by Tad Szulc
In what Fidel calls "a decisive moment in my life," Ángel Castro decided during the boys' summer holidays after the fourth grade that they would not go back to school. The father had not only been receiving reports from La Salle that his three sons did not study and "were the three biggest bullies who had ever gone there" (Fidel says it was "an unfair report but they believed it at home"), but he also discovered that they were cheating, obtaining solutions to math problems given them by a tutor at the finca, from an answer book they had procured at school.
Ramón Castro was delighted to end his education because he preferred the life in Birán, the fields, the animals, the machines. The little Raúl, unable to defend himself, "was packed off to a military school run by a country teacher, a sergeant, who also gave him a hard time." But Fidel was determined to return to school. As he tells the story, "I remember going to Mother and explaining that I wanted to go on studying; it wasn't fair not to let me go to school. I appealed to her and told her I wanted to stay in school and that if I wasn't sent back, I'd set fire to the house. . . . So they decided to send me back. I'm not sure if they were afraid or just sorry for me, but my mother pleaded my case."
Fidel was learning quickly that absolute and uncompromising stubbornness was a powerful weapon. This may have been the most important lesson he had drawn from his young years at the finca and at the Santiago schools, and he never forgot it. Now, having in effect blackmailed himself back to school, Castro was enrolled in the fifth grade of the much more demanding and much better Dolores boys' school in the center of the city. There, at the age of nine, he began his Jesuit education, one of the most significant intellectual influences in his life. Fidel says that Dolores "was a school that set very high standards; I had trouble keeping up with the others." Castro claims that he changed schools at his own demand, refusing to stay at La Salle after the teacher had slapped him.
But again he found himself a day student, staying with a merchant's family he deeply resented; his sister Ángela, attending a girls' school in Santiago, was his only friend at the hostile house. Fidel was receiving from Birán a twenty-cent weekly allowance, spending ten cents on Sunday movies, five cents for ice cream afterward, and five cents for the comic book El Gorrión (The Sparrow) he bought on Thursdays. However, Fidel recalls, his allowance was cut off if he failed to get the highest marks. Therefore, "I decided to take steps to protect my interests."
He did so by informing his teachers that he had lost the report card with his marks, and he was given another one. "From then on," Fidel says, "I would put my grades in the new book and take that one home to be signed—with very good grades in it, of course. The other notebook, the one they put the real marks in at school, I signed myself and returned to school." At the time, he seemed to have been cultivating a more angelic demeanor, so he must have been above all suspicion. A photograph shows him, a half-smile on his face, sitting on a wooden bench at the long dining table at the school. He wears the Dolores uniform of white trousers, dark blue jacket, shirt and tie, and a white Sam Browne belt; the Jesuits favored a military school atmosphere, and there even was a band with which, as another photograph shows, Fidel marched under a Cuban flag and a Dolores pennant.
Right after turning ten, Castro developed appendicitis, spending three months at the Colonia Española Hospital in Santiago because the incision would not heal properly. But, as usual, he used the time well, and he enjoys recounting the experience: "I was practically alone, and I made friends with all the other patients. I am telling this because I think it shows I already had an ability to relate to other people; I had a streak of the politician. When I wasn't reading comic books, I spent my time visiting other patients. . . . Some people thought I might make a good doctor, because I used to play with lizards and a Gillette razor blade. I had been impressed by operations like the one I'd been through. . . . Few sanitary measures were taken, and that's why the wound opened up and I had to stay at the hospital three months. After that, I would 'operate' on lizards—lizards that usually died, of course. Then I would enjoy watching how the ants carried them off, how hundreds of ants working together could carry the lizard and move it to their heap."
The illness prevented Castro from skipping a year at school as he had been encouraged to do by a black woman teacher known as "Professor Danger." She had been tutoring his sister and saw great potential in him. Fidel says that he never had "a preceptor or a guide who would help me" in his youthful rebellions when his character was being formed, but "that black professor in Santiago was the nearest to being a preceptor." She was, Castro adds, "the first person I knew who stimulated me, who gave me a goal, who was able to make me enthusiastic about studying at such an early age."
Back at the guardian's home, Fidel, now in the sixth grade, was increasingly resentful. For one thing, he was angry that when he came home from school, he was shut up in a room for hours to study "when all any boy wants is . . . do nothing, listen to the radio or go out." But he refused to study, instead letting his imagination "fly off to places and events in history, and to wars." Castro says that he liked history "very much, and particularly the stories of battles . . . I even used to invent battles." The hours he was locked up, he recalls, "were a kind of military training. . . .I'd start off by taking a lot of little scraps and tiny balls of paper, arranging them on a playing board, and setting up an obstacle to see how many would pass, and how many wouldn't. There were losses, casualties. I played this game of wars for hours at a time." When he could not stand the guardian's home any longer, he told the merchant's family "all to go to the devil," and became a boarder at Dolores that same afternoon. Fidel does not explain whether his parents had any say in it, but stresses that time after time "I had to take it upon myself to get out of what I considered an unpleasant situation," listing the fights over his years at La Salle and the confrontation at Birán over the continuation of his education.
