In 1878 he was working as the manager of the newspaper El Álbum when he participated along with a group of independence advocates in the seizure of San Cristóbal when they refused to submit to the authority of the new president of the state.

It was during the burial of a fellow fighter, Evaristo Jaimes, who had been killed in the earlier fighting that Castro met Juan Vicente Gómez, his future companion in his rise to power.

His nine years of despotic and dissolute rule are best known for having provoked numerous foreign interventions, including blockades and bombardments by Dutch, British, German, and Italian naval units seeking to enforce the claims of their citizens against Castro's government.

In 1901 the banker Manuel Antonio Matos was the leader of the Liberating Revolution,[2] a major military movement with the intention to overthrow Cipriano Castro's government.

[4] In November 1902, the troops at command of Castro himself broke the Siege of La Victoria, weakened the vast network of revolutionaries armies and its extraordinary power.

Few weeks after that, Venezuela saw a naval blockade of several months imposed by Britain, Germany and Italy[5] over Castro's refusal to pay foreign debts and damages suffered by European citizens in the recent Liberating Revolution.

The blockade saw Venezuela's small navy quickly disabled, but Castro refused to give in, and instead agreed in principle to submit some of the claims to international arbitration, which he had previously rejected.

When the world press reacted negatively to incidents including the sinking of two Venezuelan ships and the bombardment of the coast, the U.S pressured the parties to settle, and drew attention to its nearby naval fleet in Puerto Rico at command of Admiral George Dewey.

This led to the signing in Washington of an agreement on 13 February 1903 which saw the blockade lifted, and Venezuela represented by U.S. ambassador Herbert W. Bowen commit 30% of its customs duties to settling claims.

The revolutionaries, bearing a wound that could not be healed, succumbing finally in July 1903 in the Battle of Ciudad Bolivar after the siege of government army conducted by General Gomez, with which Matos decides to leave Venezuela, establishing itself in Paris.

[9] In 1906, Castro punished the international firms involved in the Revolution to the point that diplomatic relations were broken with the United States and then with France due to debt differences.

In it, Paredes called on the Venezuelan diaspora to join together to oust Castro from power, accusing him of stealing millions from the national treasury and using mercenary force to impede the government.

Few days later, Castro, who had been seriously ill for four years due to a kidney problem,[13] left for Paris to seek medical treatment for syphilis, leaving the government in the hands of vice president Juan Vicente Gómez, the man who was instrumental in his victories of 1899 and 1903.

Relying on allied merchants and ranchers, the Gómez assumed command as dictator, counting on the support of multiple opponents of Castro regime and foreign governments with interests in Venezuela.

At the end of 1912 Castro intended to spend a season in the United States, but was captured and vexed by the immigration authorities of Ellis Island which forced him to leave in peremptory terms (February, 1913).

[15] Hs brother Celestino Castro as Provisional president of the Tachira state (11.8.1900), is appointed commander-in-chief of the government forces in charge of combating the invasion of the General Carlos Rangel Garbiras from Colombia (July 1901) and assumes the role of commander of San Cristobal in the battle that culminates in the defeat of the invaders (26.7.1901).

He keeps to brother scrupulously informed of the events on the border, taking care to recruit and send troops to the center of Venezuela that help fight the forces of the Liberating Revolution (1902–1903).

During his presidency, northern Venezuela was struck by the powerful 1900 San Narciso earthquake, which caused widespread material damage in Miranda State and in the Venezuelan capital Caracas.

[21] The earthquake led him to consider changing the official residence to a building with anti-seismic structure, which occurred in 1904, when he transferred the Presidential House to Miraflores Palace, becoming its first occupant.