Fidel Castro, Cuba's former president and leader of the Communist revolution, has died aged 90, state TV has announced.

Fidel Castro ruled Cuba as a one-party state for almost half a century before handing over the powers to his brother Raul in 2008, reported BBC.

His supporters praised him as a man who had given Cuba back to the people. But his opponents accused him of brutally suppressing opposition.

In April, Fidel Castro gave a rare speech on the final day of the country's Communist Party congress.
He acknowledged his advanced age but said Cuban communist concepts were still valid and the Cuban people "will be victorious".

"I'll soon be 90," the former president said, adding that this was "something I'd never imagined".
"Soon I'll be like all the others, "to all our turn must come," Fidel Castro said.

However, Castro lived long enough to see a historic thaw in relations between Cuba and the US.

President Barack Obama announced in December that the US would re-establish diplomatic relations with Cuba and urged Congress to lift a 52-year-old economic embargo.

Cuban President Raul Castro - who took over from his ailing brother more than eight years earlier - announced the breakthrough to the nation, but observers noted Fidel's silence on the matter.

Castro's stage was a small island nation 90 miles from the underbelly of the US, but he commanded worldwide attention.

"There are few individuals in the 20th century who had a more profound impact on a single country than Fidel Castro had in Cuba," Robert Pastor, a former national security adviser for President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, told CNN in 2012.

"Castro reshaped Cuba in his image, for both bad and good," said Pastor, who died in 2014. "Cuba will be a different place because he lived and he died," he stated.

It was a bearded 32-year-old Castro and a small band of rough-looking revolutionaries who overthrew an unpopular dictator in 1959 and rode their jeeps and tanks into Havana, the nation's capital.

They were met by thousands upon thousands of Cubans fed up with the brutal dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and who believed in Castro's promise of democracy and an end to repression.

Castro became famous enough that he could be identified by only one name. A mention of "Fidel" left little doubt who was being talked about.

No other nonroyal ruler clung to power as long as Castro did for 47 years, until an intestinal illness that required several surgeries forced him to temporarily relinquish his duties to younger brother Raul in July 2006.

Castro resigned as president in February 2008 and Raul took over permanently.

At the height of the Cold War, Castro used a blend of charisma and repression to install the first and only Communist government in the Western Hemisphere, less than 100 miles from the US.

Cuba and the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations on May 8, 1960, further eroding the relationship with the US.

Castro, who had long blamed many of Cuba's ills on American influence and resented the US role in hemispheric politics, quickly intensified cooperation with the Soviet Union, which began sending large subsidies.

One Castro or another has ruled Cuba over a period that spans seven decades and 11 US presidents. Fidel Castro outlived six of those presidents, including Cold War warriors John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.