Cuba's revolutionary leader and former president Fidel Castro passed away at the age of 90.
The news of his death was announced by Cuban President Raul Castro, who took over from his ailing brother more than eight years earlier, Cuban state media reports.
Robert Pastor, a former national security adviser for president Jimmy Carter, had said in 2012 that there are few individuals in the 20th century who had a more profound impact on a single country than Fidel Castro had in Cuba.
"He reshaped Cuba in his image, for both bad and good. Cuba will be a different place because he lived and he died," Pastor said.
"He was a historic figure way out of proportion to the national base in which he operated," CNN quoted scholar Louis A. Perez Jr., author of more than 10 books on the island and its history, as saying.
In 1959, Castro along with a small band of revolutionaries overthrew an unpopular dictator Fulgencio Batista and rode their jeeps and tanks into Cuba's capital Havana.
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Cubans believed in Castro's promise of democracy and an end to repression as they were fed up with the brutal dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.
An intestinal illness that required several surgeries forced Castro, who had been in power for 47 years, to hand over his duties temporarily to younger brother Raul in July 2006.
Raul took over permanently as the President after Fidel's resignation in February 2008.