba. Fidel then becomes allies with the USSR, and they install ballistic missiles on the island, leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1961, Fidel began to serve as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba (Helicon, 2016). Contrary to popular belief, Fidel actively chose the communist route for Cuba. Over time, the idea of Fidel being pressured and pushed to communism by the Soviet Union in exchange for military protection and economic help has been popularized. Cuba became the first communist state established in the Western Hemisphere. The Cuban Missile Crisis thankfully never broke out into war, and ended with the USSR taking their ballistic missiles out of Cuba in exchange for the United States never trying to seize Cuba again (Helicon,