By: Jerry Moore
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Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz , ( born August 13,
1926) is a Cuban communist revolutionary and
politician, having held the position of Prime
Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976, and then
President from 1976 to 2008. He also served as
the First Secretary of the Communist Party of
Cuba from the party's foundation in 1961 until
2011.
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On the international stage, he also served as the
Secretary-General of the Non-Aligned
Movement from 1979 to 1983 and 2006 to 2008.

Castro subsequently became Commander in
Chief of the armed forces and shortly thereafter
became Prime Minister. The United States was
alarmed by his involvement in the overthrow
of Batista and relationship with Soviet Premier
Nikita Khrushchev, implementing an economic
blockade of the island. U.S. President Dwight
D. Eisenhower also ordered the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) to overthrow him,
which they unsuccessfully tried through
multiple assassination attempts and the failed
Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961.
The Bay of Pigs Invasion was an unsuccessful
action by a CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles to
invade southern Cuba, with support and
encouragement from the US government, in an
attempt to overthrow the Cuban government of
Fidel Castro. The invasion was launched in April
1961, less than three months after John F. Kennedy
assumed the presidency in the United States. The
Cuban armed forces, trained and equipped by
Eastern Bloc nations, defeated the invading
combatants within three days.
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The Cuban missile crisis—known as the October
crisis in Cuba and the Caribbean crisis (Russian:
Kарибский кризис) in the USSR—was a 13-day
confrontation between the Soviet Union and Cuba
on one side and the United States on the other; the
crisis occurred in October 1962, during the Cold
War. In August 1962, after some unsuccessful
operations by the US to overthrow the Cuban
regime (Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose), the
Cuban and Soviet governments secretly began to
build bases in Cuba for a number of mediumrange and intermediate-range ballistic nuclear
missiles (MRBMs and IRBMs) with the ability to
strike most of the continental United States.