Fidel Castro

A Biography

Volker Skierka, Patrick Camiller

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780745640815, 9780745630069
• eBook ISBN: 9780745693040
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Fidel Castro is one of the most interesting and controversial personalities of our time – he has become a myth and an icon. He was the first Cuban Caudillo – the man who freed his country from dependence on the USA and who lead his people to rediscover their national identity and pride.

Castro has outlived generations of American presidents and Soviet leaders. He has survived countless assassination attempts by the CIA, the Mafia, and Cubans living in exile. He has become one of the greatest politicians of the 20th Century. His biography, and the history of his country exemplify the tensions between East and West, North and South, rich and poor.

As Castro's life draws to a close, the question as to what will become of Cuba is more important that ever. Will Castro open Cuba to economic reform and democratization, or stick to his old slogan socialism or death?

In this remarkable, up-to-date reconstruction of Castro's life, Volker Skierka addresses these questions and provides an account of the economic, social, and political history of Cuba since Castro's childhood. He draws on a number of little-known sources, including material from the East German communist archives on Cuba, which were until recently inaccessible.

This is an exciting, painstakingly researched, and authortiative account of the life of one of the most extraordinary political figures of our time.

1

The Heroic Myth

“One thing is certain: wherever he may be, however and with whomever, Fidel Castro is there to win. I do not think anyone in this world could be a worse loser. His attitude in the face of defeat, even in the slightest events of daily life, seems to obey a private logic: he will not even admit it, and he does not have a moment’s peace until he manages to invert the terms and turn it into a victory.”¹ The man who wrote these words is the writer Gabriel García Márquez, a longstanding friend of the Máximo Líder. They give us some idea of what may have driven Fidel Castro for more than half a century to outlast his various enemies, opponents and critical friends: namely, a wish to be proved right, to be morally as well as politically victorious. No self-doubt: “his” Cuba for the Cubans! The final verdict on his “mission” would rest with history alone – although Castro also tried from the beginning to keep the last word for himself and to anticipate the verdict of history. In 1953, at his trial for the abortive attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba which launched his career as a professional revolutionary, he concluded his famous defense plea with the certainty: “History will absolve me!” For García Márquez, “he is one of the great idealists of our time, and perhaps this may be his greatest virtue, although it has also been his greatest danger.”² Yet an even greater danger has always been lurking in the background: the danger of isolation. For only in isolation is there no possibility of contradiction.

With an iron will Castro has survived generations of American presidents, Soviet general secretaries, international leaders of states and governments, democrats and potentates, until he has become by far the longest-ruling “number one” of the twentieth century and one of the most interesting figures of contemporary history. Bearded, always dressed in his green uniform, a hero and object of hate in one: this is how the world knows him. Against no one else are so many murder plots supposed to have been hatched. Leaders who are so unyielding, so “unpolitical” in their refusal to compromise, do not usually survive for long in that part of the world; they tend to be overthrown or killed. The fact that Castro is still alive is little short of a miracle. It is due to the alliance of his own well-trained instinct with a ubiquitous security apparatus that is considered among the most efficient in the world. From soon after his twentieth birthday Castro had assassins and conspirators on his trail: political gangsters at Havana University in the late 1940s, henchmen of the dictator Fulgencio Batista, traitors in his own ranks, big landowners evicted during the Castroite revolution in 1959, Cuban exiles in Florida working hand in hand with the CIA and the Mafia. Their bosses, most notably the legendary Meyer Lansky, lost a fortune estimated at more than US

100 million in hotels, clubs, casinos, brothels and other such establishments – a good tenth of the value of US assets taken over by the Cuban state. That a stubborn farmer’s son from the underdeveloped east of the island simply came and took away this lucrative paradise and sink of iniquity from the fine, upstanding United States; that he went on to humiliate the “Yankees” and President Kennedy in the eyes of the world when they attempted an invasion with exiled Cuban mercenaries in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs; that Soviet nuclear missiles installed for his sake in Cuba nearly led in 1962 to a third world war – these deep narcissistic wounds will never be forgiven, even after his death, by the great power to the north.

