Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  Castro is recognized today as one of the great orators of his time, yet the adolescent timidity never really left him. Rasco (who has lived in exile in Miami since 1980, having broken with Castro soon after the revolution over the issue of communism) remembers that before delivering his first public speech as a university student five years after the agony of Avellaneda, Fidel had spent a week at Rasco's house writing, rewriting, and memorizing the address before practicing his delivery in front of a mirror. Again, timidity was the great problem, and again, he overcame it. His confession to Havana's Bohemia magazine in 1985 that he suffers from fear as he faces an audience was greeted with disbelief and derision by readers at home and abroad, but it was no invention. He can be a timid (or shy) man, and there is always that moment of uncertainty when he begins to speak, usually in tentative tones. When he becomes enraptured with his theme, the timidity vanishes for the long hours he remains before the cameras and microphones.

  In Fidel Castro astounding tenacity accompanied the timidity. Rasco emphasizes that as a student Fidel had immense powers of concentration as well as his phenomenal memory working for him. Frequently, distracted by other matters that interested him more, he would fall back in his studies—then recover spectacularly. In his last year at Belén, Rasco says Castro was suspended after the first semester from French-language and logic classes for failure to maintain his grades, which, in turn, prevented him from being allowed to take special final exams before Education Ministry inspectors (because Belén was a private school, the law required that students be certified by the ministry in addition to normal graduation). Under the circumstances, Fidel bet Father Larrucea, the supervising teacher, that if he obtained a 100 grade (the highest possible) in both French and logic in the second semester, he would be permitted to present himself at the ministry exams. The priest agreed and, of course, Castro won the bet.

  His memory was so stunning that, as Rasco remembers, his schoolmates would playfully ask him, "Fidel, what does page forty-three of the sociology text say?" and Castro would recite it with a straight face, and if the word at the end of the page was hyphenated, he would stress that, too.

  Castro's tenacity and determination were physical as well. Fidel had made up his mind to be Belén's best baseball pitcher, but because he had a muscle problem in his throwing arm, he practiced sometimes until eight o'clock in the evening at the school's sports grounds. Long after the catcher got tired and left, Castro would go on throwing the ball against a wall. Rasco tells the story of Fidel bragging one day that he could succeed in anything he wanted to do, and when challenged by a student named Cabella, he bet him that he could hurl himself on a bicycle, head first, against a brick wall. Not surprisingly, he fainted from the impact, and he had to spend three days recovering at the school's infirmary.

  During the four years Castro spent at Belén, he was by far the outstanding athlete, both because he enjoyed sports and because it was a question of principle for him to excel at everything. As several of his former schoolmates point out, however, Fidel was principally a solo player, not a team player, which was a natural reflection of his character.

  He was a track star, a Ping-Pong champion, a pitcher in baseball, and, as he explains it now, a "thinker" in basketball—the de facto team captain. Enrique Ovares, who knew Castro very well at the university because of their many common political involvements, says that the Belén basketball team "was famous because Fidel made famous everything he touched." Ovares, an architect who now lives in exile in Florida, cannot be accused of being a Castro propagandist: He spent seven years in prison in Havana after 1960 for antirevolutionary plots. He reminisces that Castro's dedication was so great that "he went to all the practice sessions, and if it was required to shoot fifty baskets, Fidel would shoot one hundred of them."

  Fidel himself tells proudly that "I succeeded in becoming outstanding in basketball, football, baseball, track, and almost all the other sports from the moment I arrived there." He maintained his love for mountain-hiking, and he says that after the first outings by the Belén Boy Scout troop, "the teachers determined that I was outstanding, and they kept promoting me until one day they made me the chief of the school's Boy Scouts, 'the general of the explorers,' as they called it." He remembers organizing and leading an expedition to climb the tallest mountain in western Cuba, taking five days instead of the scheduled three days because the ascent of Guajaibón Peak was so difficult, and alarming the Jesuits who feared that Fidel and his group had suffered an accident. He says that "I didn't know then that I was preparing myself for the revolutionary struggle, nor could I imagine it at that moment."

