Like the fieldstone farmhouses of Láncara, Galicia, the boy born the night of December 5, 1875, to Manuel Castro Núñez and Antonia Argiz Fernández was made to last. Castro, from the Galician castrexa, Latin castrum, means castle or fort. Ángel Castro Argiz, Fidel Castro’s father, had the build and bearing of the granite lintel that framed the doorway of his parents’ low-slung home. First and last surviving photographs reveal a figure as unyielding as inland Galicia itself: short, stout, chiseled, severe, with sagging eyelids and furrowed brow—a walled city, a castro, of one.1
Ángel was the couple’s second child, the first to make it through a night. A survivor by sunrise of his natal day, Ángel embodied his parents’ faith not that things would be good in Láncara, exactly, but that things could be better.2 All infants did not die in childbirth. All livestock did not succumb to wolves. The rain would cease. The cold would ease. The restoration of King Alfonso XII would end the chaos unleashed by twenty-two months of republican government. For eleven years, the family’s fortune held. Then the latest child went the way of the first, this time taking her mother, Antonia, along with her. The couple had lost its hedge with fate and the family quickly disintegrated. Two surviving daughters were sent to live with a nearby aunt. The father remarried the next year. The boy, just twelve, quit his sad and broken home in search of something better.3
He did not wander far at first, taking up with two sausage-making uncles in the nearby village of Armea, a patchwork of pastures, fields, and woods from Láncara, on the south bank of the Neira River. Three years later, having tired of sausage making, Ángel left home again, this time for Madrid, the nation’s capital, 470 kilometers southeast of Láncara, where he called on a distant aunt. Descending Spain’s Cordillera Central onto the outskirts of Madrid on day ten or so of what would become a decades’ long pilgrimage, Ángel would have sensed the city long before arriving in it. By 1890, Madrid was enjoying the fruits of a commercial revolution two generations old that had swept south and west into the heart of the Iberian Peninsula from the port cities of Barcelona and Bilbao, and which introduced new industries and markets, new legal and political institutions, new social and civic allegiances.4 The revolution was surely palpable in the vibrant colors and commotion, the unfamiliar smells and tastes, which greeted Ángel as he approached the city. It was present, too, in the curious confidence and carelessness of the young boys and girls he met along the way who must have regarded the country bumpkin with bemusement.5
This new world would prove as cruel as it was exhilarating, but its downsides would have been easy to miss as Ángel crossed the Puente Segovia and disappeared into the heart of the old city. Any one of Madrid’s great public squares could absorb more visitors than populated all the little villages along the Neira. The Plaza Mayor, its stalls bursting with luxuries, the Puerta del Sol, with its opulent town houses, the spanking new Jardines del Buen Retiro, where the city elite frolicked, boated, basked, and bowled made Madrid seem less a distant metropolis, in Ángel’s eyes, than a foreign country, with its own moral and political economy. Everything the boy had learned from his parents about virtue and self-discipline toppled head over heels with the nimble acrobats, spoiled children, and brazen couples on the sumptuous lawns of Buen Retiro. With time, Ángel would learn to manipulate the economic levers of the new liberal order, but there is no record of him ever succumbing to its hedonism.6
Years later, with a family of his own, Ángel insisted that his children pursue higher education. The cost of his own illiteracy was everywhere apparent in Madrid, where he found himself shut out from the lucrative clerical and administrative jobs that characterized the new commercial economy. Unqualified for meaningful work he was cut off from the pleasures that went with it. The elegant restaurants, the hypnotic music, the coded flirtation, the casual strolls, even the rough-and-tumble world of sport were the province of a class above, and no amount of backbreaking work in a butchery here or bakery there could win him elevation. For four years Ángel toiled in vain to amass the savings that might alter his fate. Relief came not in a lucky break, but in a note from home when, in 1894, with Spain on the verge of war in Cuba, the government issued a draft decree. Ordered to attend a lottery in the Galician town of Carracedo, Ángel, now eighteen, retraced his steps across the city, behind him a beguiling but unforgiving capital, ahead a tedious ascent up the Cordillera Central toward a future no more promising than when he first departed Láncara.7
Unable to read or write, Ángel made his mark on the world with his hands and feet. His mother’s death launched him on an extended journey that took him to Madrid and back, to Cuba and back, then back to Cuba again, finally to Oriente Province in far eastern Cuba to stay, where, despite long odds, he managed to establish a toehold and, eventually, the financial footing that allowed him to settle down. The man who emerged from this pilgrimage was not a cultured, playful, adoring father or spouse, as we shall see. But he was a dogged worker, a reliable neighbor, and a generous benefactor, determined to provide his children the stability and education he lacked. As befits the surname Castro, Ángel was resolutely self-assured, able to get along with others when necessary, but ready to go it alone—a characteristic he passed on to his famous son.
