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The Young Fidel
Among Jesuits
The name of the Cuban citizen Fidel Castro first entered the White House files in 1940. On November 6 of that year the young boarder at the Jesuit Dolores College in Santiago de Cuba sent a three-page letter to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt congratulating him on his re-election. Before signing off with a bold flourish, “Goodby Your friend,” he added a personal request: “If you like, give me a ten dollars bill american, because I have not seen a ten dollars bill american and I would like to have one of them.”1 In the letter Castro stated that he was 12 years old – a claim which, if true, would have meant that he was two years younger than he is officially reported to be.2 He received no reply from the president, only a letter of thanks from the State Department. Nor did it contain a ten-dollar bill. No one could then suspect that the boy would grow up and confiscate everything that the North Americans owned in Cuba.
At the very time when Fidel Castro was penning his lines to Roosevelt, the man who 12 years later would embody his enemyimage of an American lackey was making his debut as Cuban president: Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar, the son of a mulatto worker from Banes, not far from Castro’s own birthplace in Oriente province. Born in 1901, Batista had a reputation for being shifty, ruthless, and open to bribery. In 1933, after the fall of the dictator General Gerardo Machado, this former military stenographer had organized a revolt in a political arena already dominated by corruption and violence. At first he kept in the background, but as the American man he controlled the country’s direction and advanced to become chief of the general staff. His path crossed with that of the Mafioso Meyer Lansky, and their friendship would later mark the political landscape.
In the space of seven years Batista got through seven puppet presidents, until no real alternative remained but to have himself elected to the highest state office. During the four years from 1940, he was Roosevelt’s right-hand man on the sugar island, whose economy was completely dependent on the trickle from the United States. One of the members of the government coalition was the pro-Moscow Partido Socialista Popular (PSP) – a situation accepted by Washington in the context of wartime alliances. At that time Cuba had the most progressive Constitution in Latin America, even if important parts of it (such as the redistribution of land owned by US corporations) were not implemented. After a time-out lasting eight years, when the presidency was assumed by the equally corrupt Ramón Grau San Martín (1944–8) and Carlos Prío Socarrás (1948–52), Batista seized power on March 10, 1952, just before presidential elections were due to be held, and established a dictatorship that played into the hands both of his friends around Meyer Lansky and of the government in Washington. On January 1, 1959, he was finally overthrown and chased from the country by a young revolutionary called Fidel Castro.
Castro’s origins had pointed to anything but a revolutionary career. “I was born into a family of landowners in comfortable circumstances. We were considered rich and treated as such. I was brought up with all the privileges attendant to a son in such a family. Everyone lavished attention on me, flattered, and treated me differently from the other boys we played with when we were children. These other children went barefoot while we wore shoes; they were often hungry; at our house, there was always a squabble at table to get us to eat.”3
Information issued by the Cuban Council of State declares that the future revolutionary and head of state was born on August 13, 1926; he saw the light of day around two in the morning, weighing just under ten pounds.4 According to his siblings, Ángela and Ramón, he was already the third natural child of the 50-year-old landowner, Ángel Castro y Argiz, and his housekeeper and cook, Lina Ruz González (who was roughly half his age). Like his brother and sister, he was given the name of a saint, Fidel, and a middle name Alejandro. In fact, Fidel is derived from fidelidad, the Spanish word denoting faith or fidelity, loyalty and dependability. “In that case,” he once said, “I’m completely in agreement with my name, in terms of fidelity and faith. Some have religious faith, and others have another kind. I’ve always been a man of faith, confidence and optimism.”5 In fact, “the origin of the name [wasn’t] so idyllic.… I was called Fidel because of somebody who was going to be my godfather.” This was Fidel Pino Santos, a friend of his father’s, “something like the family banker. He was very rich, much richer than my father. People said he was a millionaire.… To be a millionaire in those days was something really tremendous.… That was a time when people used to earn a dollar or a peso a day.”6
