Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  Significantly, Fidel Castro seems and professes to know astonishingly little about his father's background, and this must be a conscious or subconscious expression of his negative attitude toward Don Ángel, for reasons that may be deeply personal, political, or both. In a 1985 interview with the Brazilian Dominican friar Frei Betto, Castro admitted that "I do not know much what were [his father's] first years, because when I had the opportunity to ask all this, I didn't feel the curiosity that I may feel today to know what were his first steps . . ." Considering that Fidel was thirty years old when his father died, he would surely have had ample occasion to ask questions—had he cared. Elsewhere in that interview, Castro volunteers the comment that although his father had the political ideas of a "landowner," he was a "most noble" man because he never turned down an appeal for help. This, Fidel said, "is very interesting." Compared with his frequent warm and personal references to his mother, the comment about his father seems forced and supercilious.

  Ángel Castro's uncle lived in the town of Santa Clara in central Cuba where he had a brickmaster's business. Ángel was put to work there (naturally there was no time or opportunity for him to go to school), but after some five years he evidently tired of the uncle's bricks and struck out on his own. He moved east, probably walking most of the way, and for reasons no longer remembered in the family, he chose the Mayarí zone in Oriente to try his luck. He must have arrived in the area just as the end of Spanish rule was approaching and the American era was about to begin. He never talked much about his youth; he died in 1956 at the age of eighty-two, his past shrouded in oblivion.

  Mayarí is a fertile region, ideal for planting sugarcane and tobacco and for raising cattle. Its principal town, also named Mayarí, lies on the river of the same name, and the beaches and fishermen of the Bay of Nipe are only four miles away. Sometime after young Ángel Castro reached Mayarí, the once sleepy town of wooden houses dating back to the early nineteenth century, was transformed into a commercial center of activity fueled by American capital.

  At the end of the overlapping Cuban independence war and the Spanish-American War, the devastated country had been thrown wide open to United States investments whose safety from troublemaking Cubans was guaranteed by the military occupation. Throughout Cuba, these investments more than tripled in eight years, from $50 million in 1898 to $160 million in 1906, chiefly in land. And lush and rich Oriente was the preferred province. In 1899, for example, the Cuban-American Sugar Company bought seventy thousand acres in Chaparta on the north coast, and a year later the property accounted for 10 percent of Cuba's sugar harvest. At the same time, the United Fruit Company and its subsidiary, the Nipe Bay Company, purchased 240,000 acres in the Mayarí area—a veritable private fief carved out of Oriente.

  Speaking with enormous indignation about the economic consequences of the Cuban "independence," Fidel Castro noted in a bitter anniversary speech in 1968, one century after the first insurrection against Spain, that "someone named Preston bought in 1901, 75,000 hectares [185,250 acres] of land in the Bay of Nipe zone for 400,000 dollars, that is, for less than six dollars per hectare of this land." He added that "the forests that covered all these hectares with precious woods and that were burned in the furnaces of the sugar mills, were worth many times, incomparably many times, this sum of money . . . they came with bulging pockets to a nation impoverished by thirty years of war to buy the best land of this country for less than six dollars the hectare." Until the revolution nationalized them in 1959, the United Fruit Company's Preston and Boston properties in Mayarí remained Cuba's main foreign-owned sugar mills and estates.

  By the time Castro was born in 1926, American investments in Cuba exceeded $1.6 billion. Today, this total investment would be equivalent to $3 billion. With the collapse of world sugar prices in 1920 (following the "Dance of the Millions" of the previous years when prices were ten times higher, and fantastic fortunes were made in Cuba), United States interests could and did pick up the pieces cheap. Foreign banks controlled 80 percent of the sugar production; American companies gained monopolies in all the Cuban railroads, electric power supplies, and telephones; and Cuban deposits in United States-owned banks on the island soared from 20 percent in 1920 to 69 percent in 1921, as most Cuban banks disappeared because they could not compete with the political power and resources of Yankee bankers.

  Cuba's president in 1926 was Gerardo Machado y Morales, an American-supported friend of big business (Washington forced him out years later, however, when he turned into a despotic dictator and the country's economic stability was threatened by the rising rebellion against him). He was as corrupt as his predecessors who ran the "pseudo-republic" in cahoots with the "better classes" of Cuban society.

  But among the new Cuban generation, a new anti-American nationalism was beginning to develop. Not only were the Cubans saddled with the Platt Amendment and the United States economic hegemony, but they could also watch American military interventions by the U.S. Marines in Mexico and Nicaragua. The Cuban Communist party was created clandestinely in Havana just a year before Fidel Castro was born. Cuba had begun to stir.

  The Mayarí region where Fidel grew up featured probably greater American presence and control than any other place in Cuba. The United Fruit Company, a Boston-based corporate giant with operations throughout Latin America, maintained special housing in Mayarí for its American (and a few Cuban) employees, hospitals, schools (for the children of the sugar-producing elite), stores stocked with American foodstuffs, a post office, and, later, swimming pools and a polo club. In addition to the Rural Guard, a United States-trained Cuban gendarmerie, the company was protected by its own armed police force that assured order and kept out undesirable Cubans.