To be drafted into Spain’s army in 1894 was inauspicious, even for a luckless Láncaran. Decades of corruption and neglect had rendered the Spanish army less an effective fighting force than a gentleman’s club, bloated at the top, rotting at the bottom, good for little more than keeping Spaniards themselves in line. A people’s army, the saying goes, is dangerous to its neighbors. A professional army is dangerous to its own people.8 By the time Ángel was summoned to Carracedo, Spain’s army had long since ceased to provide the rank and file with decent housing, diet, sanitation, medical care, even adequate training. These are requisites not only of an effective fighting force, but of life itself. Deprived of these, Spanish soldiers expired in astonishing numbers: 10 percent in their first year of service, 25 percent over their next four years, bringing the toll to nearly four deaths for every ten soldiers over a five-year enlistment—and this not in war but in peacetime, and on the Iberian Peninsula itself.9
To make matters worse, the nation’s draft laws encouraged wealthy citizens to buy their way out of military service. This created a caste system in which regular enlistees were treated as common criminals, deployed as strikebreakers, and forced to work the fields. The Spanish public was powerless to do much about the corruption and abuse. New laws forbade criticism of the army and restricted freedom of the press. Individuals who defied the laws were made to answer in military courts. Opponents of the regime, like Carlists (archconservatives) and Republicans (leftists), were posted to remote and undesirable settings. The result was a rank and file populated by the most desperate and defenseless Spaniards—in short, by the likes of Ángel Castro.10
Ángel’s draft number was not called at Carracedo. A year later, he got the opportunity to leave home again, when, for the third time in a generation, Cuban separatists led by an exiled nationalist named José Martí, declared independence from Spain on February 24, 1895. Desperate to attract recruits to fight in a climate Spaniards had learned to loathe, the government offered stipends payable at the stroke of a pen. Ángel promptly signed on, concluding that if things might not be better in Cuba, they could hardly be worse.
By the time Manuel Castro delivered up his eldest son to the Spanish Army at the port of A Coruña in August 1895, the Cuban War of Independence was six months old. A conflict that had elicited only the most casual shrug from the Spanish government initially had become a source of consternation across the land. For decades, senior army officers had refused postings to the Antilles, so notorious were the islands for heat, humidity, and tropical disease. In the latest flare-up, their intransigence led to the hasty promotion of reserve officers and ordinary enlistees with no experience in command of men. Combined with preexisting problems, the inexperience proved immediately calamitous, and word reached home of skyrocketing fatalities in Cuba just as Ángel’s ship set sail. Public disquiet about these developments was palpable in the grim countenances of locals who lined the lanes to the nation’s seaports for one last glimpse of the flower of Spain. Mothers and sons, sisters and brothers clung to one another in scenes of desolation. “When Spanish parents said goodbye to a beloved son drafted into the army,” one historian has observed, “they really meant it.”11
Ángel departed A Coruña on August 24, 1895, arriving in Cienfuegos on September 8, after sixteen topsy-turvy days at sea. He was posted to Remedios, in central Cuba, just northeast of Santa Clara, headquarters of Spanish forces in a region identified as Cuba’s Rubicon. Should the Cuban guerrillas penetrate west of there, Spanish officials believed, there would be no stopping an advance on the capital Havana. Very little is known about Ángel’s day-to-day experience with the Regimento Isabel II, but there is a good chance he never fired a shot.12 A disciplined guerrilla force is notoriously difficult to engage, and the Cuban general, Máximo Gómez, marshaled his resources shrewdly. Outnumbered by more than five to one, the insurgents avoided face-to-face combat, striking from cover and under cover of darkness, while relying on local knowledge to dodge their adversary at lightning speed. Spain’s strategy played into insurgent hands. Abandoning the countryside to the enemy, Spanish forces busied themselves protecting property, cities, and towns, as well as the trochas (trenches) that carved the island into thirds. Meanwhile, Spanish officers hired out troops on private terms to guard the great plantations, just as they had done back home in peacetime. The strategy made Spain’s soldiers sitting ducks, easy to pick off as they stood rooted to their garrisons, easier to evade as the rebels knew their every whereabouts. It all made for a very curious kind of war. “The countryside is ours,” a rebel leader wrote home in August 1895. “There is hardly any fighting in this revolution; it has been two months since I have had serious battles.” A month later little had changed. “We have crossed all of Camagüey without firing a shot.”13
An onslaught of tropical disease exacerbated Spain’s misguided strategy. By the time the war ended in summer 1898, Spain had dispatched nearly 200,000 thousand men to Cuba, a record in colonial warfare to that time. Spain’s losses throughout the war are conservatively estimated at 42,000 killed. Of these some 4,000 died in combat, the remaining 93 percent from disease. At any one time during the war, more than half Spain’s soldiers were incapacitated due to illness. Midway into the four-year war illnesses climbed above 230,000 for two years in a row. Virtually every Spanish soldier became sick at least once during the war.
Ángel joined this wretched host just as the insurrection gained strength. Accompanying him were 40,000 new recruits, many of them teenagers far younger than he. Novices were given no training, granted no period of acclimatization. It took a little over eight months for mosquitoes, gnats, fleas, flies, lice, and poor sanitation to break down Ángel’s natural defenses, remarkable in a theater that saw one in two soldiers incapacitated in their first two months in Cuba. In June 1896, Ángel was hospitalized for the first time with fever, chills, and delirium. The following December, he was admitted for eleven days with stiff and swollen joints. Out of the hospital, soldiers were hardly safe, as the garrisons to which they returned resembled hospital wards only without the medical staff. Once sick, Ángel could not dodge the microbial bombardment. In 1897, he was hospitalized seven different times for typhus, rheumatism, ulcers, malaria, diarrhea, lesions, and general fatigue. One hospital stay lasted an entire month. The end of the war brought no relief. Ángel returned to hospital on the eve of the armistice in July 1898, then again early the next year while awaiting transportation home.14
Together with Spain’s garrison strategy, the rampaging disease leveled the playing field. The few times Spain sallied forth to engage the foe directly it did so with more or less equal numbers and the results were catastrophic. At the aptly named Battle of Mal Tiempo in December 1895, a Spanish regiment stumbled headfirst into a trap set by the guerrillas. In the ensuing melee sixty-five Spaniards were hacked to death by machete, forty grievously wounded. The role of the machete at Mal Tiempo inspired the legend that the guerrillas were amateurs who fought this war by hand. In fact, they were battle-tested marksmen who used the machete as their principal weapon as a last resort. One need not have survived Mal Tiempo to suffer its effect on Spanish morale, as fear of the machete won permanent lodging in the minds of greenhorns like Ángel. Still, the significance of the battle lies elsewhere, namely, in the lesson it suggests that on a level battlefield the advantage goes to the side that knows what it is fighting for.15
The rebels’ success in taking the battle to the heart of Cuba brought turnover atop the Spanish command. In February 1896, Valeriano Weyler replaced Arsenio Martínez Campos as captain-general of Cuba. Weyler is said to have greeted his latest appointment with the remark that “war should be answered with war.”16 Cubans interpreted Weyler’s appointment as prophesy of mayhem. Weyler did not disappoint, corralling peasants into concentration camps, destroying the homes and fields they left behind.17 Weyler’s destruction of the rebel’s food supply cleared western Cuba of insurgents but did nothing to end the insurrection. Less than a year after his arrival, the number of rebel troops in the country had swollen from a mere three thousand at the start of the conflict into the tens of thousands. By summer 1897, the war reached a stalemate not so different from the one that Weyler inherited, with Spaniards protecting the cities and insurgents ruling the countryside.
