Fidel Castro Read online

  Ángel had taken a liking to the island and decided to try to make something of himself in Cuba, which he did. Ultimately, he would amass land and a near-fortune. “No one would ever say that my father was a millionaire … although he was very well-to-do and had a solid financial position,” Fidel said. “Although in that poor, suffering society we children were treated like the children of rich people … a lot of people would come up to us and be nice out of pure self-interest, although we really never realized that.”

  The political events, still decades before Fidel’s birth, were the building blocks of what came to define Fidel. His father’s leaving Spain was just a start.

  Not having amassed much in his mother country, Angel built up his life in the next decade in Cuba. Within 10 years he was a landowner, and in 1911, he married for the first time. When the marriage failed by the mid 1920s, he left his first wife and five children, and took off with the family cook. This woman, Lina Ruz Gonzalez, originally from the Canary Islands, would give Ángel an additional seven children—Fidel the third-born.

  While Ángel and Lina started their life and family together in the ’20s, they would not legally marry until 1943—again, not exactly fitting with the mindset of the times. It seems Ángel never planned to marry Lina, but the very Catholic Lina pushed for it. Once Angel’s first marriage was officially and finally over, almost 20 years after he left his first wife, he no longer had a choice.

  So, it would seem that Fidel’s urge to rebel had come from both his father and his mother, who, even as a Catholic, had managed to have an illicit union and family for 20 years, when one could well imagine this was not how she had been raised. But while all sources indicate Fidel had a close relationship with his mother, his relationship with his father was “at arm’s length.” Fidel said, “Home represented authority and that got my dander up, and the rebel spirit in me began to emerge.”

  It has been reported that Fidel was somewhat rambunctious as a youth, which was what, in part, prompted his parents to send him off to boarding school. Why had Fidel given his parents such a hard time?

  “I had several reasons for being [a rebel],” he said. “Faced with certain Spanish authoritarianism, and even more so the particular Spaniard [his father] giving the orders … it was authority, respect in general … I didn’t like authority, because at that time there was also a lot of corporeal punishment, a slap on the head or a belt taken to you—we always ran the risk, even though we gradually learned to defend ourselves against it.”

  So the early “injustice” Fidel experienced in his home was not at all about poverty, but about authority, another entity he would grow to rise against. The more educated he became, the more his rebellious streak began to turn into more of a defining trait.

  The push for education had come mostly from his mother. Lina came from nothing in every way, and she wanted her children to have everything she did not have. Education, even for Fidel’s sisters, was a vital part of that plan. Fidel said, “My mother was practically illiterate, and, like my father, she learned to read and write practically on her own. With a great deal of effort and determination, too. I never heard her say that she’d gone to school. She was self-taught. And extraordinarily hard-working woman, and there was nothing that escaped her attention …”

  Fidel reported that his relationship with his mother was close and that she was outwardly more loving and affectionate with the children, but “she didn’t spoil us, though. She was a stickler for order, savings, cleanliness … Nobody knew how she got the time and energy to do everything she did. She never sat down. I never saw her rest one second of the whole day.”

  When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Fidel was just shy of 10 years old. At the time, he was home in Birán for a summer break and he learned about the war by reading the newspaper to the cook, Manuel Garcia. Castro recalled: “It had been a pro-Spanish newspaper since the War of Independence and it was the most right-wing of any newspaper that ever existed in the country down to the triumph of the Revolution … I would read it to Garcia for hours on end.”

  So by age 10, Fidel was already starting to understand the difference between the establishment and the rebellion; between keeping the status quo and forging for progress; and the position of the Nationalists, supported by the likes of Hitler and Mussolini, and the driving force behind the Spanish Republic. And he was already beginning to form his opinions—seeds of ideas began to take root and grow. He acquired the facts by reading the papers to Garcia, but then processed the information on his own.

  By this time, thanks to the corporeal punishment at home and at school, Fidel had for years already begun to think against the establishment. “I remember well those schoolhouse tortures, although they didn’t happen every day, or even all that often. They were really more just ways of scaring us … By that time I was already very rebellious … I found myself needing to solve problems at a very early age, and that helped me acquire a sense of injustice …”

  That sense of injustice became the filter through which he understood the events of the war, and informed which side he chose.

  Even as a child, he began to act in a kind of violent manner against those whom he felt oppressed him. He recalled a time that one of his teachers got married and honeymooned in Niagara Falls, and this was all she talked about for what seemed like weeks to a roomful of children who may or may not have had enough to eat that day, let alone any sense of what a “luxury vacation” was. Fidel recalled “storming” the teacher’s home. “Our first act of vengeance, you might say revenge, and it was with a slingshot … We’d made slingshots out of a forked branch of a guava tree and some strips of rubber. There was a bakery nearby, and we took all the firewood for the oven and made ourselves a parapet, a fort, and we organized a bombardment that lasted like half an hour … Oh, we were vengeful little devils.”