  In the context of Cuban society of the 1940s, the politically conservative rich families as well as those who had just acquired wealth—such as Spanish immigrants—were expected to send their sons to Jesuit schools. This was not because Catholicism was so deeply engrained in them but because these were the best educational establishments. To attend a Jesuit school carried a social and snobbish cachet as well; girls from "good families" went to convent schools like Sacred Heart or the Ursuline Sisters. The goal was solid religiously oriented upbringing, at least on the surface.

  Affluent but liberal "bourgeois" parents preferred nonreligious private schooling for their offspring, often military academies for the boys. Middle-class or even the poorer families' children attended public schools known as institutos, or technical and vocational schools. Peasants and other truly poor Cubans seldom could send their sons (much less daughters) to study beyond the local grade school. In this sense, social stratification in Cuba was implemented from childhood, and children on all levels knew instantly their place in society. For the now-rich Castro family it was logical for the sons to go first to Dolores in Santiago, then to Belén in Havana (Ramón, the oldest son of Ángel and Lina, returned from Dolores to work at the finca, which he liked best, and was married at nineteen; Raúl was kept at Dolores until it was time for him to enter Belén, too; Ángela, their oldest daughter, went to the Ursuline Sisters' convent in Havana to be followed there by Juana).

  Fidel Castro is extremely keen, however, to avoid any impression that he came from an aristocratic or upper-class bourgeois background even though his family had accumulated wealth. He makes the accurate observation that in "privileged" schools like Belén, the students were divided into two groups, "not so much by money, although money was the basic fact, but by social category, the homes where they lived, the traditions."

  He remarks that while the Castros perhaps had adequate resources to rise socially, they never did so because they lived in the countryside: "We lived there among the people, among very humble workers . . . where animals were under the house, the cows, the pigs, the chickens, and all that." Fidel may be exaggerating the simplicity of his origins, particularly because there is no question that at least his father undertook to create a social and political position for himself in the region (contributing to political campaigns and participating in them on behalf of friends and associates), but he is correct in portraying the status of Cuban rural-class culture.

  "I was not a grandson of a landowner nor a great-grandson of a landowner," he says. "Sometimes the great-grandson of a landowner no longer had money, but he conserved a full culture of the aristocratic, rich, oligarchic class. Inasmuch as my mother had been a very poor peasant and my father a very poor peasant, who succeeded in accumulating certain wealth, the culture of the rich, of the landlords . . . I think that if I had been a grandson of a landlord or a great-grandson of a landlord, I might possibly have had the misfortune of receiving that culture of class, that spirit of class, that conscience of class, and I would not have had the privilege of escaping bourgeois ideology."

  It is striking that so many years after his victorious socialist revolution and his supposed evolution into a full-fledged Marxist-Leninist, Castro still finds it necessary to engage in essentially gratuitous protestations about his social origins. He is defensive about his parents' affluence, offering the disclaimers that
they "worked every day under hard conditions" and had "no social life," even though he willingly accepted parental financial support well into adulthood. Because Fidel's youthful reminiscences, limited as they are, always seem designed to construct most carefully the official myth of Fidel Castro (as he wishes to be perceived at a given time), he is determined to erase any suspicions that the bourgeois taint lurks somewhere in his background. He may also want to exorcise the temptation existing among so many bourgeois who became Communists to remain, even subconsciously, more bourgeois than Communist. In any event, "bourgeois" is an immensely obscene word in Castro's lexicon, a word he almost fears, and it is a theme to which he constantly returns.

  As the leading educational center of the Cuban establishment elite, Belén was located in its own imposing building, built in the 1930s on a large tract of land in the mainly residential Alturas de Belén (Bethlehem Heights) district of Havana, off Fifty-first Avenue. The school had originally functioned in cramped quarters in Old Havana, but the new building had comfortable accommodations for its two hundred boarders (out of a total of a thousand students), several baseball and basketball fields and courts, a track oval, and even a swimming pool. Fidel enjoyed very much this privileged environment and facilities of the Cuban aristocracy and bourgeoisie; after the revolution Belén was turned into the Military Technical institute, a university-level technological center for the armed forces (Fidel's old room remains unchanged as a shrinelike showplace maintained by the Museum of the Revolution).

