Fidel Castro resigned as president and commander-in-chief of Cuba, the online version of the official daily Granma said today.

"I will neither aspire to nor will I accept — I repeat — I neither will aspire to nor will I accept, the position of president of the council of state and commander-in-chief," Castro wrote, according to Granma. "My only desire is to fight as a soldier for my ideas."

Castro, 81, had been in power for almost 50 years after seizing power in Cuba almost a half-century ago promising liberty and economic justice only to turn the Caribbean island into a communist bastion and a flashpoint of the Cold War.

In July 2006, he handed control to his brother Raul after undergoing surgery to treat an intestinal ailment.

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Castro, a lawyer by training, ruled the nation of 11 million people since the 1959 revolution. Over the decades, he boosted literacy and health care for the island's poor, while imprisoning thousands of dissidents, seizing private property and sparking an exodus of Cubans who braved treacherous, shark-infested waters on rickety, homemade boats to flee for the U.S.

The Cuban leader took his place on the world stage at the height of the Cold War by making his country an outpost of the Soviet Union only 90 miles from Florida. In Latin America and Africa, Castro gave military and political support to revolutionary groups and Marxist governments for more than three decades after taking power.

He pushed the superpowers toward nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and turned the nation into the region's strongest military power until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Castro is "a monument to the practical art of political survival," said Robert Muse, a Washington attorney who specializes in international trade and the U.S. economic embargo on Cuba.

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