As Weyler waged war on unarmed peasants and as Ángel fought off infection, forces stirred in the goliath to the north that would shape Cuba to the present day. The conflict in Cuba had not gone unnoticed in Washington, D.C., where for over a century U.S. officials had kept a jealous eye on Cuba, which they regarded as the heart and filter of Atlantic commerce, hence essential to the welfare of the young republic.18 Over the course of the nineteenth century, U.S. merchants, slaveholders, and diplomats talked endlessly about buying or seizing Cuba from Spain. Only the perfect opportunity eluded them. Most Americans were content to leave Cuba in Spain’s hands so long as it did not threaten U.S. interests or invite British or French intervention. Weyler’s brutality and the destruction of private property during the war refocused Americans’ attention, with some calling on the government to intervene on the side of the Cuban independence, others for outright annexation.
If the United States intended to intervene in the conflict, it would have to hurry. By late 1897 the war favored the insurgents, who began to target the cities just as Spanish troops began to lay down their arms. Through late 1897, talk of U.S. intervention in Cuba remained hypothetical. On New Year’s Eve, a correspondent of the New York Herald visited General Gómez in his camp to see whether he still opposed U.S. intervention. Not necessarily, Gómez replied, so long as intervention did not mean “annexation.” With this distinction, Gómez struck preemptively at U.S. officials who insisted that Cubans were incapable of self-government. How could anyone be sure just what Cubans were capable of, Gómez wondered, before they had been given the opportunity to prove themselves? Cuba’s only objective was independence. “We have among us young men who have sacrificed everything to this sacred cause,” he said, men who had “but one goal in life, and this is to see the flag of Cuba supreme from Cape Maisí to San Antonio.” Worried lest Cuba “be robbed of any share in the honor of the expulsion of the Spaniards,” Gómez was confident that “the people of the United States will never balk us in this, our hour of victory.”19
An insult and an explosion catapulted the United States into the Cuban conflict early the following year before Gómez or anybody else anticipated. On February 11, 1898, the pro-intervention New York Journal greeted readers with a letter by a Spanish official describing U.S. president William McKinley as a “weak and popularity-seeking . . . hack politician.” Though few Americans regarded these remarks as “the worst insult” in U.S. history, as the Journal declared, the slur brought cries for U.S. intervention to a fever pitch. The explosion of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor four days later sealed the debate. A nation hungry for adventure needed no judicious weighing of the facts to discern the source of the Maine’s destruction. “The Maine was sunk by an act of dirty treachery,” Theodore Roosevelt, assistant secretary of the navy, concluded the following day. The New York Journal blamed “an enemy’s secret infernal machine.”20
On April 11, President McKinley petitioned the United States Congress for authorization to intervene in Cuba. On April 19, Congress passed a war resolution, which the president signed the next day. On April 21, the president ordered a naval blockade of Cuba. On April 25, the United States declared war on Spain. The most significant aspect of these preliminaries went virtually unnoticed. Attached to the war resolution was a legislative rider introduced by Republican senator Henry M. Teller, known as the Teller Amendment, which in one sentence seemed to repudiate a century of U.S. policy toward Cuba. Clause one of the resolution asserted Cuba’s independence. Clause two demanded Spain’s withdrawal from Cuba. Clause three authorized the president to use the military to effect these ends. Then came the kicker: “the United States hereby disclaims any disposition or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said Island except for the pacification thereof, and asserts its determination, when that is accomplished, to leave the government and control of the Island to its people.” 21
Historians disagree about how to account for the Teller Amendment. Its passage followed the withdrawal of a more radical resolution granting immediate recognition to the revolutionary government, suggesting that a bargain had been struck.22 Senator Teller hailed from Colorado, home to a lucrative sugar beet industry reeling from new European competition; the introduction of Cuban sugar into the U.S. sugar market duty-free could potentially ruin U.S. beet growers.23 Then there was the roughly $1 million in cash that Tomás Estrada Palma, exiled leader of the Cuban Revolutionary Party in New York, handed to Samuel Janney, a Cuban lobbyist in Washington, to distribute among U.S. congressmen.24 Finally, there was widespread and sincere support for Cuba Libre among the American people and some elected officials.25 Whatever the explanation, there could be no doubting the amendment’s effect: for the first time in U.S. history, American officials had elevated the cause of Cuban independence above American interests on the island. Americans were heading down to Cuba to help remove the Spanish. With that mission accomplished they would leave Cuba in the hands of its people.