There are scarcely any photos that show Castro laughing. Yet the Cubans are a spirited people full of joie de vivre. Gabriel García Márquez described Castro as “one of the rare Cubans who neither sing nor dance.”³ He is said to have a good sense of humor – but it is as if he has forbidden himself any public display of laughter or pleasure. Such things are secret, and it is a state secret whether there is a private Castro behind the political Castro. Information about himself and his family is filtered for public consumption, becoming partly contradictory or inaccurate. On the whole, then, not much can be gleaned about his personal life. We know that his marriage came to an early end, that he had a few passionate affairs such as those with Natalia Revuelta (once the most captivating woman in Havana) and Marita Lorenz (a German captain’s beautiful daughter who was later contracted by the CIA to assassinate him). He has one son from his marriage, Fidelito, a nuclear scientist with a doctorate, as well as several children born out of wedlock and a host of grandchildren. In each case, so it is said, he is a kind yet strict father or grandfather – yet Alina, his daughter by Natalia Revuelta, keeps tormenting him with her hatred. It is well known that Castro likes to go swimming and diving; that he enjoys baseball, sleeps little and has a mania for working at night; that he had to give up smoking cigars for health reasons; that he lives an ascetic existence with few material demands, but is fond of ice cream and likes to cook spaghetti for himself. When García Márquez once found him in a melancholic mood and asked what he would most like to do at that moment, Castro astonished his friend with the answer: “Just hang around on some street corner.”⁴ Did he ever think that perhaps he ought to have become a baseball player? He certainly had the opportunity. For in his student days, he was such a good pitcher that the New York Giants offered him a professional contract. Had he accepted, part of world history would have taken a different course.

Instead, this son of a big landowner from eastern Cuba felt called to lead a handful of comrades – including the Argentinean Che Guevara, later deified as a pop icon of the sixties generation – in a movement to bring down the dictator Batista. Since 1959 Castro has ruled his people like a large family, with the stern hand of a patriarch. The whole island is his “latifundium.” He wants to be seen not as its owner, however, but as its trustee. Under his rule, sweeping reforms have made Cuba’s health and education systems unparalleled in Latin America and beyond; and for the first time Cubans have been able to develop a national identity, even maintaining it through a period of political and economic dependence upon the Soviet Union. These achievements, and not just the ever-present straitjacket of state security, may be one of the reasons why Castro’s system has been able to last so long despite its lack of democratic and material freedoms. For decades now the majority of Cubans have lived with a split mentality: on the one hand, a love–hate relationship with the United States and a longing for the life conjured up by the glitter of Western globalization; on the other hand, admiration and respect for Fidel as their patron even in times of greatest hardship.

Although Fidel Castro seems to have taken more after his father, we should not underestimate the influence that his mother’s strict Catholicism and his long years at a Jesuit boarding school had upon his essential character. It is no accident that he has repeatedly drawn parallels between early Christianity and his understanding of socialism, even if he has long been in conflict with the official Church. In this way, he has over the years developed an “ideology” of his own that involves more than just the adoption of Soviet-style Communism. His Caribbean model of socialism is “Castroism,” or, as Cubans say, “Fidelism” – a pragmatic mixture of a little Marx, Engels and Lenin, slightly more Che Guevara, a lot of José Martí, and a great deal indeed of Fidel Castro. Martí was the Cuban fighter who, in the late nineteenth century, launched the decisive struggle for the country’s independence from Spain; Castro identified with him from early youth and always saw himself in the role of his heir and descendant. “He knows the 28 volumes of Martí’s work thoroughly,” writes García Márquez, “and has had the talent to incorporate his ideas into the bloodstream of a Marxist revolution.”⁵ Martí, who was killed in the early months of war in 1895, was spared from seeing how the United States eventually intervened and, after the Spanish defeat in 1898, established its own dominance over the island. But on the day he died, he wrote with great concern to a friend: “Belittlement by a mighty neighbor who does not really know us is the worst danger for our American continent.”⁶ Precisely this is the deeper cause of the Cuban–American and indeed the Latin American dilemma, and it will remain such after Castro himself has departed from the scene.

2

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 built 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 a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• A Note of Thanks
• Acknowledgments
• Preface to the English Edition
• 1 The Heroic Myth
• 2 The Young Fidel
• 3 The Young Revolutionary
• 4 The Young Victor
• 5 Old Enemies, New Friends
• 6 The Long March with Che
• 7 Bad Times, Good Times
• 8 Alone against All
• 9 The Eternal Revolutionary
• 10 Don Quixote and History
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index