Unlike his father, Fidel’s mother was very religious – “she prayed every day. She always lighted candles to the Virgin and the saints. She requested things from them and prayed to them in all kinds of circumstances. She made vows on behalf of any family member who became ill or who was in a difficult situation.” Later, through all the risks of the revolutionary struggle, his mother and maternal grandmother “made all kinds of vows on behalf of our lives and safety. The fact that we came out of the struggle alive must have greatly increased their faith.… I could see the strength, courage and comfort they got from their religious feelings and beliefs.”24
Such things leave their mark – especially in a Latin American country, where the mother is often revered as a saintly figure. In the early sixties, after Castro’s profession of faith in communism, the Roman Church and the Cuban clergy, still feeling tied to the old oligarchy, came out in opposition to the new regime, while for a long time the only faith he allowed on the island was faith in the revolution. Anyone who declared for the Church was subject to discrimination. Subsequently, in the spirit of his own fidelista dialectic, Castro has never tired of pointing up a close affinity between early Christianity and socialism,25 and has placed the heroes and martyrs of his revolution on a level with the martyrs in the history of Christianity. Yet the things that fill the clergy with indignation do not disturb him; in the end, the Church is not God.
It was not easy for him early in life. But although he was looked down upon because of his rural origins, his birth out of wedlock and his late baptism, he managed to pull through. His brother Raúl, who experienced school as a “prison,” with endless “prayer and fear of God,” recalled: “But Fidel was different. He dominated situations.… And, every day, he would fight. He had a very explosive character. He challenged the biggest and the strongest ones, and when he was beaten, he started it all over again the next day. He would never quit.”26 He also stood out by his intelligence and dazzling memory. In the end, the brothers at La Salle advised his parents to send him to the Jesuits’ strict and respected Dolores College.
“I never had good marks in maths, grammar and other subjects – except for history, a subject I like a lot, and in geography.”27 At first he was a day boy, but as he wanted to be a boarder he provoked a breakdown in relations with the family where he had lodgings.
I had had enough of that place, and one day I … told them all to go to the devil, and entered school as a boarder that very afternoon. This was the second time, or the third, fourth, fifth, I don’t remember which, that I had to take it upon myself to get out of what I considered an unpleasant situation.… From then on I definitely became my own master and took charge of all my own problems without advice from anyone.28
Fidel concentrated his physical energies mainly on long hikes in the Sierra Maestra, the range of mountains rising to almost 2,000 meters at the gates of the city, with their humid forest that was often so difficult to penetrate. It was here, nearly 20 years later, that his revolution would begin its triumphal march across the 1,000 kilometers to Havana. “Of the whole group, I was the enthusiast, the mountain climber par excellence. I did not imagine that mountains would one day play such an important role in my life.”29
In his last year at the Colegio Dolores, Castro recorded, “I was one of the best in my class.”30 This encouraged his parents to send him to the top school in the country, the Jesuit college of Belén (Bethlehem) in Havana, where he eventually obtained his school-leaving certificate. It was the elite school of the Cuban aristocracy and bourgeoisie, a training ground for the rising generation of conservative politicians. Fidel passed the entrance examination in October 1941 and left behind the “Wild West” of the island. In fact, the examination also involved a kind of preliminary test of political talent, at which candidates had to speak freely for ten minutes. Fidel obviously made a lasting impression, and right from the start – as classmates later recalled – the Jesuits detected in him an exceptional gift for political leadership. In the eyes of his examiner, the head of the oratory academy and college “ideologue” Father José Rubinos, he soon developed into the most capable pupil and the best athlete among the boarders.31
The fathers were convinced supporters of the Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco – anti-Communist but also, for historical reasons, inclined to anti-Americanism. They dreamed of countering US economic imperialism and the influence of Anglo-Saxon culture in Latin America with a renewal of hispanidad, and of reviving the traditional ties with Europe in the shape of Franco’s “New Spain.” They brought to life for their pupils such historical figures as Julius Caesar, Simon Bolívar, Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco, as well as Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder and spiritual father of the Spanish Falange, whose writings Fidel had to study. But the personality he discovered for himself at Belén, and with whom he would identify for the rest of his life, was the freedom-fighter José Martí, in a sense the George Washington of Cuba. In his writings, Fidel found the roots for his own later development. For what that multilingual writer and staunch republican had championed in the second half of the nineteenth century had been the view that a new political leadership must associate the independence struggle against Spain with a far-reaching revolution in colonial society, a revolution that would abolish slavery and bring land reform, racial equality, and social justice.