U.S. marines came ashore at Guantánamo Bay on June 10, 1895, quickly converting the bay into a coaling facility and staging ground for an advance on Santiago de Cuba, thirty miles up the coast. In early July, U.S. forces launched a series of attacks on Spanish garrisons protecting Santiago, which included the Rough Riders’ celebrated charge up San Juan Hill. In mid-July, Santiago capitulated to the United States, more or less bringing the Cuban conflict to a close. U.S. accounts of the victory ignored two salient aspects of the battle: first, how valiantly depleted Spanish forces rallied to meet the American attack; second, how readily U.S. publicists transformed a brief intervention in a generation-old colonial conflict into a smashing American victory. With that victory came the right not only to rename the conflict “The Spanish-American War” but to determine Cuba’s future, notwithstanding the solemn promise of the Teller Amendment. U.S. military officials and journalists wasted no time making the case for annexation. Discussion centered on the question of Cubans’ capacity for self-government, with U.S. officials ultimately deciding that Cuba could not be left to its own devices. A solution would have to be found for Teller.
Ángel Castro remained posted in central Cuba through the end of hostilities in mid-July. The armistice might have made things worse for Spanish soldiers, who could expect little sympathy from an adversary that Spain had exploited for centuries. In fact, it proved more punishing to the Cubans. Besides providing Spaniards food and medicine as the fighting came to an end, U.S. generals deployed Spanish troops throughout the country to maintain order, as if regarding the people they had come to liberate as more menacing than the enemy itself.
On July 17, 1898, Spain surrendered Santiago not to the Cubans who had been waging this war for thirty years, but to the Americans who had arrived weeks earlier. On what might have been a day of celebration among victorious allies, U.S. General William Shafter refused to let the Cubans partake in Spain’s surrender. Cuban General Calixto García had fully expected U.S. forces to commandeer Santiago, its garrisons and forts. He was eager to cooperate with Shafter to preserve order until the time came for the U.S. to fulfill its pledge to establish a free and independent Cuban government. What could explain this official snubbing? Rumor had it that the Cubans planned a massacre. This was calumny, García responded. “We are not savages ignoring the rules of civilized warfare. We are a poor, ragged army, as ragged and poor as was the army of your forefathers in their noble war of independence, but like the heroes of Saratoga and Yorktown, we respect our cause too deeply to disgrace it with barbarism and cowardice.”26
Shafter’s humiliation of his Cuban hosts was the first in a long series of indignities visited on Cuba in the aftermath of the Spanish-Cuban-American War as the United States struggled to reconcile its pledge, as stated in the Teller Amendment, “to leave the government and control of the island to its people” with the centuries old conviction that Cuba was essential to U.S. prosperity. As Ángel Castro awaited transport home in autumn 1898, the United States recapitulated Shafter’s snubbing of García on a grand scale. When American and Spanish officials descended on Paris in early October to work out the details of the transfer of Spanish sovereignty over Cuba and its other colonial possessions to the United States, not a single Cuban representative could be spotted in their midst. Like Shafter, the U.S. government simply assumed that Cuba had no role to play in negotiations about its future.
Ángel Castro said little or nothing in later years about the North Americans’ behavior at the end of the war. His son would make this history a cornerstone of the Cuban Revolution. The war itself could not have been much crueler to Ángel had it taken him to the grave. Dispiriting news from Láncara punctuated his recurring hospital visits. In November 1896, one of two surviving sisters died (the last would follow a few years later); the next year he lost a beloved grandfather. The news from home dispelled illusions that things would be better if he could only make it out of Cuba alive. He eventually did so in January 1899, exchanging his hospital bed for a musty hammock aboard the steamship Ciudad de Cádiz just as the U.S. occupation formally began.
There was scant rejoicing in the floating hospitals that creaked home after the war, their passengers, like the once formidable empire itself, in tatters. In a belated act of sympathy, the government handed the soldiers 20 pesetas each as they set foot on Spanish soil, enough to get by for a few months at most.27 No handout could rectify successive years of capital neglect. Journalists struggled for words to describe the human wreckage that tumbled down the gangways (“Like Christ coming down from the cross,” one wrote) and dotted the dusty roads that fanned out from Spain’s seaports (“the light gone from their eyes, the blood from their cheeks, their bodies resembling scarred meat”).28
The shame of arriving home in ruin was magnified by the soldiers’ knowledge that nobody had cared enough to increase the odds of their success. The first boats pulled into Spain’s seaports in autumn 1898 in the midst of a self-serving debate over who was to blame for the Cuban debacle. To be fair, the war had not been kind on the home front. War can spur economic growth, but only where governments possess the legitimacy to put the nation on a war footing, decidedly not the case in late-nineteenth-century Spain. Amid the void of leadership and solidarity, the nation’s economy ground to a halt. Capital froze up, contracts lapsed, factories shuttered their doors. Hunger stalked the land. “Bad now,” La Correspondencia Militar wondered, “what will happen next winter . . . with competition from soldiers returning from Cuba and Puerto Rico?”29