  Discipline at Belén was strict, but Castro seemed to have no problems with it. The boys wore uniforms, were awakened at 6:30 A.M. to attend mass at 7:00 A.M. (mass and prayer and periodic religious three-day retreats were the only aspect of Belén life Fidel now says he disliked), then breakfast and classroom. Castro was given the responsibility for the main reading room where pupils studied between dinner and bedtime: He had to make sure that windows and doors were locked and lights turned off after the study period, but he often stayed on alone for hours to read for exams.

  Castro tells that he made "many friendships" with fellow students, and that "without realizing it, or trying for it, I began to acquire popularity among them as a sportsman, athlete, explorer, mountain-climber, and as a person who, after all, had good grades." He says that "perhaps during that time there, some unconscious political qualities were emerging" in him. They must have been very unconscious indeed, because Fidel never developed any political or other following at the school, and no Belén companion of his ever participated in Castro's subsequent revolutionary activities.

  Fidel and other boarders were allowed to go out on weekends if they had relatives in Havana or were invited to friends' homes. But despite his sports-rooted fame, Castro seems to have rated few such invitations. His father was relatively rich, yet in class-conscious Cuban society this did not automatically grant him entrée in old-money Havana circles, and behind his back he was occasionally called guajiro (peasant). Enrique Ovares recalls first meeting Fidel during a weekend at the home of Carlos Remedios, a Belén basketball player whose father was a powerful politician and member of the Chamber of Deputies. This, however, was only a "basketball friendship." Ovares, who knew Castro as well as anybody during his young years, goes still further in defining the latter's situation. "I think that the worst damage Fidel's parents did him," he says, "was to put him in a school of wealthy boys without Fidel being really rich . . . and more than that, without having a social position. . . . With Fidel's kind of maturity, when he grew from child into an adult, I think that this influenced him and he had hatred against society people and moneyed people."

  He recalls that Fulgencio Batista, even as Cuba's president, could not be elected member of the super-exclusive Havana Biltmore Yacht Club, being blackballed each time his name came up. This is a sad commentary on how the privileged in Cuba behaved in those days, and Fidel is the first to point it out. It is difficult to judge whether Ovares is correct in concluding that his inferior social status pushed Fidel into "hating the rich"—Castro has not spoken of these years in those terms, but it is doubtful that he could remain indifferent in a situation where his personal popularity was in question. In any event, Fidel was not exceedingly sociable, then or later. Ovares says that "we used to like going to parties and so on, but he did not. He was introverted." Juan Rovira, a fellow boarder, remembers Fidel as a person of "a somewhat difficult character . . . he wasn't very open, he wasn't very constant," and "being happy if things worked well for him, and depressed if they went badly." He was prone to violence, and one of his former schoolmates says that on at least one occasion he got into a fistfight with other players over a basketball referee's decision he questioned.

  In his third year at Belén, Fidel, then age eighteen, was proclaimed Cuba's "outstanding collegiate athlete," but in the classroom he concentrated only on the subjects that interested him: Spanish, history, geography, and agriculture (which is probably why he let French and logic lapse). Interestingly, Fidel favored sacred history as well because of its "fabulous content . . . it was marvelous for the mind of a child or adolescent to know all that had occurred since the creation of the world until the universal deluge."

  Castro was fascinated by the Bible: the story of Moses, the crossing of the Red Sea, the Promised Land, and "all the wars and battles." He says that "I think it was in sacred history that I first heard about war, that is, I acquired a certain interest in martial arts . . . it interested me fabulously, from the destruction of the walls of Jericho by Joshua . . . to Samson and his Herculean strength capable of tearing down a temple with his own hands. . . . All that period, which one might call of the Old Testament, Jonas, the whale that swallowed him, the punishment of Babylon, the Prophet Daniel, they were marvelous stories." Then, he says, came the New Testament, where "the whole process of the death and crucifixion of Christ . . . produced an impact on the child and the youth."