Born in Havana on January 28, 1853, Martí died on May 19, 1895, at the beginning of the final war of independence, near Dos Rios in Oriente Province, just 25 miles from the Finca Mañacas. He was only 15 when he rebelled against Spanish rule and founded the paper La Patria Libre (Free Fatherland); he was imprisoned for six months for his part in an insurrection and then deported to Spain in 1871 because of his seditious writing. He lived as an exile in France, Mexico, and Guatemala, but eventually wended his way back to Cuba. In 1892 he was elected chairman of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (Cuban Revolutionary Party) and again banished from the island. He set up his headquarters in New York, using it as a base to plan another rising against Spanish rule in Cuba.
Castro found many parallels with his own life, and over the years these evidently fostered a belief that he was called upon to be Martí’s successor. Both their fathers had come to Cuba as Spanish army sergeants during the wars of independence that persisted with long interruptions from 1868 to 1898. José Martí, like Fidel Castro – and also for political reasons – had had a very difficult relationship with his father; both men sacrificed their marriage to politics; both had one son; both were imprisoned on the Isla de Pinos as leaders of an uprising, released soon afterwards and sent into exile; both first collected funds for the freedom struggle in the land of the American arch-enemy. And one day Castro, like Martí, would land with a little group of followers on the lonely southern coast of Oriente Province to launch the armed struggle. They proved similarly mistaken in thinking that the country would immediately rise up and support the revolutionaries. Like Martí, Castro then led a minuscule struggle against a powerful army, and finally brought down a regime that knew how to impose its will only by terrorizing the population. Unlike Martí, however, Castro both survived the struggle and escaped the disillusionment that had set in after the victory of the war of independence in 1898.
Three years after Martí’s death, as the hour of Spain’s defeat approached, the United States joined in for the last round without being asked, so that it could then exclude the independence movement from the peace agreement that was concluded in Paris on December 10, 1898. Moreover, the freedom fighters in Washington accepted only to a limited degree Cuba’s longed-for right to self-determination.32 The pretext for US intervention had been an explosion on the battleship Maine on February 15, 1898, in Havana Harbor, when 266 members of the crew had lost their lives. The ship had been lying at anchor to evacuate American citizens during the final phase of the war on the island. But although a fire spreading from the ship’s coal bunker to its ammunition store had obviously been the cause of the disaster, Washi
ngton promptly accused Spain of a warlike attack and, stoked up by the Hearst press, declared hostilities under the banner “Remember the Maine.” The 39-year-old deputy navy minister and future president, Theodore Roosevelt, a former cowboy, deputy sheriff, and buffalo hunter, rode through a hail of bullets to mount furious attacks on the Spanish, at the head of a bunch of so-called “Rough Riders” made up of hunters, trappers, Indians, adventurers, Harvard students from the New York upper classes, and accompanying newspaper reporters.33
The right to self-determination mentioned in the peace agreement was not worth the paper on which it was written. The United States, which had long been seeking to get its hands on the island, now treated it as war booty. American troops pulled out only in 1902, after Congress had forced Cuban politicians the year before to introduce into the new Constitution a clause highly dubious under international law that virtually made the island a US protectorate. This Platt Amendment, named after Senator Orville H. Platt who thought it up, gave Washington the right to intervene militarily in Cuba whenever it perceived a threat to American interests there. From that time, Cuba was unable to enter into agreements with another state unless they had the approval of the United States, and it was required to make land available for the building of US Marine bases (the last one, now highly contentious, being in the bay of Guantánamo).34 The Platt Amendment implied an expansion of the notorious Monroe Doctrine to the islands of the Antilles that had remained in the Spanish or British sphere of influence.35 And there would be more than one occasion when Washington exercised its “right” to military intervention in Cuba: in 1906, 1912, and 1917.