There is an old fountain in the town square in Láncara that brims with water all year round, as inland Galicia has no dry season to speak of. Framing the square, which opens to the main road, are three stone barns, one of them cloaked in chipping stucco. Into that square one cold, clammy day in early February 1899 marched a solitary figure, thin, disheartened, ground down. A quick right down a narrow lane, first building on the left, and there stood Ángel Castro, face-to-face with the heavy farmhouse door, guardian of his family’s grief, for the second time in four years with nothing but fresh scars and a meager government handout to show for it. A son’s return from war in Cuba might have been greeted as auspicious, what with the odds against him and the time he spent in hospital. But the Castros of Láncara had long since lost their faith in auspices, just as Ángel himself had long since lost his love for home. Stingy from the first, fate had tightened its grip inexorably in his absence: another little sister gone, a grandfather, too. Even the warmest greeting could not allay Ángel’s growing conviction that his future lay outside Spain. For several months, he tried to make a go of it in Láncara. In contrast to many of his fellow veterans, he still had his wits about him, along with two stout arms and legs. Not liking his prospects, he resolved to cross the sea once more, committing his future to a country whose dream of independence he had only recently set out to crush.30
On December 3, 1899, Ángel arrived in Cuba for the second time, disembarking at the port of Havana and clearing U.S. customs the next day. By this time, the U.S. military occupation neared the end of its first full year, with the occupying forces at work improving sanitation, wiping out disease, creating municipal government, erecting infrastructure, building schools—in short, providing a climate favorable to U.S. investment. Asked for his thoughts about a stable Cuba, Military Governor Leonard Wood, the man in charge of the U.S. occupying force, took the mercenary view: “when money can be borrowed at a reasonable rate of interest and when capital is willing to invest in the island, a condition of stability will be reached.”31
U.S. citizens of all stripes flocked to Cuba in the aftermath of the war as if to a new frontier. Real estate, agriculture, mining, finance, engineering, construction, education, the professions, gambling, prostitution, you name it—all were overrun by opportunistic Americans arriving on the island often with extended families in tow. It is hard to exaggerate the scale of the migration. By 1905, some 13,000 Americans had purchased land in Cuba valued at $50 million. By 1919, 44,000 Americans had relocated there, prompting one Southern journal to remark, “little by little the whole island is passing into the hands of American citizens.” And why not? U.S. newspapers and magazines depicted Cuba as “a land of perpetual sunshine, flowing with milk and honey”—“a year-round country,” with “no unproductive season.”32
By contrast, Cubans found it difficult to square the talk of liberty and opportunity with the fact of U.S. domination. “There is so much natural anger and grief throughout the island,” General Gómez noted in his diary in January 1899, “that the people haven’t really been able to celebrate the triumph of the end of their former ruler’s power.”33 The end of the U.S. military occupation did not improve things from Cubans’ perspective. Obligated by the Teller Amendment to uphold Cuban independence after the war, U.S. authorities came up with a legislative vehicle known as the Platt Amendment to render the new Cuban Republic a U.S. colony in all but name. Among other things, the Platt Amendment compelled Cuba to lease Guantánamo Bay to the U.S. Navy and to concede the right of the United States to intervene at will in Cuban affairs. When Cubans cried foul, they were told that adoption of the Platt Amendment into the new Cuban Constitution was the condition of U.S. withdrawal. The logic of Platt was undeniable. “There is, of course, little or no real independence left Cuba under the Platt Amendment,” a triumphant Wood wrote the new U.S. president, Theodore Roosevelt, in October 1901. “The more sensible Cubans realize this and feel that the only consistent thing now is to seek annexation.”34
That was not the end of it. Two years later, these unequal partners signed a trade deal that ensured that Cuba would remain as economically dependent as it was politically subservient. The so-called Reciprocity Treaty of 1903 granted Cuba a 20 percent reduction in the U.S. sugar tariff in return for a still larger reduction in Cuban tariffs on a range of U.S. products. The treaty set off a sugar bonanza, increasing U.S. investment in Cuba from $80 million to $220 million in the decade after independence. By 1923, U.S. investment reached a staggering $1.3 billion, over half of it devoted to sugarcane production. The sugarcane industry employs its workers for at most four months a year, often as little as two (the rest of the year is called the tiempo muerto, or “dead season,” a term that speaks volumes to the ravages sugar has wrought on Cuban society). The trade agreement drained Cuba of capital that might have promoted new agricultural and industrial development along with jobs and markets. A mixed economy might absorb laid off workers. Cuba’s sugar monoculture could not. By inflating the price of sugar, the Reciprocity Treaty triggered the conversion to cane fields of land formerly devoted to other agricultural commodities. Cuba struggles with the effect of these policies to this day.
Strolling the streets of Havana in December 1899, Ángel could be excused for missing Cubans’ simmering resentment. Having emerged from the war relatively unscathed, Havana bustled with businessmen, peddlers, immigrants, and hucksters of every shape and color, all vying for a piece of a country suddenly awash in U.S. capital. The North American presence was visible everywhere, from the steamships lined up outside the port of Havana, to the seawalls sprouting up across the city, to the work crews repairing bridges, dredging waterways, and laying rail. U.S. advertising dominated the front pages of the leading dailies, with McCormick Harvester, New York Trust, Iris Insurance, New York and Cuba Mail Steamship Authority (to name but a few) all promising to provide whatever anybody wanted faster, cheaper, better, and stronger than the competition, at very low interest and with minimal strings attached.35
Those tired of work could make their way to the New Cuba Theater (“the proper place for American visitors to Havana to fool away their time and spend their money”), or catch Rigoletto or Aida at the Gran Teatro Tacón, the city’s oldest playhouse. If Verdi was not your thing, you could cross the Prado to the still grander Teatro de Albisu, with its full card of one-act comic operas. There was money for this, credit for that, cheap land here, ready labor there, even books promising to educate Cubans about the history and customs of their new benefactor to the north. Truly, a phoenix rose from the ashes of decrepit Spain. Those with initiative and daring might come along for the ride. Only the timid and tentative would be left behind.
