Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dead at 90

HAVANA — Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who led a rebel army to victory in Cuba, embraced Soviet communism and defied the power of 10 U.S. presidents during his half century rule, has died at age 90. Castro’s brother, current Cuban president Raul Castro, announced the death on state television late Friday night,

reported.

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"At 10.29 at night, the chief commander of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro Ruz, died," Raul Castro said. "Ever onward, to victory."

Fidel Castro, who overthrew the American-backed government of Fulgencio Batista government in January 1959, ruled Cuba as a one-party state for almost half a century before ill health forced him to relinquish his powers to Raul in 2008.

"He was a historic figure way out of proportion to the national base in which he operated," Cuba scholar Louis A. Perez Jr., author of more than 10 books on the island and its history, told

. "Cuba hadn't counted for much in the scale of politics and history until Castro," Wayne Smith, the top U.S. diplomat in Cuba from 1979 to 1982, told CNN. In Miami early Saturday, Cuban exiles took to the streets of Little Havana, honking car horns, banging utensils against pots and pans and cheering the death of the man who forced them to flee their homeland.

Orlando Guiterrez, founder of the Cuban Democratic Directorate in Miami, called Castro a "criminal," the

reported.

"I regret that this criminal never faced a tribunal for all the crimes he committed against his own people," he said. "This is a man who leaves a legacy of intolerance, of setting up a family-run dictatorship which had no tolerance for anyone who thought differently, who set up a vicious totalitarian regime where people were persecuted for the most slight deviation from official ideology."

Others, however, lauded the late Cuban leader.

"I am very upset. Whatever you want to say, he is public figure that the whole world respected and loved," Havana student Sariel Valdespino told

.

"I lament the death of Fidel Castro Ruz, leader of the Cuban revolution and emblematic reference of the 20th century," Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto wrote on Twitter.

Former ally and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev paid tribute, saying:

"Fidel stood up and strengthened his country during the harshest American blockade, when there was colossal pressure on him and he still took his country out of this blockade to a path of independent development."

“I formed a very good opinion of him," Gorbachev told the BBC. "We became firm friends and remained friends until the end."

During his reign, Castro weathered the U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year, the latter incident bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war. He also survived many assassination plots — more than 630, according to Cuba — imprisonment at the hands of Batista and exile in Mexico.

His rebellion, which began in the Sierra Maestra mountains of eastern Cuba, began disastrously but picked up steam, culminating in Castro’s triumphant entrance into Havana on Jan. 8, 1959. At age 32, Castro became the youngest leader in Latin America. Interviewed in 1958, he said that "there is not Communism or Marxism in our ideas."

Cox Media Group