  When Fidel was around 11 years old, there was the incident involving his vice principal, which prompted his parents to pull him and his siblings out of school at Christmas. Fidel was incensed that his parents believed the school authorities over him, and he demanded to go back. “I won’t accept you not letting me study,” he told them. Still, it looked like they were not going to send them back. Fidel needed to give them incentive. “I said that if they didn’t send me back to school I was going to burn the house down,” he says. “I must have said it very seriously because I was determined to put up a fight against that injustice that was being done against me at school and at home.”

  Suffice to say, Castro, along with his siblings, returned to school.

  In the years to come, those seeds of rebellion took root and sprouted into the man he would become. “I faced certain problems even as a young child, and little by little I developed—that may, indeed, explain my role as a rebel. You hear people talk about ‘rebels without a cause’, but it seems to me, as I think back over it, I was a rebel with many causes, and I’m grateful to life that I’ve been able, throughout all these years, to continue to be one.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE STUDENT REBEL

  “I was a dreadful, terrible example as a student, because I never went to classes. In high school … I never attended a lesson … At the university, I never went to class, either. What I’d do was talk to the other students in the park, in the Patio de los Laureles. I’d just talk out there—there were small benches—with the guys, and especially with the girls, because they paid a little more attention to me, they were better educated. There were always several students around listening while I explained my theories.”

  It’s funny that for as much as Fidel craved education, he was not an ideal student in any sense of the word. For him, school was about learning, but it was more about “connecting.”

  Even in high school, Fidel Castro was starting to “find his wings.” Though in his case, it was the Left Wing he was finding—and finding it more and more attractive the more he learned and the older he got. Despite not being a stellar student, Castro was stil
l a voracious learner, and read countless books on his own, among them The Communist Manifesto, the book that justified his ideas.

  He did have to go to class sometimes, however, so he didn’t fail out of school, so when he needed to attend, he said, “I just let my imagination fly.” As for his studies, he learned everything he needed to know to pass his classes by cramming the nights before exams.

  More significant to Fidel’s destiny than what he would learn in the classroom was how he was growing politically. His discussions with other students in the courtyard while he avoided classes was only part of this. “What I had was a rebellious spirit, hungry for ideas and knowledge, filled with curiosity and energy,” he said. “I sensed from a very young age that there were a great many things to do [in my life].”

  If he was testing his wings in high school, the guiding principles of his life would really begin to take shape in college. Castro started university in September 1945, with a deep sense of guilt that many who had grown up around him were never able to complete their education beyond sixth grade, even the best students. It was money that decided who would have the opportunity to continue their education, and thus, the opportunity to succeed. Even though Fidel came from money, and was one of the students who would be given the opportunity to succeed, he lamented, “Was I better than any of those hundreds of poor kids in Birán, almost none of whom ever reached the sixth grade and none of whom graduated high school, none of whom entered university?”

  This sense of guilt was part of it. Another part of the equation, however, was his father’s firm Right Wing footing—and Fidel’s need to rebel against the authoritarianism of his father at all costs.

  But his privilege made him an anomaly among his left-wing oriented peers. “The leftists saw me as a queer duck. They’d say, ‘Son of a landowner and a graduate of the Colegio de Belen, this guy must be the most reactionary person in the world.’”

  Reactionary or not, politics became the defining force in Fidel’s life and his dedication to it surpassed anything else he might be engaged in, including sports. Castro said, “I dedicated my life entirely to politics.” He ran for student representative and won the election in a landslide—181 to 33

  Once ensconced in that world, he only wished to go further and further. Next was a run for the FEU, the University Student Federation. It was around this time that he started to imagine his place in the world of politics beyond the cocoon of college, and while at university, he opposed the government’s candidate for Federation president. The situation became dangerous, and could have been deadly.

  Castro said, “I started to strongly oppose the government’s candidate. That translated into countless dangers for me, because it ran counter to the interests of the mafia that … dominated the university.” The situation became so bad, he was practically shut out of school. “I couldn’t enter any university facilities,” he recalls. “I was up against all powers and all the impunities. They were armed and they had no scruples about killing; they had the support of all the police agencies and Grau’s corrupt administration. The only thing that had contained them [so far] had been a moral force, the growing mass of students who supported me. No one had faced them openly in their feudal empire at the university, and they weren’t going to tolerate any more defiance, any more challenges to their authority. They also had the university police on their side. I ran the real risk of being killed in what would be alleged to be inter-group rivalry. I cried, but I decided to go back—to go back to fight even though I was aware that it might mean my death.”

  Around this time, Castro’s eyes were definitely also widening beyond the situation in Cuba, and he began to start to consider world politics—Cuba’s place in the world, including its strengths and what might be holding it back.

  In the late 1940s, he joined the Cayo Confites Expedition. Here, he and like-minded students underwent military training to take down Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo. Trujillo, or as he was known, El Jefe, had been the leader of the Dominican Republic since 1930, and his nearly 30-year reign was considered one of the bloodiest in the history of the Dominican Republic. While the country prospered under his perceived tyranny, there were no civil liberties for anyone, and the wealth seemed only to go to Trujillo and a small circle of his family, friends, and other supporters.