And yet resentment festered. Just the week before Ángel’s arrival, city papers reported a rally at the University of Havana commemorating the murder of eight Cuban medical students by Spanish soldiers in 1871. Fifty thousand habaneros joined the procession, including students, doctors, “civil and municipal authorities, the city police, firemen, and various friendly corporations.” Journalists described the crowd as restive and edgy. One speaker warned listeners not to lose sight of the nation’s sacred and unequivocal commitment to “Independence or Death,” as if the struggle for Cuba Libre was not yet over.36
If Havana bustled, much of Cuba lay in ruin. The country lost an estimated 100,000 to 400,000 dead (depending on whether one counts noncombatants), as well as countless injured, maimed, and incapacitated by war, disease, and malnutrition. Private property suffered, too, with some 100,000 small farms, 3,000 cattle ranches, 800 tobacco plantations, 700 coffee farms, and over 1,000 sugar mills completely destroyed.37 Terrible as it was, destruction created opportunity in a country with an acute labor shortage. The problem of labor on the island went back to the sixteenth century, when Spain turned to Indians to work the mines. When the Indians succumbed to abuse and disease, Spain imported African slaves, continuing to do so until long after the slave trade became illegal in the Spanish Caribbean in 1820 (slavery was abolished in Cuba in 1886). The formal end of the slave trade compelled Spain to look to China for labor, which it did until the “coolie trade” itself was prohibited in 1875.38
With the Indians annihilated, slavery abolished, and Chinese importation banned, there was renewed demand for labor at the end of the war. This was especially true in rural areas, and above all in the east, where violence and Weyler’s reconcentration policy drove men and boys from the countryside. Part of the postwar negotiations between the United States and Spain, from which Gómez, García, and their fellow Cubans were excluded, concerned the number of Spanish soldiers that would be permitted to remain in Cuba. Naturally, Cubans looked on Spaniards as competition. By contrast, U.S. investors viewed Spaniards as ideal workers. According to William Jared Clark, author of a primer on business opportunities in postwar Cuba, Cubans, whether “white, black, or medium-colored,” eschewed wage labor, preferring to work their own plots despite competitive disadvantages. Years later, Cubans’ commitment to private property would bedevil Fidel Castro’s collectivization campaign. At the time of Ángel’s return to Cuba, it contributed to the underdevelopment of Oriente Province, especially, making the region ripe for Wood’s economic modernization. The worker of choice from the planters’ perspective was a former Spanish soldier followed closely by Catalan and Galician immigrants. Where the former worked “faithfully at any place or under any conditions,” according to Clark, the latter distinguished themselves by “their industry and other commendable qualities.” All of which augured well for Ángel Castro, until now the embodiment of the dispensable man.39
Ángel did not remain long in Havana. After a few days exploring the capital and consulting fellow Galicians, he left for the town of Camajuaní, in Las Villas Province,40 which Clark described as “a small unimportant station” on the railroad line linking the region’s north coast with its sugarcane fields. Ángel did not linger there either, soon departing for Oriente Province after a brief stop in Cayo Romano, off Cuba’s north-central coast.41 For a stranger in search of work, Oriente was a sensible destination. Nowhere did the milk and honey inundating Cuba flow more abundantly than there. Contemporaries spoke of the “Americanization” of Oriente Province, historians of an “invasion.”42 By the early 1920s, this invasion made Oriente, long the least developed, least populated part of Cuba, the country’s most densely populated province and second leading sugar producer. By 1929, foreign sugar growers, most of them American, had bought up 64 percent of the province.43 Three quarters of this investment was devoted to large-scale sugar production, which crowded out smaller coffee and tobacco enterprises, displacing Cuban farmers and replacing them with cheap Haitian, Jamaican, and other migrant labor.
The transformation of Oriente was spurred by Civil Order No. 62 of the U.S. military government. Announced in March 1902, the order promoted the zoning and sale to American and other foreign investors of vast properties owned or occupied by small farmers. The small farms of the east had their origin in a system of communal landholding that developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on unoccupied royal estates. The hacienda comunera, as they were known, were divided into shares ( pesos de posesión) representing the value of the original estate. To own a share of the value of the entire estate was not the same as possessing the title to a specific parcel of land, making property claims elastic. The informality functioned more or less effectively in a traditional setting. It became strained in the face of the American-led modernization, as the war destroyed public records and property titles, thus depriving small farmers proof of their proprietorship. In the end, farmers were left at the mercy of powerful forces bent on their demise.
Legitimate owners of pesos de posesión were not the only ones who suffered. Oriente had long served as Cuba’s safety valve. The teams of foreign developers that descended on Oriente after the war found much of the land occupied by squatters, some of whose families had been there for decades, even centuries, as well as by displaced veterans. Civil Order No. 62 ripped through this traditional landholding system like a locomotive tearing up Cuba’s virgin forests, dispossessing legions of small farmers while disposing of their land for the scandalously low price of between one and two dollars an acre. In short, conditions in Cuba were ripe for U.S. capital under the military occupation. U.S. capital arrived in abundance unequaled before or since—unhampered, Cuban scholars are quick to point out, by regulations in place in the United States.