  The United Fruit Company also exercised great political power in Cuba, even more than other American companies and banks. The first sizable acquisition of sugar land in Cuba was made by an American investor from Boston named E. F. Atkins in 1882 (although the first American-owned sugar mill dates back to 1818). Atkins was followed by the Boston Fruit Company, originally concentrating on bananas, which changed its name to United Fruit Company in 1898 when it began its massive sugar-plantation purchases. United Fruit and the other companies had key Cuban politicians in their pockets (or on their payrolls): The Cuban-American Sugar Company, founded by a Texas congressman at the turn of the century, was represented on the island by Mario G. Menocal, who served as the U.S.-blessed president of Cuba from 1912 to 1920. The United Fruit Company was saved from the nationalization of one half of its holdings by the revolutionary government of President Ramón Grau San Martín in 1934 when Agriculture Minister Carlos Hevia, at odds with the rest of the ministers, talked Grau out of doing it. Hevia, who later served a brief presidential term, conducted the defense of United Fruit as a negotiator between his own government and the United States embassy in Havana. Until the revolution, United Fruit was untouchable: Succeeding governments protected it from labor unrest, excessive taxation, or any interference with its privileges. The company also had immense fruit-plantation holdings, mainly banana, in most Central American countries where it likewise was the dominant political force. In 1954, United Fruit worked hand in hand with the CIA to overthrow the leftist regime of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala, after the company's economic domination was challenged by the local government.

  In Cuba thousands upon thousands of canecutters and mill workers lived with their families in miserable bohios (shacks) on the estates during the four months of the annual zafra (harvest), usually earning less than a dollar a day (sometimes only forty or fifty cents, without food). In the year's remaining months—the sinister "dead time" in Cuba—there was simply no work, and the guajiro (peasant) families tried to survive the best they could. This was the social environment that Fidel Castro remembers from his childhood, and it awakened him politically as he matured.

  When Ángel Castro first came to Mayarí, there were occasional jobs available on the new railway the United Fruit C
ompany had built between its mills and the port of Antilla on the Bay of Nipe, and he was briefly employed as a laborer laying down track as one of the many menial tasks he performed to stay alive. He was probably around twenty-five years old when he decided to start his own business as an itinerant peddler among canecutters and woodsmen up and down Mayarí.

  It was beautiful country, the classical Oriente landscape with clusters of tall palm trees rising proudly amid green canefields and meadows, then deep woods extending far beyond in the direction of the sierras in the south. Rivers faithfully irrigated the fields. As the war ended and foreign capital poured in, chimneys of the new sugar mills being erected all over Oriente began to punctuate the skyline. More and more, there were cattle grazing in the pastures, with guajiros in big straw hats, mounted on their tough little horses, guarding the herds.

  Selling lemonade he prepared every morning and transported in small barrels and tankards was Ángel Castro's first mercantile enterprise. With a donkey cart, he toured the fields and the woods of Mayarí, serving the lemonade to the thirsty men. With his first tiny profits, he started buying wholesale a variety of merchandise, peddling it from finca to finca in the ranch countryside. Fidel says he remembers hearing that his father then organized a group of local workers, whom he paid to cut trees for new sugar-planting fields and for burning wood in the furnaces of the big mills. He apparently had a work contract with an American sugar company. As Spanish immigrants, and especially the gallegos, the poorest and the most determined of all, have always done overseas, Ángel Castro worked incessantly to earn and save as much as possible. Somewhere along the line, he learned how to read and write.

  Probably around 1910, when he was thirty-five or so, Ángel began leasing land from the United Fruit Company in the Birán area, thirty-six kilometers southwest of the town of Mayarí, putting the proceeds from his sugar sales into the acquisition of parcels of land. Thus he became a colono, planting sugarcane for sale to the company's mills, a practice the corporation encouraged because it tied the small farmers closer to it. He employed his first farmhands, and gradually became Don Ángel Castro, an increasingly affluent landowner in Oriente.

  About that time, Ángel Castro married his first wife, María Argota. She is thought to have been an elementary-school teacher in the Mayarí area, though virtually nothing else is known about her. They had two children, Pedro Emilio and Lidia, the latter born in 1915; in 1985 both of them lived in Havana, rather aged and rarely seeing their famous half-brother but in quiet comfort assured by him. Lidia, who eloped as a very young woman to marry an army officer and became widowed within a few years, devoted the rest of her life to Fidel, helping him immeasurably during his clandestine periods, the imprisonment, and the Sierra war. Pedro Emilio was a minor politician prior to the 1952 Batista coup, then reverted to his real interest—Greek and Latin studies.

  There is something of a mystery about the first Señora de Castro, and about the circumstances of Ángel Castro's second marriage. All the published accounts about the Castro family are extremely sketchy (Fidel likes to keep it that way), but they coincide in affirming that María Argota de Castro died shortly after her second child was born. Juana Castro, Fidel's younger sister, insists however that her father either divorced or simply left María (this point is entirely unclear inasmuch as actual divorces in rural Catholic families in Cuba in the 1920s were most uncommon). Juana Castro also says that this first wife lived very long, dying well after the revolution.

