Fidel Castro retires
Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro stepped down on Tuesday 49 years after taking power in an armed revolution, closing the book on a Cold War career that turned him into a leftist icon and a tyrant to his foes.
Castro, 81, who has not appeared in public since undergoing stomach surgery almost 19 months ago, said he would not seek a new term as president or leader of Cuba's armed forces when the National Assembly meets on Sunday.
His retirement raised expectations for change on the communist island, but Cuba experts said limited economic reforms were more likely than swift political change.
President George W. Bush, who has tightened the decades-old economic embargo against Castro's government, said his retirement ought to begin a democratic transition.
Cuba's National Assembly, a rubber-stamp legislature, is expected to nominate Castro's brother and designated successor Raul Castro as president. The 76-year-old defense minister has been running the country since emergency intestinal surgery forced his older brother to delegate power on July 31, 2006.
Raul Castro has promoted more open debate about the failings of Cuba's command economy, but he is unlikely to make bold political changes to the one-party state. Fidel Castro will remain influential as first secretary of the ruling Communist Party.
Cubans on the quiet streets of Havana were not surprised by Castro's retirement, first announced on Granma's Web site in the middle of the night.
In Miami, the heartland of exiled opposition to the Castro brothers, reaction was subdued.
European governments said Castro's retirement could open the door to democratic change.
The charismatic Castro led the bearded and cigar-chomping guerrillas who swept down from the mountains of eastern Cuba to overthrow U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959.
He then turned Cuba into a communist state on the doorstep of the United States and became the world's longest-serving head of state, barring monarchs.
Castro survived a CIA-backed invasion of Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, as well as assassination attempts, the continuing U.S. trade embargo, and an economic crisis in the 1990s after the collapse of Soviet bloc communism.
He played a key role in taking the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1962 when he let Moscow put ballistic missiles in Cuba, leading to a 13-day stand-off between U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.
Famous for his long speeches delivered in green military fatigues, Castro is admired in the Third World for standing up to the United States but considered by his opponents a dictator who suppressed freedom.
Supporters point to Cuba's advances in health and education for all its citizens. Critics, led by the United States and the hundreds of thousands of Cubans who live abroad, say he turned the island into a police state and wrecked its economy.
Castro was close to death in 2006 and has looked gaunt and frail in the few videotapes of him broadcast since his surgery, but Cuba's leadership has showed no sign of collapse.
Frank Mora, a political scientist at the National War College in Washington, said Castro's successors will likely be forced to head down paths that he would disapprove of.
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