Relations in the family were pretty disastrous. María Luisa Argote, the wife with whom Fidel’s father had two other children (Pedro Emilio and Lidia), seems to have left the home after Fidel was born, and the marriage was later dissolved. Ángel Castro eventually married his servant, who bore him four more children: Juana, Raúl, Emma, and Augustina. Their wedding ceremony – the year of which remains unclear – was performed by Enrique Pérez Serantes from Santiago de Cuba, a priest and friend who, like Ángel Castro and the parents of Lina Ruz, had originally come from Galicia in Spain. It was also he who baptized Fidel – but only when he was sent “at the age of five or six” to stay with a family in Santiago, where he received private lessons. Evidently the lack of a clear family relationship in connection with Fidel’s birth was the real reason why the godfather became unavailable, and why the young boy had to wait so long for the Church’s seal. Meanwhile, Fidel later recalled, “people called me a Jew. They used to say, ‘He’s a Jew.’ I was four or five and was already being criticized.… I didn’t know the meaning of the word ew, but there was no doubt that it had a negative connotation, that it was something disgraceful. It was all because I hadn’t been baptized, and I wasn’t really to blame for that.”7 Since “my wealthy godfather hadn’t materialized and the baptism hadn’t been performed – I was around five years old and, as they said, a ‘Jew’ … – a solution had to be found for the problem… . One afternoon, they took me to the cathedral in Santiago de Cuba, [where] they sprinkled me with holy water and baptized me, and I became a normal citizen, the same as the rest.”8 Thus, religious prejudice exposed him to discrimination from which he continued to smart in later life, without at first really being able to pinpoint the circumstances that lay behind it. And in the end this helped to ensure that it was his foster-father – his teacher’s sister’s husband and Haitian Consul in Santiago – who agreed to take on the role of his godfather. It is not clear whether Fidel’s real parents were even present at the baptism. Many years later the priest who performed the ceremony, by then Archbishop Pérez Serantes, is said to have saved Fidel’s life when Batista’s troops captured him soon after the abortive attack on the Moncada Barracks and wanted to make short work of him.9 The man in the cassock also became an important link-man for Castro’s revolutionary movement, but one day he grew disillusioned with the revolution and was even placed under arrest for a short period.
Castro’s home, the “Finca Mañacas” (Palm Farm), nestles in the idyllic Nipe foothills of the Cristal mountains between Santiago de Cuba (the country’s second-largest city) and the town of Mayarí, some 12 miles south of the Bay of Nipe. The old “royal road” passes nearby, on its 600-mile way to Havana at the other end of the island. The area, one of the most beautiful in Cuba, had in those days the reputation of a Wild West, where bandits and the armed “sheriffs” of the United Fruit Company imposed the rule of force. The old men from the Buena Vista Social Club made it known all over the world through their song “Chan Chan,” which sold millions of CDs in the late 1990s. “Few places in Cuba,” writes Hugh Thomas, “were quite so dominated by the North American presence.”10
There, near the village of Birán, lay the Finca Mañacas sugarcane plantation, with its 800 hectares of freehold and another 10,000 hectares on leasehold, whose other main sources of income were livestock and timber, as well as a small nickel mine. On the shores of a small lake, half-surrounded by a palm grove, single-and double-storey houses had been bu