  Ángel Castro's second wife, the mother of Fidel and his six sisters and brothers, was Lina Ruz González, a woman easily twenty-five years younger than the Birán landowner. She appears to have been born in the westernmost province of Pinar del Río, and her daughter Emma once described her as "a Cuban for a long time," presumably meaning that her parents were not first-generation immigrants from Spain. Juana says her mother was from "the most humble origins," but it is unknown when and why she had come to Oriente. According to most published versions, Lina worked as a cook or a maid in the Castro household while María Argota de Castro was still in residence.

  Fidel says that his maternal grandparents moved "one thousand kilometers in a cart" from Pinar del Río to Oriente at the start of the century, with Lina and their other children. The grandparents were extremely poor and, according to Fidel, Lina's father and his two brothers drove oxcarts transporting cane from fields to mills. It is unknown what happened to Grandfather Ruz, but Fidel recalls that his maternal grandmother lived about one kilometer from the Birán house and that she had even gone to Havana with Lina after the revolution in 1959.

  Castro, who has rich memories of his mother, has often told of her being "practically illiterate" until, as an adult, she taught herself to read and write. Both his mother and his grandmother, he says, were deeply religious, "the religiosity coming from some family tradition." Because there were no churches or priests in the Birán region, Fidel's mother's devotions were at home, and during the Sierra war, both women had made endless promises to God and the saints for the lives and safety of Fidel and Raúl. The day the revolution triumphed, Señora de Castro, her head covered by a black mantilla, knelt at the altar in the Santiago cathedral to thank God for her sons' survival and victory. Castro recalls that when his mother and grandmother told him of the promises and their faith, he listened to them with interest and respect. "Although I had a different concept of the world, I never discussed these problems with them, because I saw the strength, the encouragement, the consolation they derived from their religious sentiments and their beliefs." Castro later remarked in all seriousness about his mother: "The fact that we completed our struggle alive must have, doubtlessly, expanded her faith." Of his father, he says in a peculiarly detached fashion, "I saw him more preoccupied with other subjects, with the political thing, the daily struggle . . . rarely, almost never, I heard him expound on religion. Perhaps he was skeptical in matters of religion. That was my father." It almost seems as if Fidel resented his father for not sharing his mother's religious faith in his own destiny.

  Some accounts by foreign writers claim that Ángel's and Lina's first three offspring—Ángela, Ramón, and Fidel—were born out of wedlock during the period when Lina worked as a maid or cook for the household. All three have chosen, unsurprisingly, not to discuss this allegation publicly. It is entirely possible that the first wife simply decided to walk out and that the family subsequently let her slip into oblivion (although Pedro Emilio and Lidia went to live with her somewhere, at least for a time).

  In any event, Ángel Castro and Lina were married in church after Fidel's birth in a ceremony arranged by the priest Enrique Pérez Serantes, a friend of the groom, who as bishop many years later would be instrumental in saving Fidel's life from Batista soldiers. Ángela, Ramón, and Fidel were baptized in church later on with the proper surnames of Castro Ruz. There is nothing to suggest that Fidel's alleged illegitimacy had ever caused him the slightest discomfort or problem in the tolerant Cuban society.

  At the time of Ángel Castro's first marriage, the Birán finca's two-story hilltop frame house on wooden piles had already been partly built. It was quite large with most of the bedroom windows facing the sierras in the south, and the cattle and the dairy barn under the building. Upon Ángel's arrival in 1899, the village of Birán had some 530 registered inhabitants and was growing rapidly when the Castro children were being born. Marcané was the nearest town of any importance having both a school and a doctor. All of this territory lay within the confines of the United Fruit Company empire.

  Castro believes that his father built the house on wooden piles with space underneath for cattle and fowl because it was in the architectural style of well-off landowners in Galicia; Ángel Castro, born in a humble one-story Spanish stone house, was eager to enjoy the prosperity that he had earned through his hard work in the new country. Fidel has saved a photograph of the Galicia house, and he shows it to visitors to underscore his family's early poverty.

  When Castro w
as a child, the house was expanded to include an office for his father, and later a cow barn was erected some one hundred yards from the main building, followed by a small slaughterhouse and a repair shop. In time, Ángel Castro built a store and a bakery. Eventually, Castro claims, the tiny post office and the small rural school were the only structures in Birán not belonging to his father. Near the house there was a cockpit where every Sunday during the harvest cockfights were held; Castro tells that "many humble people spent there their scarce earnings [on betting]; if they lost, nothing was left to them and if they won, they spent it immediately on rum and fiestas."

  Manacas, the Castro finca, became in time a 26,000-acre domain (1,920 acres belonged to Don Ángel and the rest was rented permanently) with some 300 families living and working on the property. Many of these people were indigent Haitian canecutters brought to Cuba across the narrow body of sea from the island of Hispaniola to work the sugarcane fields. The cane was sold by the finca to the United Fruit Company's nearby Miranda mill. Don Ángel also grew fruit, raised cattle, and owned forests in Pinares de Mayarí where his sawmill processed lumber for sale in big volume. A small nickel mine belonged to him as well (the Bay of Nipe zone is very rich in nickel and other minerals).