Even after nearly 50 years at the helm, Cuban President Fidel Castro remains an intriguing, if divisive figure.

As president of the first communist state in the Western Hemisphere, Fidel Castro is reviled by Washington and was for many years America's enemy number one.

Although the U.S. tried on several occasions to get rid of him, the cigar-smoking leader has so far outlasted no fewer than nine American presidents during his 47-year rule and managed to keep communism alive when the doctrine began crumbling in Europe.

Arguably, Castro's raison d'être was the revolution. From the outset, his speeches -- which were often several hours long -- were littered with revolutionary jargon.

"Only a revolution can affect the foundations and the pillars upon which a social order rest," proclaimed Castro in 1959.

However, although his 75-year-old brother Raul has long been his designated successor, many believe Cuba's Communist Revolution will not last much longer than Fidel.

Talk of Castro's mortality was taboo until June 23, 2001, when he fainted during a speech in the sun. Although Castro quickly recovered, many Cubans were for the first time hit with the realization that their leader would eventually die.

Castro shattered a kneecap and broke an arm when he fell after a speech on Oct. 20, 2004, but he has always laughed off rumours about his deteriorating health -- in particular a 2005 U.S. claim that he had Parkinson's disease.

Castro stunned Cubans when he announced on July 31 that he was temporarily relinquishing his leadership powers to his brother Raul after undergoing surgery to halt intestinal bleeding.   

"Fidel Castro's health has been in bad shape for a while," Cuban affairs analyst Professor John Kirk, of Dalhousie University in Halifax told CTV News.

"He's a 79-year-old person who drives himself mercilessly and his body is giving warning signals it's time to slow down."

The early years

The son of a prosperous plantation owner, Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz's was born on Aug. 13, 1926, although some say he was born a year later.

He was born out of wedlock in Mayari in the Oriente province where his father, Angel Castro y Argiz, had two children with his first wife and five with his cook, Lina Ruz Gonzalez. Fidel was Gonzalez's second child.

Fidel worked in his father's sugar cane fields and as a boy, he went to Roman Catholic schools before attending a Jesuit-run boarding school in Havana.

He went on to get a law degree at the University of Havana, where he read the works of Karl Marx and discovered his passion for politics.

Castro practiced law for a short period after graduation, but shocked by the contrast between his own middle-class lifestyle and the dire poverty of so many around him, he became a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary and a member of the Cuban People's Party.

The party -- called Ortodoxos in Spanish -- fielded Castro as a candidate in the 1952 elections.

However, former Cuban president General Fulgencio Batista cancelled the elections when he overthrew the government of then president Carolos Prio Socarras.

Rise to power

Castro opposed Batista's dictatorship and in 1953, he took up arms against the regime -- leading more than 100 followers in a failed attack on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba in July.

The failed coup, dubbed the '26th of July Revolutionary Movement,' resulted in Castro and his brother Raul being imprisonned.
 
Upon his release in 1955, Castro went to Mexico for a short time to continue a plot against Batista.

From there, he organized a guerrilla force which included Raul and legendary Argentine revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

Castro's revolutionary ideals attracted support in Cuba and in 1959, his followers overthrew Batista, whose regime had become a byword for corruption, decadence and inequality.

As Cuba's new leaders, Castro and Guevara promised to give the land back to the people and to defend the rights of the poor.

As head of the country's government, Castro took an anti-American stance and in 1960, he severed economic and political ties with the United States in favour of trade with the Soviet Union.

The Cold War years

Castro became a symbol of opposition to America and as such, became a key target of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, which plotted to assassinate him on several occasions, even attempting to poison one of his cigars.

In April 1961, the CIA backed a private army of some 1,300 Cuban exiles in an attempt to overthrow Castro's government.

The group landed at the Bay of Pigs on Cuba's southern coast, but they proved to be no match for Castro, whose own army stopped them in their tracks, killing many and capturing hundreds.

The following year, U.S. reconnaissance planes discovered Soviet missiles on their way to sites in Cuba.