ilt on stilts in the Spanish Galician style; they are still preserved today as a kind of museum. The farm had its own post and telegraph office, a dairy, a general store, a baker’s and butcher’s shop, a workshop, a school, and a cock-fighting pit. Some “two hundred, perhaps three hundred” families, or “roughly a thousand people,” most of them black Haitian laborers and their families working in the cane fields and woods, lived here under the sway of Fidel’s father, in simple palm huts with bare clay floors.11 “There wasn’t a single church, not even a small chapel,” although most of the people were Christian. “At that time, the farmers had all kinds of beliefs. They believed in God, in the saints … , in the Virgin.… They believed in Our Lady of Charity, Cuba’s patron saint.… Many people also believed in spirits and ghosts.”12
The area around Santiago de Cuba has always been a bastion of the Afro-Cuban religions and cults which African slaves brought with them in the form of their own gods and voodoo ceremonies, and they have reacted imaginatively to the constant attempts by the official Catholic Church to suppress the obscure mysticism of their so-called santería. Often they have simply mixed their African rituals together with Catholic doctrine and liturgy, taking over Christian saints and attaching them to their own gods or orishas, so that Changó, for example, has become Saint Barbara, or Saint Lazarus “Babalu Ayé.” “I remember,” Castro told Betto, “that, as a child, I heard stories about spirits, ghosts and apparitions. People believed in superstitions too.… For example, if a rooster crowed three times without getting an answer, that meant some tragedy might occur. If an owl flew over at night and you could hear the sound of his wings and his screech – I think they called it ‘the owl’s song’ – that too was a harbinger of tragedy.… In that sense, the world I was born into was quite primitive, because there were all kind of beliefs and superstitions.”13
Surrounded by nature and animals, the young Fidel Castro went hunting on horseback in the woods, swimming in the River Birán or skin-diving in the Bay of Nipe; his playmates were the workers’ children. It was thus at an early age that he first came into contact with agriculture and social hardship, with the privation that ordinary people experienced during the periods between harvests. His own parents learned to read and write only late in life, and the family lifestyle was in keeping with their origins and the harsh environment.
There, we lived among the people, the workers, … we even had animals under the house – the cows, pigs, chickens and all. I wasn’t the grandson or great-grandson of a landowner. Sometimes the great-grandson of a landowner didn’t have money anymore, but he kept the culture of the aristocratic or rich oligarchic class. Since my mother and father had been very poor farmers who managed to acquire some money and accumulate some wealth, my family didn’t have the rich people’s landowners’ culture as yet. They were people who worked every day in harsh conditions. They had no social life and hardly any relations with people like themselves.14
Fidel’s father was a tight-lipped, hard-working man, coarse and quick-tempered, quarrelsome and intolerant of contradiction – the very picture of a patriarch. Well-built and over 6 feet tall, always with a wide hat covering a bald head that his wife and daughters had to keep shaved and polished, he ruled the home and farm with a strict hand. Ángel Castro had been born on December 8, 1875, the son of a miner in the small village of San Pedro Láncara near Lugo in the bleak province of Galicia in North-West Spain, not far from the pilgrims’ route to Santiago de Compostela. He first came to know the east of Cuba between 1895 and 1898, where he served as a cavalry quartermaster in the Spanish army during the Cuban war of independence. Since his only prospects back home were those of a day laborer, he returned to the island as an immigrant in 1905, at the age of 30, and worked first in the nickel mines near Santiago and then for the United Fruit Company. Later, he struck out independently (providing transport services for the Company, among other things) and eventually bought some land of his own, so that by 1920 he was already quite well-off. Hugh Thomas thinks that Ángel Castro must have worked very hard, but that “he hacked his farm out of forest, perhaps sometimes on moonless nights, perhaps by stealing title deeds.”15 According to Fidel, he was “a very active, enterprising person, and he had an instinctive sense of organization.”16 In 1950 his assets were estimated at half a million US dollars.
