In April 2018, it was announced that the island nation long ruled by dictator Fidel Castro and his family would get a new leader: Miguel Díaz-Canel. For nearly 60 years, the Castro family controlled Cuba. But in April 2018, it was announced that the island nation long dominated castro valley independent the specter of its former dictator, Fidel Castro, and his family will get a new leader.

On April 19, 2018, the 86-year-old Raúl Castro will step down and Miguel Díaz-Canel, his handpicked successor, will become president and head of state. This will be the first time Cuba has had a non-Castro in power since the Cuban Revolution rocked the island more than half a century ago—and it’s been a bumpy ride. Since taking power in 1959, the Castros have overseen both revolution and modernization, becoming some of the most divisive figures of their time. In 1953, the son of a wealthy Spanish sugarcane farmer burst into Cuba’s national consciousness when he helped lead what he hoped would be a successful uprising against Cuba’s new dictatorship.

Fidel Castro, then a young attorney with a flair for politics, wanted all of Cuba to rise up against Fulgencio Batista, who had deposed Cuba’s president the year prior. By the time he was released two years later, Fidel was ready for full-scale revolution. He went to Mexico with Raúl and formed the 26th of July Movement, a revolutionary guerrilla group that included Ché Guevara. Beginning in 1956, they fought Batista’s military until, on January 1, 1959, Batista admitted defeat and fled Cuba. After a short-lived turn in Cuba’s provisional government, Fidel took over. Fidel Castro, with his brother Raul seated next to him, at his first press conference in Havana July 27, 1959 since resuming the duties of Prime Minister of Cuba. It was the beginning of 57 years of rule.

As Cuba’s dictator, Fidel Castro oversaw sweeping reforms, including modernizing the country’s electrical grid, providing free education and healthcare, and creating full employment as Cuba became a communist state. But these changes came at an overwhelming price. Private business became a thing of the past. Public protest, the free press, and political opposition were brutally suppressed. And free elections became a distant memory. As the years went on and Fidel aligned himself more and more closely with the Soviet Union, Cuba became not only economically dependent on the fate of the USSR, but embargoed and shunned by its enemies, like the United States.

1961, and sparked Fidel’s ire during the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, in which a group of 1,400 American-recruited, -funded, and -trained Cuban exiles attempted to invade the island only to be overtaken by Castro’s forces. Over 1,100 were taken prisoner, and another 114 were killed in the conflict, which lasted less than 24 hours. Meanwhile, Fidel was using his relationship with the Soviet Union to bolster his military. After a tense, two-week-long standoff, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove nukes from the island in an exchange for a promise that the U. In private, the nations also agreed that the U. The nuclear war the world feared might break out during those two tense weeks had failed to materialize—but it did little to reduce Fidel’s hatred of the United States. This newspaper map from the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis shows the distances from Cuba of various cities on the North American Continent.

As the years of Fidel’s dictatorship dragged on, so did the trade embargo with the United States. In the meantime, Cuba’s regime-controlled economy stagnated. Despite economic problems at home, Fidel pumped money into communist rebellions abroad. And in the early 1990s, disaster struck when the Soviet Union collapsed. Suddenly, the Russian-dependent economy was on the brink of famine. By then, hundreds of thousands of Cubans had already fled the country. They left during four waves of Cuban exile.