Oriente Province consists essentially of two great mountain chains, the fabled Sierra Maestra and the no less formidable Nipe-Sagua-Baracoa massif. The mountains dominate the province’s southern coast, north of which lies an extensive plain. These mountains, valleys, and plains endow Oriente with tremendous agricultural and mineral diversity, made accessible by miles of seacoast, navigable rivers, and generous bays. Elevations in the province range from sea level to over six thousand feet atop the Sierra Maestra, thus supporting a variety of valuable timber (mahogany, majagua, cedar, lignum vitae, lancewood, and ebony) and agriculture (sugarcane, bananas, pineapple, tobacco, rice, and citrus, on the plains, cocoa, café, and indigo, higher up). Blessed by rich, alluvial soil, the mountains are ringed by grassy foothills suitable for large-scale ranching. The mountains are home to rich mineral deposits, including gold, copper, manganese, mercury, zinc, nickel, asphalt, coal, marble, alabaster, rock crystal, and precious gems, considerably adding to Oriente’s commercial potential.44
After leaving Camajuaní, Ángel tried his luck in the mining town of Daiquirí, east of Santiago, run by a subsidiary of Carnegie Steel. He found work as a night watchman, a job for which the war had left him overqualified. Carnegie paid the miners one U.S. dollar per day. As a guard, Ángel probably made a little more. A few dollars a day does not sound like much until you remember that land in north Oriente was going for just over a dollar per acre at the time of Ángel’s arrival. There is scant evidence of his life among the miners. Many of them hailed from his native Galicia; he would have recognized the dialect and understood the references. There were few distractions in these mountains, and Ángel seems to have succeeded in setting aside a small savings for the first time. He did not drink much, but he was a natural gamer with a memory for cards and the good sense to quit when he was ahead. For much of the year Oriente is scorching hot and humid, even by Cuban standards. Miners lived in squalid quarters not so different from those Ángel had occupied as a soldier. It was not long before talk of cool breezes and greener pastures drew his attention to the rich, untapped country north of the Sierra Maestra in the vicinity of the Bay of Nipe. Collecting his few belongings, Ángel departed the south coast, not knowing that his decades-long pilgrimage was nearly over.
The Bay of Nipe sits atop the large shark tail that is southeast Cuba. Surrounding the bay on the north and west are fertile plains suitable for grazing and agriculture. To the south and west of the bay lies the Sierra Cristal, with its vast forests and mineral deposits. Up to the time of the U.S. occupation, the region was occupied by the sort of independent farmers whom Wood, Clark, and others regarded as an impediment to the region’s economic development. In 1885, a man named Hipólito Dumois, son of French émigrés from Haiti, established a banana, citrus, and pineapple plantation just north of Nipe Bay, near the future town of Banes. In 1899, Dumois sold his land to Andrew Preston, owner of the Boston Fruit Company, which owned banana plantations across Latin America and would soon change its name to the United Fruit Company. In a few short years, Preston erected a new sugar mill called Boston, which spurred the transformation of Nipe Bay into one of Cuba’s top sugar-producing regions. A few years after that, United Fruit purchased 200,000 more acres around the south coast of the bay, erecting yet another massive mill named Preston.
The rise and consolidation of United Fruit Company in Cuba coincides with Ángel’s arrival in the region. His first stop in north Oriente seems to have been at or near the town of Mayarí, not far from Preston. Mayarí was a hub of the region’s new development, and Ángel would have collided there with labor drawn from all over Cuba and the Caribbean, as well as from China and the United States. American capital was on the march across the region, buying out small landholders, razing virgin forest, and converting a diverse agricultural base into sugarcane fields. This process entailed much dispossession and misery, as well as environmental degradation, but it also created jobs. New mills and mill towns needed constructing. Mills, warehouses, shipping ports, stores, factories, restaurants needed staffing and provisioning. This labor force needed direction. Resilient, disciplined, and enterprising, Ángel recognized in these necessities the chance of a lifetime. “There are doubtless tremendous possibilities in store for those who will purchase and concentrate such properties, erect modern mills, and manage them according to the most improved methods,” William Clark observed. There was also opportunity down the line, and it was there that Ángel proved his usefulness as a medium between men looking for work and owners and managers in search of labor.
As a former Spanish soldier and native of Galicia, Ángel would have been given the benefit of the doubt in head-to-head competition for jobs, and he soon distinguished himself as a reliable foreman. Having worked for others all his life, he took his first step toward independence by purchasing a team of oxen, hiring himself out, then hiring other men to lead his team, before acquiring more oxen and still more men, and so on, until he commanded some three hundred workers. With these teams of men and beast, Ángel crisscrossed the Nipe region, draining swamps, cutting and burning forests, transporting timber, and planting and harvesting sugarcane. In an era of rampant speculation, nothing is more valuable than a contractor who can deliver the right men for the right job at the right time, and Ángel soon amassed substantial savings.
“It is impossible to exaggerate the prosperity and progress in evidence in the Nipe Bay district,” observed a leading trade magazine in 1905.45 That same year, Ángel invested 200 pesos in a small inn located in the town of Guaro, down the road from Mayarí, along the thoroughfare linking the United Fruit enterprises at Boston and Preston. He named the inn El Progreso, an understated acknowledgment of his recent turn of fate. With its favorable location and ample shade, the inn provided much needed respite from the blistering sun that scorched the east nine months a year. The inn doubled as a country store, providing a burgeoning local population with cheese, olives, hazelnuts, honey, candy, sausages, flour, chestnuts, oil, wine, newspapers, and other sundries.46
Four years later, on the verge of thirty-five, Ángel met the first woman to play a significant role in his life since the death of his mother. The woman’s name was María Luisa Argota Reyes. Born in the port town of Gibara, thirty miles west of Banes, María Luisa grew up in Guaro under the supervision of her father, a manager at United Fruit. The couple married on March 25, 1911, and settled in Mayarí, where Ángel erected a spacious house on Avenida Leyte Vidal. With decorative arches, high ceilings, paneled walls, and mosaic tile floors, this residence provided quite a contrast to the last place Ángel had dared to call home. The willingness of María’s father to allow Ángel to marry his well-heeled daughter suggests the remarkable distance the illiterate peasant had come.