The confrontation, known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, brought Russia and the United States to the brink of nuclear war.

Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev stood eyeball-to-eyeball with U.S. President John F. Kennedy, but it was Krushchev who eventually decided to withdraw the missiles in return for a secret withdrawal of U.S. weapons from Turkey.

After Cuba broke ties with the U.S., the Soviet Union became Cuba's biggest benefactor, buying  most of the island's sugar harvest while in return, Soviet ships brought desperately needed goods to trump the U.S. blockade.

However, the steady stream of subsidies came to an abrupt end when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Moscow pulled the plug on the Cuban economy by refusing to buy its sugar any more, leaving the country to fend for itself and bringing economic hardship to Cubans. 

Exodus

Chronic food shortages, queues and empty shelves on the island were inevitable and by the mid-1990s, many Cubans had had enough.

In a crushing vote of no-confidence in their leader, thousands fled on boats or rafts to Florida, where many drowned during the journey.

Even Castro's own daughter Alina Fernandez said she prefered living in exile in Miami to living under her "despotic" father's rule.

With the official Cuban salary standing at just $15 per month and even basic items such as soap almost impossible to come by, the black economy thrived, with many Cubans selling whatever they could.

Cutting ties with the Soviets forced Castro to allow greater openness in the island's economic and civil life, which in turn opened the door to a range of outside influences in Cuba.

The church played a more prominent role in day-to-day-life and in 1998, Pope John Paul II visited Cuba -- a move that would have been highly unlikely in previous years.

Foreign investment and tourism grew in the 1990s as did the black market to compensate for the loss in aid from the Soviet Union.

Castro engineered a relationship with oil-rich Venezuela and his friend Hugo Chavez, which saw Cuba receive cheap Venezuelan oil in exchange for sending Cuban-trained doctors to Venezuela.

Cuba under Castro's rule has also made impressive domestic advances.

Good medical care is freely available for all, literacy stands at 98 per cent, and Cuba's infant mortality rates compare favourably with western nations.

While many Cubans undoubtedly despise Castro, others genuinely worship him for being what they see as the 'David' who stood up to the 'Goliath' of the United States.

Life after Castro

Three weeks after taking power in January 1959, Castro named Raul his successor, telling supporters: "Behind me are others more radical than I.''

As first vice-president of Cuba's supreme governing body, the Council of State, 75-year-old Raul is legally designated to assume his brother's role as president in the event of "absence, illness or death.''

While Fidel headed up many of the mass protests in Havana, it was Raul, dressed in his olive green uniform and a full head shorter than his brother, who lead tens of thousands of chanting, flag-waving citizens in the provinces.

"Raul is more pragmatic than his brother but definitely far less charismatic," Cuban affairs analyst Professor John Kirk told CTV News.

Like his brother, Raul has been suspicious of the United States and at a September 1960 rally denounced the U.S. Embassy as "a cave of spies.''

Yet, in one rare interview in early 2001, Raul spoke with unusual frankness about his older brother's eventual death and encouraged the United States to make peace with Cuba while Fidel was still alive.

"I am among those who believe that it would be in imperialism's interest to try, with our irreconcilable differences, to normalize relations as much as possible during Fidel's life,'' Raul said in the interview with state television.

The New Yorker reported recently that Fidel was angustiado -- literally, "anguished" -- over his advancing years, and obsessed by the idea that socialism might not survive him.

As a result, the Cuban leader launched his last great fight, which he called the Battle of Ideas, to "reengage Cubans with the ideals of the revolution, especially young Cubans who came of age during what he called the Special Period."

However, many Cubans regard the Battle of Ideas as a spectacle they must tolerate but which is irrelevant to their lives, The New Yorker said, adding that most of them do not earn enough money to eat well, much less live comfortably. 

"The tension between the public Cuba of rallies and tribunals and this hidden one is growing, and a number of Cubans and American officials fear that the pent-up chaos could erupt into open unrest upon Castro's death -- looting, rioting, and revenge killings."