Castro, who then was barely eleven years old, says that "from then on I definitely became my own master and took charge of all my own problems without advice from anyone. . . . I played soccer, basketball, jai alai, all kinds of sports. All my energy went into them." He explains that "I personally suffered from the lack of the most elementary perception about teaching and about the psychology of educating boys," but that "I'm not blaming my parents, who were ignorant people without a proper education; they left us in the hands of others they believed were treating us properly, but we had a hard time of it." It would appear that Castro's view of his parents was principally one of contempt. Still, he went on for years using them to his advantage, accepting financial aid from them even as late as the preparations for the Granma invasion in 1956. His sister Juana believes that Fidel respected his father, but very clearly there was no warmth between the two proud and stubborn Spaniards. Fidel's threat at the age of nine to burn down the house if he were not allowed to return to school was his first major confrontation with Don Ángel. At the age of thirteen, while his father paid the Dolores bills, Fidel used the summer vacations not only to drive the finca tractors (one of his preferred pastimes), but also to try to organize the sugar workers against Don Ángel. At eighteen, while studying at an expensive Jesuit college in Havana, he fought with his father repeatedly over the family's "capitalism," accusing him of "abusing" the workers "with false promises."
Other relatives say that at the same time Fidel would criticize Don Ángel for administering the estate badly, insist on examining the books, and protest that a peasant working for the family was permitted to go on owing it six thousand pesos. When Fidel was in prison after the Moncada attack, his father (who had just finished financing his university studies) sent money monthly for the support of the rebel's wife, Mirta, and the little Fidelito. According to Juana Castro, Fidel found no time to see his parents at Birán during the seven weeks he spent in Havana between amnesty from prison and his departure for Mexico and the revolution; Raúl, released from prison on the same day, did manage to visit the finca for a week or so. The last t
ime Fidel saw his father was early in 1953, before Moncada. He was in Mexico when Don Ángel died from a ruptured hernia in October 1956. A person who has known Fidel Castro from childhood says that he had "no tenderness for anybody, not even for his wife," and that he is "a passionate but not a. caring or tender man, living at the margin of all human problems, except his own."
This is a very harsh judgment, and it is not necessarily borne out by other accounts of Fidel's behavior. Fidel had undeniably become his own master, however, something he seemed to have worked on quite conscientiously while at school. In the sixth grade at the Dolores school, Fidel was joined by Ramón and Raúl, their father having again changed his mind about educating all his sons. Raúl recalls that during one Sunday outing at the Siboney beach, near Santiago, the priest in charge punished two students by forbidding them to go swimming. Hearing this, Fidel approached the priest and asked him, "Father, if I dive down from the ten-meter [thirty feet] board, will you let them swim?" The priest answered, "My son, it is too high. . . . You'll never dare!" Fidel repeated his question, and the Jesuit said, "Well, yes, if you dive." Fidel jumped, mustering all his courage, winning the swim for his companions—but also proving to himself that he could always overcome fear.
Raúl, who hated school, remembers: "For me, it was a prison. School for me, it was prayer, the necktie, the fear of God. But what really killed me was the prayer. We prayed from morning till night. But Fidel, that was different. He dominated the situation. He succeeded in everything. In sports, in studies. 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." Again, Fidel's goal was to hone his courage.
Juan Rovira, who was Fidel's classmate at Dolores (and is now an exile in Miami), recalls him as a sports hero and a student with a phenomenal memory. Rovira says: "Everybody was very enthusiastic about Fidel when there was a basketball game with La Salle, or when there was a track meet, because he ran so well and his sports qualities were fantastic. He was outstanding in all the sports, and for this reason he enjoyed general sympathy. When it came to studies, Fidel didn't stand out as much, but when the exams came, he studied a lot. Boarders were allowed to rise early, at four o'clock in the morning, to study, and he had a prodigious memory. He wrote everything exactly the way he read it, and it looked as if he had copied it, but he had it all engraved in his memory. And he got good grades for his fantastic memory."
Castro's familiarity with mountains first came when he was at Dolores. The boys were taken on outings by school bus to climb mountains, sometimes to El Cobre, to Gran Piedra, or even the foothills of the Sierra Maestra. Fidel recalls that "I also loved to take off along the rivers when they were swollen, cross them, and hike a while before coming back. The bus always had to wait for me. . . . I did not imagine that mountains would one day play such an important role in my life!"
When he was fifteen, Castro graduated from Dolores (that year, he says, "I was one of the best in my class"), but he still had an arrogant attitude. Asked at final exams to name a reptile, he answered, "A majá" (a large, nonpoisonous Cuban snake), and when told to name one more, he replied, "Another majá."