The mother was the balancing character in the family: she gave her children the closeness lacking in the father, and ensured that, from the early age of probably five, Fidel attended the village school at Maracané near Mayarí. His exceptionally good results soon persuaded the parents to send him to the provincial capital, Santiago de Cuba, where he was given private tuition by a black female teacher. “Those classes consisted of having me study the addition, subtraction, multiplication and division tables that were printed on the cover of my notebook.… I believe I learned them so well I’ve never forgotten them. Sometimes I calculate almost as quickly as a computer.”17 Castro later looked back: “Of all the people I knew, she was the first who was able to motivate me; she gave me a goal and aroused my ambition.”18
When he was six-and-a-half or seven, he was sent to the “La Salle College” run by the Franciscan order of Marianist brothers in Santiago de Cuba. “I was away from my family, my home, the place I loved, where I used to play, run around and enjoy freedom.… [S]uddenly, I was sent to a city where I had a difficult time, faced with material problems.”19 Above all, he seems to have missed his mother. Clearly, ever since he was a small child he felt closer to her than to his father – perhaps the two males were just too alike, as Fidel seems to have taken after his father in many ways. He too showed an early strength of will, and a similar self-assertiveness and refusal to compromise.
Once, Fidel’s father heard reports that he and his brother Ramón had been behaving like rowdies at the La Salle school – Fidel was even supposed to have returned a teacher’s box on the ears – and was on the point of bringing them back to the farm. It was only their mother’s intervention which prevented things from going so far. “It was a decisive moment in my life, … although a boy wasn’t supposed to like studying at that age, I felt that taking me away from school was a punishment I didn’t deserve and I was being hurt, unfairly hurt.… I remember going to my mother and explaining that I wanted to go on studying.… I told her … that if I wasn’t sent back, I’d set fire to the house.… I really threatened to set the whole place on fire.”20
By the time he was 13 he was trying out his first insurrection. Accusing his father of exploiting the sugarcane workers on the farm, he stoked them up and tried to organize a strike. This sudden assault was bad enough in itself, given the taboo surrounding the boss’s authority in Spanish American countries, but the fact that the son conducted it against his father in front of everybody led to a deep rift between the two. When looking back at the past, Castro has never done more than make brief mention of his father, whereas he has always expressed himself with great warmth and affection about his mother.
His education in Catholicism played an important role from earliest childhood on. One of the first things we were taught to believe in were the Three Wise Men. I must have been three or four the first time the Wise Men came. I can even remember the things they brought me: some apples, a toy car – things like that – and some candy.… We were told that the Three Wise Men, who’d traveled to pay homage to Christ when He was born, came every year to bring children presents.
Santa Claus has never been popular in Cuba, and so instead “children wrote letters to the Three Wise Men: Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar.”21
Curiously, the young Fidel spent three successive feasts of the Epiphany not on the family farm at Birán but with the apparently childless foster-parents in Santiago de Cuba, even though his relations with them became increasingly difficult. It was there that he wrote his first letters to the Three Wise Men.
I wrote when I was five and asked them for everything – cars, trains, movie cameras, the works. I wrote long letters to the Th
ree Wise Men on January 5.… The disappointments came later.… I remember that my first present was a small cardboard trumpet; just the tip was made out of metal, something like aluminum. My first present was a small trumpet the size of a pencil.… For three consecutive years, three times, I was given a trumpet; I should have become a musician.… The second year, the Three Wise Men brought me a trumpet that was half aluminum and half cardboard. The third time, it was a trumpet with three small keys, made completely of aluminum.22
It remains a mystery why Fidel was so often away from home during the Christmas period and the most important feast in the year. Was it because of domestic tensions on the family farm? The young boy must anyway have suffered for a long time as a result.
How much he missed home can be felt in later recollections.
The countryside was freedom. For example, Christmas Eve was a wonderful thing, because it meant fifteen days of vacation – and not just fifteen days of vacation, but fifteen days of a festive atmosphere and treats: cookies, candy and nougats. We had a lot of them at my house.… When that time came, you were always excited, from the time you took the train and then continued on horseback until you finally arrived.… The roads were nothing but huge mudholes. During the first few years in my house, there weren’t any cars or even electricity.… Christmas vacations were happy times. Holy Week was another wonderful time, because we had another week of vacation at home.… Holy Week in the countryside – I remember from when I was very young – were days of solemnity. What was said? That Christ died on Good Friday. You couldn’t talk or joke or be happy.23
Fidel Castro Page 3