  By this time, Fidel had been appointed chairman of the FEU’s Committee for Dominican Democracy, and, Castro said, “I’d taken those responsibilities very seriously … I was convinced, on the basis of experience in Cuba, the wars of independence, and other analyses, that you could fight against a conventional modern army by using the methods of irregular warfare. My idea was a guerrilla struggle in the mountains of the Dominican Republic, instead of launching a badly trained, inexperienced force again Trujillo’s regular army.”

  While the attack on Trujillo was not exactly a success, the idea of fighting against a “conventional modern army” with “irregular warfare” became the foundation of so many other rebellions that Castro would soon lead.

  In April of 1948, when Colombian presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was shot to death outside of his office in Bogotá, the poor of the city, whose interests the liberal candidate had at heart, began rioting, looting, and murdering in what would come to be known as “El Bogotazo.” Three thousand lives were lost in the chaos, and Bogotá was destroyed.

  El Bogotazo affected Fidel deeply, especially as he had been a part of it. It showed him that when people were too far oppressed, when their only hope of freedom from that depression was murdered in the street, bad things would happen. “[El Bogotazo] was an experience of great political importance,” Castro recalled. “Gaitán represented hope and development for Colombia. His death detonated an explosion—the uprising of the people, a people seeking justice … I joined the people. I grabbed a rifle in a police station that collapsed when it was rushed by a crowd. I witnessed the spectacle of a totally spontaneous popular revolution … [The experience of El Bogotazo] led me to identify myself even more with the cause of the people.”

  If the attack on Trujillo and the chaos of El Bogotazo sparked Fidel’s desire to unseat injustice in a kind of physical way, it was The Communist Manifesto that sparked his intellect. “It made an enormous impact on me,” he explained. “I started to see and understand certain things, because I’d been born on a latifundio, which was, in addition, surrounded by other huge latifundios, and I knew what life was like for those people. I had the experience, at first hand, of what imperialism was domination, one government subservient to another government that was corrupt and repressive.”

  While in college, Fidel married Mirta Diaz-Balart, who hailed from a wealthy Havana family. One year later, Fidel’s son, Fidel (“Fidelito”) was born.

  When Fidel graduated in 1950, armed now with knowledge and experience and an irrepressible passion to liberate the oppressed, he set up a law practice in Havana and began in earnest his political career.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CASTRO AND CHIBAS

  “The telegraph operator’s son was one of the first people to betray us when the struggle against Batista started. He was a compañero. He lived here in Havana … he was a friend, a supporter—he sympathized with us, [he was] in the Party. I trusted him. That’s the mistake. You shouldn’t trust someone just because he’s a friend.”

  Even in those early years, the backbone of his Fidel’s political doctrine—independence, political and economic freedom, and true emancipation—were leading his charge. While at university, Fidel joined the Cuban Orthodox Revolutionary Party, a political party that was headed by Eduardo René Chibás Ribas. Ribas had started the party, known in Cuba as the Ortodoxos party, to use the constitution to bring about revolutionary change—to expose government corruption and give the power to the people.

  While Fidel had considered Chibás a mentor, and someone he wanted to follow, there was a fatal flaw in Chibás’s makeup: He was anti-Communism. Still, there were tenets on which Fide
l and Chibás were in total alignment, and soon after joining the party, Fidel found himself leader of their Radical Action Group, a smaller offshoot of the Ortodoxos party that included Castro and about 50 other dedicated individuals.

  Born in 1907 in Santiago de Cuba, Chibás was a politician with a popular and prominent weekly radio show he used as a forum to blast corruption and gang culture in Cuba. He believed government corruption was the root of all evil. Castro said of Chibás, “[He] wanted to sweep the thieves out of government. And once in a while, he would denounce an ‘octopus’—the electricity company, the phone company—when there was some rate increase. He was an advanced thinker in civic terms, but revolutionary social change was not his main objective.”

  This was another area where the two clashed, but not significantly. All in all, it was in Fidel’s best interests to keep aligned with Chibás, who, aside from being against communism, was about all the other things Fidel was about. Though even at this point, Fidel was starting to believe that “revolutionary social change” was the only way that change came about; not by talking on the radio.

  However, Chibás wasn’t against all action. He did run for president in 1948, placing third, and became a strong critic of the elected president, Carlos Prío Socarrás, for almost his entire tenure in office.

  And Chibás’s most dramatic radio statement, most dramatic life statement, was all action; there were no words at all.

  In August of 1951, Chibás had found himself embroiled in a scandal and there seemed no way to escape. As Castro recalled, “Chibás had denounced the minister of education [Aureliano Sanchez Arango], who was a person with some degree of political acumen, political experience, and who in his time had fought against [Gerardo] Machado and [Fulgencio] Batista, as both a student and professor—he’d been on the Left … [He had been] accused by Chibás of owning farms in Guatemala. So, this man defied Chibás, quite spectacularly, to prove it. And Chibás couldn’t. Apparently, some source he’d trusted had given him that information without providing the necessary proof.”