His determination to excel and to distinguish himself knew no limits. When a Santiago radio station sponsored a poetry contest, with parents requested to vote for the best entry, Castro entered several poems. José Martí, his object of admiration, had been a great poet, but this was a gift Fidel totally lacked. He admits that in the contest his poems "weren't the best, but I had made friends with all the boys, which I think again reveals perhaps a political streak in me. . . . Almost all the kids asked their parents to vote for me; as a result, letters were sent in . . . that went something like this, 'Elpidio's poem to mothers is very beautiful and very touching, but our vote goes to Fidel . . .' "
After his revolution triumphed, Fidel Castro has often said that his sense of social consciousness was born at the little country school in Marcané and at the Birán finca where he studied and played with the children of the poor. This is substantiated in a lengthy personal letter he wrote to a woman friend from his prison cell in January 24, 1954, where he was serving the sentence for the Moncada attack: "My classmates, sons of humble peasants, went to school barefoot, and, in general, wore miserable clothes. They were very poor. They learned poorly the first letters, and they soon left school, even if they were more intelligent than was necessary. They drowned, then, in a bottomless and hopeless sea of ignorance and poverty, without any of them ever escaping the inevitable disaster. Today, their children will follow in their steps, shouldering the burden of social fatalism. I, on the contrary, could study, I continued to study. . . . Nothing has changed in twenty years. . . . It is probable that it has been like this since the day the Republic was born, and that it will continue without anyone seriously taking in hand such a state of things. . . . Nothing that could be done in the domain of the technique and organization of education can lead anywhere unless one reshuffles from top to bottom the economic status of the nation . . . because that is where the real root of the tragedy lies. . . . Admitting that, with the aid of the state, a young man reaches an enviable technical level, even there he would drown with his diploma, like a paper boat, in the terrible narrows of our present economic and social status . . ."
In his autobiographical interview with Carlos Franqui in 1959, Castro notes that "all the circumstances surrounding my life and childhood, everything I saw, would have made it logical to suppose I would develop the habits, the ideas, and the sentiments natural to a social class with certain privileges and selfish motives that make it indifferent to the problems of others." Yet, he says, "one circumstance in the middle of all this helped us develop a certain human spirit: It was the fact that all our friends, our companions, were the sons of local peasants."
It was with this sort of background that Fidel Castro was exposed to the teachings of the Jesuits, first in Santiago, then in Havana. After his first experiences with Jesuit schools, he concluded that "the educators were better prepared than those in other schools . . . there was a spirit of discipline . . . creating habits of discipline and study was good. I am not against that kind of life, Spartan to some degree. And I think that, as a rule, the Jesuits formed people of character."
Castro had no way of knowing it, but an astonishing number of young Cuban boys, boys destined to become his closest revolutionary companions, were at that same time studying at Jesuit schools in Santiago, Havana, and other cities. As for Fidel, he was now almost sixteen and ready for the next great change in his life.
CHAPTER
3
On an October morning in 1941, Fidel Castro's knees were shaking, and he was perspiring profusely from nervous tension. He was standing before Father José Rubinos, the director of the Avellaneda Literary Academy, to deliver from memory a ten-minute speech that would mark the birth of his professional political life.
If it pleased the demanding Father Rubinos, the speech would mean acceptance in the academy, the school of oratory at Belén College, an exclusive Jesuit high and preparatory school in Havana where Fidel was sent by his father to pursue his studies after completing the four years at Dolores. He had turned sixteen in August, and while vacationing in Birán, he had persuaded his parents to let him attend Belén because he regarded it as the best school in the country even though it was also "the center of great prestige of the cream of the cream of Cuban aristocracy and bourgeoisie." Castro always knew what was good for him.
Studying in Havana and leaving behind the provinciality of Oriente was a tremendous step toward a proud career, Fidel being the first in his family to be given such an opportunity. Belén, above all, was the road to the university, Castro's next planned move. The bustling, cosmopolitan, vital, sensual, and explosively loud capital city on the north coast, ever mysterious in its promise of ideas and experiences, was a breathless new world to the gangling and still rough-c
ut youth from the sugarcane countryside. It was his first time in Havana, and Fidel arrived there by train from Santiago with "a lot of money to buy clothes and other articles . . . and to pay tuition, purchase books . . . and for other expenses." Tuition and board cost fifty dollars monthly, which, Castro says, was "very cheap" at the time, considering Belén's ample facilities, but out of reach for the children of a schoolteacher, for example, whose salary was seventy-five dollars a month.
Fidel did not know a soul in Havana, but naturally he was determined from the first moment to make his mark as soon as possible, overcoming obstacles as he encountered them. José Ignácio Rasco, his schoolmate at Belén and later at Havana University, recalls that on that October day at Avellaneda Academy, Castro "was desperate because he worried that his nerves wouldn't let him pass the all-important test." In the end, Castro was able to satisfy Father Rubinos and was accepted into the academy. Nobody remembers what he actually said, but the test (it was elective, not compulsory) was another victory over himself. In Cuba one cannot succeed politically without being a first-rate public speaker, and at the age of sixteen, Fidel was already overwhelmingly attracted by the craft, art, and glamour of politics and power—little as he knew about them.