  At the same time, however, Castro also remembered his education in sinister terms: In a 1961 speech, he said that "I was formed in the midst of the worst reaction and I lost many years of my life in obscurantism, superstition, and lies," evidently not seeing a contradiction between this view and his recollections of the fascination sacred history held for him at Belén. Again, this is how Castro goes on weaving and re-creating his own myths about himself.

  Fidel Castro's stay at Belén—autumn of 1941 to spring of 1945—straddled the Second World War and coincided with Fulgencio Batista's first presidency in Cuba. This former army sergeant, for seven years the power behind the throne in Cuba as the country's military chief, now emerged as a democratic leader.

  Batista's political career began on September 4, 1933, when he led a coup by noncommissioned army officers to establish the armed forces as the conservative arbiter in Cuban politics, although at the outset he allied himself with a radical regime.

  The crisis of the 1930s in Cuba stemmed from the move by President Machado, initially supported by the United States, to prolong the four-year term in office by five years. First elected in 1926, Machado organized two years later a phony election with himself as the only candidate, receiving a new term to run from 1929 to 1935. Machado's maneuver triggered a wave of opposition bringing together revolution-minded students, the young Communist party, and moderate traditional political leaders, and Cuba lived for five years in deep unrest and violence. The United States blissfully ignored this state of affairs almost until the end even though the Platt Amendment was still in force and Washington could have intervened legally for a good cause. But so long as American economic interests were not in jeopardy, the United States paid no attention.

  Starting a tradition that Fidel Castro would resurrect a quarter-century later, revolutionary students and young professionals along with worker and peasant leaders formed the spearhead of the antidictatorial movement. From the university sprang the Students' Directorate, which would be reborn during the Castro revolution, and the militant youth of the day became known as the "Generatio
n of 1930," profoundly nationalistic and social-justice conscious. The anti-Machado struggle produced its heroes and martyrs: In January 1929, Julio Antonio Mella, a student leader and secretary-general of the illegal Cuban Communist party, was assassinated in Mexico by agents of the dictatorship; in September 1930 the police killed Students' Directorate leader Rafael Trejo during an anti-Machado street demonstration. From thereon Cuba was plunged in virtually permanent violence.

  Only in 1933, when American businessmen and investors became concerned about the Cuban economy and their stake in it, did the United States government awake to the island crisis. President Franklin D. Roosevelt dispatched Benjamin Sumner Welles, his top diplomat in Latin America, to mediate between the Machado regime and the opposition groups. Protesting against the belated Welles effort, however, was the Generation of 1930 leadership. The Directorate and its allies saw in the anti-Machado battle the opportunity to bestow on Cuba "real" independence, free her of American influence, and put into practice Martí's teachings of freedom and justice. Thus Martí was the model and hero of the revolutionaries in the Thirties, a fact that goes far to explain subsequent Cuban history.

  Machado was forced to resign on August 12, 1933, under the pressure of a revolutionary general strike on one hand and United States demands on the other. The strike was successful despite a last-minute decision by the Communist party to withdraw its support on the unconvincing grounds that it might lead to armed United States intervention (it was no longer necessary anyway), and an agreement between the party and Machado. The Communists, who seemed to have forgotten Mella's murder, could not save Machado, but this incident proved the first example of the extraordinary political flexibility of the Cuban Communist party—if not always necessarily of its wisdom.

  Acting on Welles's advice, the traditional political parties and the army joined in handing the presidency to Carlos Manuel de Céspedes whose father led the first independence war in 1868. But the Students' Directorate and other radical groups were not satisfied with the simple disappearance of Machado, desiring a full-fledged revolution. This is where Fulgencio Batista, the stenographer-sergeant, entered the scene, and Cuban politics. Noncommissioned officers headed by Batista rebelled against the army command on the night of September 4, taking over the power in order to hand it to a five-man civilian commission named by the Students' Directorate. Céspedes had lasted three weeks.