This aggressive involvement of the United States may be explained, right up to the present day, by the huge stake it had in Cuba. Already in the nineteenth century there was a strong economic lobby that threw its weight behind calls for annexation of the sugar island. The Spanish turned down an American offer to purchase it for the sum of 130 million dollars, but in the end it went indirectly for much less than that, after the war of independence had so devastated the sugar and tobacco plantations that the economy fell an easy prey to speculators. The US military governor of Cuba, General Leonard Wood, himself complained in 1902:
One of the hardest features of my work was to prevent the looting of Cuba by men who were presumed respectable. Men came down there apparently with the best recommendations and wanted me to further the most infamous of schemes. They expected to profit by sharp business practices at the expense of the people of the island.36
In the same year, US investments were already valued at 100 million dollars. And by the time that Fidel Castro was born, two-thirds of agriculture was in North American ownership.
A recent study of the situation in Cuba after independence has highlighted the early causes of the political aberrations that would give rise to Castro’s revolution.
When Cuba became independent on 20 May 1902, … the Cuban economy was dominated by the interests of US capital, which, in alliance with the Cuban upper classes, blocked any recasting of colonial property relations. Until the revolution in 1959, the gearing of the Cuban economy to sugar monoculture cemented its external dependence on the world market and the United States (as the main buyer of the product), as well as the dominance of the large sugar producers inside the country. Broad layers of the population who had made great sacrifices for the cause of independence – especially members of the liberation army itself – found themselves robbed of its fruits, and this led to a widespread sense of frustration even as the republic was coming into being.37
In 1934, as part of a “good neighbors” policy, the Platt Amendment was revoked under President Franklin D. Roosevelt (whose father was a cousin of Theodore Roosevelt), but this did not prevent Washington from continuing to pursue a self-interested policy in Latin America, through the cultivation of a tightly knit web of military and political forces.
For Castro, daily life in the Jesuit college of Belén mirrored the results of that historical tragedy. The “farmer’s son” from the far east of the island was treated more condescendingly than the boarding-school boy had been in Santiago, by that section of the old Cuban oligarchy which had been able to keep its prosperity through the struggle for independence and to forge in time close links with the new masters. Castro again dealt with such slights by redoubling his efforts at school, especially in the field of sport, and this earned him a degree of popularity as well as some superficial friendships. Soon after he started there, he even won a dubious respect when he bet with some schoolmates that he was capable of extreme deeds and, looking straight ahead, rode a bicycle with full force into a stone wall; he fell down unconscious and had to spend several days recovering from concussion. The memory of such uncompromising audacity, such wild and literally hard-headed determination, remains alive at the school today. In the year 1943–4, the young Fidel was even awarded the prize for the best sports all-rounder in Cuba. One former schoolmate recalls that the Belén baseball team was much feared because he scored a point with every ball he hit, and that his efforts helped the school to win numerous competitions, championships, and medals. The other side of this was that he was seen more as a solo runner than a team player. Teachers and pupils alike kept a strong impression of his huge powers of concentration and his outstanding memory. He learned faster than others, and sometimes astounded everyone by rattling off a page of text that he had previously read.38
An ideological gulf later separated Castro from the world of his former teachers, and he looked back on the daily mass and sermons as “a form of mental terrorism.”39 All his life, however, he has been full of respect for his teachers and the school: “The Jesuits … valued character, rectitude, honesty, courage and the ability to make sacrifices. Teachers definitely have an influence. The Jesuits clearly influenced me with their strict organization, their discipline and their values. They contributed to my development and influenced my sense of justice.”40 Belén thus became a training for life:
I met … teachers and other men who were interested in molding the students’ character.… I acquired ethics and norms that weren’t just religious. I got a human influence from the teachers’ authority and the values they attached to things. They encouraged sports and trips to the mountains… .Nor did I dream I was preparing to be a guerrilla, but every time I saw a mountain, it was a challenge to me.41
At the end of his school years, Father Francisco Barbeito noted in the college yearbook: “Always Fidel distinguished himself in all the subjects related to letters. He was excelencia [in the top ten of the graduating class] and congregante [a student who regularly attended prayers and religious activities].… He will make law his career, and we do not doubt that he will fill with brilliant pages the book of his life.”42
Among gangsters
In 1945 the 18-year-old Fidel returned with a brilliant leaving certificate from the Jesuits in Belén to his proud parents in Birán. His father rewarded him with a Ford Cabrio. Then, after a long carefree summer in the country, he enrolled in October 1945 to study at the law faculty of Havana University. “I myself wonder why I studied law. I don’t know the answer. I partly associate it with those who said: ‘He talks so much he should become a lawyer.’ Since I was in the habit of debating and discussing, I was sure I had what it took for the legal profession.”43
No sooner had he outgrown the well-guarded elite school than a real struggle for survival began. The campus was ruled by the gangsterismo of two rival groups, which used violence and money to influence political life in the capital. One was the Movimiento Socialista Revolucionario (MSR – Revolutionary Socialist Movement), led by former Communist Rolando Masferrer; the other the Unión Insurreccional Revolucionaria (UIR – Revolutionary Insurrectional Union), led by the one-time anarchist Emilio Tro. The names were little more than a joke: neither the “socialism” nor the “revolutionary” meant anything at all. For people in general, their members were simply a bunch of pistoleros. They controlled the students’ union, the Federació
n Estudiantil Universitaria (FEU). And the government of President Ramón Grau San Martín (1944–8) was highly dependent upon them, as was that of his successor, the much-derided cocaine addict Carlos Prío Socarrás (1948–52). During Grau’s term alone, more than 120 mob-style murders were attributed to them, either in the service of politicians or to settle accounts with each other. In the spring of 1947, Grau even appointed as head of the criminal investigation department an MSR leader, Mario Salabarría, a notorious killer who later targeted Fidel Castro. Tro, the UIR boss, made it as far as head of the national police school (but was then himself murdered), and the long-serving FEU chairman, MSR leader Manolo Castro, got the job of national sports manager. After 1948 President Prío surpassed even Grau, entering into a secret pact whereby gang members would obtain jobs in the police and draw a kind of basic income from the state coffers.
Such crude provisions were no longer needed by the US-based Mafia, which saw Cuba as especially fertile terrain for its operations. In the late thirties Meyer Lansky’s friend and “business partner” Batista had given it exclusive “grazing rights,” and both Grau and Prío ensured that these were not infringed. The Mafia purposefully set about turning the Caribbean island into one big gambling casino and brothel, where for hard dollars prudish America could act out its secret desires and fantasies beneath the king palms.
Cuba’s importance at that time for organized crime may be seen in the quite special society that Havana’s exclusive Hotel Nacional hosted in February 1947, when the Who’s Who of the American underworld gathered there for one of the largest meetings in its history. A group of 36 godfathers plus entourage, making a total of some 500 persons, answered Meyer Lansky’s invitation to join the party and to discuss the scope for business expansion. Among them were Albert “Butcher” Anastasia, Frank Costello, Carlo Gambino, Willie Moretti, Mike Miranda, Vito Genovese, “Fat Man” Joe Maglocco, Carlos Marcello, Al Capone’s heirs Charlie and Rocco Fischetti, Joe Bonanno, Santos Trafficante and Tommy “Three Finger Brown” Lucchese. The boss of bosses, however, il capo di tutti capi, was Charles “Lucky” Luciano, who had found refuge from criminal prosecution in a thirties suite in the Catalan-Moorish neoclassical hotchpotch of the Hotel Nacional. The others duly paid homage, presenting him with dollar-stuffed envelopes to help cover his living costs. Frank Sinatra flew down specially for the informal side of things. According to Joseph “Doc” Stacher, Meyer Lansky’s link to Batista, “the Italians among us were very proud of Frank.… They had spent a lot of money helping him in his career.”44
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