For five years, Ángel and María Luisa got along well enough. María liked the city life and hoped one day to trade Avenida Leyte Vidal for a home on one of the broad squares of Santiago de Cuba, the provincial capital, a hundred kilometers to the south. The couple named their first-born son, Manuel, after Ángel’s father, who died in 1903. Summoning the ghosts of Galicia proved inauspicious, and the boy did not make it to his first birthday. The next three children, two girls and a boy, survived. The fifth and final child, a daughter, did not, and the infant’s death seems to have sunk a permanent wedge in the couple’s relationship.
Ángel spent very little time at home. Running teams of men and oxen around the bay, managing his inn, training champion fighting cocks, he came to know and be known by owners, managers, administrators, and workers of the vast U.S. enterprises in the region, as well as by local Cuban businessmen and politicians. Greater and wider opportunities began to fall in his direction. In this way, he met an entrepreneur named Fidel Pino Santos, who was based in Santiago de Cuba, but who had business throughout the province, including with United Fruit. The men became friends, with Pino Santos playing the role of confidant and private banker, eventually becoming the namesake of a future president of Cuba.
In 1915 Ángel learned of a parcel of land for sale thirty miles south of Nipe Bay in prime cane-growing country. The world war was in its second year, and European beet production had ground to a halt, significantly elevating the price of Caribbean sugar. Meanwhile, the price of land throughout Oriente remained ridiculously low. With his modest savings and a 6 percent loan from Pino Santos, Ángel purchased the 660-acre parcel known locally as Manacas for a little over a dollar per acre. Located near the small town of Birán, the parcel became the foundation of Finca Manacas, the Castro family home. In succeeding years, Ángel acquired 2,000 additional acres of his own while leasing another 22,000 acres from neighboring U.S. and Cuban planters. By the time he was done, his plantation comprised forty-two square miles of some of eastern Cuba’s richest farmland.47
Prosperity did not bring marital bliss to Ángel and María Luisa. María Luisa never saw herself as a plantation mistress. Ángel preferred the farm to the city. With the purchase of Finca Manacas, Ángel came to spend more time at Birán than in Mayarí, and the couple drifted apart. Lidia Castro, one of the couple’s three surviving children, once asked her mother why she and Ángel separated. “Live in the countryside?” María gasped. “No thanks. The countryside is for birds and other animals.”
In 1920 Ángel met the woman, the girl really, who would become his soul mate. Lina Ruz González made quite a contrast to María Luisa. Ángel was forty-five, Lina was seventeen.48 Lina’s family were sugarcane and tobacco farmers from Pinar del Río in far western Cuba. Her family left home in 1910 after a cyclone destroyed their crops. They moved first to Camagüey, then to Oriente, where her father and uncle came to the attention of Ángel. Being married (if separated) from María Luisa did not deter Ángel from adopting Lina as a second wife, and the two began to produce a family of their own. They would have seven children total, all of them born before Ángel divorced María Luisa in 1941, and long before they themselves finally wed two years later. Ángel and María Luisa’s divorce seems to have been motivated by convenience rather than conviction, as he had to appear that day in court anyway (to renounce his Spanish citizenship).49 Ángel produced yet another child, Martín Castro, in 1930, with a local peasant named Generosa Mendoza, the informality of these relationships of little concern to him.
The years immediately following the world war were difficult for Cuban planters. In May 1920 an extraordinary spike and vertiginous collapse of sugar prices, known colloquially as the Dance of Millions, imperiled the entire Cuban economy, causing banks to default while bankrupting U.S. and Cuban plantation owners alike. Ángel managed to survive the crisis thanks to his constitutional restraint and to the generosity of his friend Pino Santos. Surveying the damage of the Dance of Millions, Ángel recognized that the widespread bankruptcies left American lenders with more property than they could possibly take advantage of. He also knew from experience that the Americans could not run their Cuban enterprises singlehandedly. Banks need borrowers, farmers could not borrow if they did not stay afloat. As the frenzy of speculation came to a halt, Ángel provided evidence of his farm’s profitability, asking his U.S. lenders to freeze his loan payments for three years in exchange for a higher interest rate. The North Americans agreed, Pino Santos offered to back him, and Ángel survived to farm another day.
Ángel Castro makes a curious subject of historical investigation. As the father of one of the twentieth century’s most controversial figures, Ángel has many detractors. He has been accused of moving fences to increase his landholdings (a charge first made by a U.S. surveyor against the North American companies that surrounded his land).50 He has been described as domineering and abusive and labeled a philanderer. Such charges are difficult to deny or confirm. Amaury Troyano, a former acquaintance (and a critic of Ángel’s son), who fought in the Cuban War of Independence, suggests Ángel’s faults have been exaggerated. His daughter, Juanita, insists that this has been the case. A childhood friend of Fidel, whose entire family worked for Ángel in many different capacities, says that this was not Ángel’s reputation at the time.51
But for being the father of a future revolutionary, there is much in Ángel’s story for a U.S. audience to admire. He seems the very embodiment of Yankee ingenuity, the subject of one of the most improbable rags-to-riches tales of all time. He was a first-generation entrepreneur and capitalist who pulled himself up, borrowing money where he could find it, tapping political connections when needed, concentrating not on the hour-to-hour, day-to-day happiness of his family, as we shall see, but on how to ensure that his children never had to suffer the hardship he endured. In a one-way world in which U.S. politicians, bankers, and managers typically called the shots, Ángel got along with his U.S. neighbors. The penniless laborer turned successful teamster become enterprising farmer did not regard the North Americans as adversaries. The North Americans, in turn, regarded him as somebody they could do business with. If less than warm, this relationship was civil and respectful, providing the Castro children a lesson in dignity and reciprocity that they would never forget.