A young boy lies awake in bed before sunrise, alert to the first stirrings of the family farm. Home for school vacation, he listens intently as the rustle of leaves and breathing of animals yield to the chirping of birds, cry of the rooster, and howl of a dog, followed by foot falls and the murmur of his father doling out the day’s instructions to the farm manager. Accustomed now to the noise of the city, the boy never ceases to wonder at how quickly the predawn quiet yields to the cacophony of an awakening barnyard.1
With big plans for the day, the boy does not dally. He rolls out of bed, pulls on a pair of worn trousers, a comfortable shirt, and sturdy shoes. He is going riding. Ever since he can remember, he has been comfortable on a horse. At age six or seven, his parents gave him a horse of his own, named Careto, on which, with shotgun in hand, he explores the vast property. Sometimes he rides in the company of friends or siblings. Sometimes he rides alone. Today, he is going solo. In recent years, his parents have granted him increasing leeway, asking few questions as he packs a lunch, saddles Careto, and heads off past the barns and outbuildings at the north end of the property, before cutting east in the direction of the foothills and, ultimately, a favorite hideout named Pinares de Mayarí high atop the Sierra Cristal. He has promised to be home by nightfall.
Pinares de Mayarí sits about four and a half miles and two thousand vertical feet above the heart of Finca Manacas. For the first mile or so, the going is easy, as horse and rider leave the fields that girdle the farm and mount the grassy foothills where his father grazes his cattle. On this part of the journey, the boy has few decisions to make, and Careto proceeds unguided. “I loved that horse,” the boy told an interviewer years later. Careto was “smart and surly, restless, lively, and fast,” and liked to escape his minders. In retrospect, horse and rider seem a good fit. “When Careto saw me coming, he would run away. I’d have to get one of the men to corral him.”2
There is no well-worn route to Pinares de Mayarí. The boy relies on a natural sense of direction to guide them. The going gets steep between miles two and three as the grassland yields to cedar, pine, caguairán, and mahogany forest. The boy eyes a shortcut, which increases the risk as an errant step now could result in calamity. On summer days, the temperature down below can reach the 90s by mid-morning. Up here in the hills, it is considerably cooler, but even so Careto’s hide is spotted with sweat. After several hours, the ground levels, and the pair emerge onto a mesa covered in red soil from local nickel deposits and topped by a thicket of pine.
Alone with his horse, the boy gazes down on the plains below and experiences something close to bliss. He loves this place. There is always a cool breeze, and the trees provide relief from the blistering sun. There is also plentiful water from local streams (“ice-cold, pure, and delicious”). The boy might stop there or proceed to lumber and mining camps deeper into the mountains, further evidence of his father’s extensive enterprise. But he has already achieved what he came for. “Up there in the woods and mountains, I experienced real freedom,” he noted later; “there was nobody telling me what to do; I traveled for miles and scaled mountains.”3
Freedom and independence were but two of the incalculable gifts bestowed by a childhood at Finca Manacas. A mature Fidel Castro once told an interviewer that having grown up as the son, rather than the grandson, of a rich landowner, he was unafflicted by “the sense of superiority” that comes to those of “aristocratic birth.” The Castro farm straddled two worlds, the world of privilege that allowed a young boy to attend faraway schools and own his own horse, and the world of menial labor from which his parents delivered themselves and the source of his earliest friendships. The local children were his “compañeros in everything,” he said. “We went to the river, the woods, and the fields together to hunt and to play.” Jealous of his own freedom and aware of the inequality around him, Castro came to understand from an early age the arbitrariness of class and racial distinctions. Years later, while representing the down-and-out in his Havana law office or waging guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra, Castro would be commended for the sympathy and sincerity he exhibited in conversation with peasants and common laborers. This, too, was a legacy of Finca Manacas, where he learned not to confuse social status or material possessions with merit.4
Castro entered the world on August 13, 1926, his birth supervised by an American physician from the United Fruit Company town of Preston, located on the eastern shore of the Bay of Nipe. In the decades before setting up shop in Birán, his father helped build Preston and clear the forests to make way for its cane fields. Ángel remained on good terms with his former bosses, availing himself of their resources when necessary. This was his third child with Lina Ruz González. He had lost two young children with his former wife. Wanting to take no chances with Lina’s babies, he sent for the nearest doctor.5
The doctor arrived at Finca Manacas in the dry season, but the farm is located in such a way as to have access to water year round while remaining functional in the drenching rains of May and October. Arriving on the scene a decade earlier, Ángel found well-drained soil suitable for a farmhouse, barns, warehouses, shops, and other buildings. Its elevation above the surrounding fields left it open to the prevailing breeze, and the doctor may have noticed the large citrus grove at the north end of the property situated to take advantage of the natural ventilation.
With its back to the foothills of the Sierra Cristal, its front gazing out over the Holguín plateau, the location of the Castro farm is spectacular. Those who like mountains will feel the tug. The Sierra Cristal is grand without being forbidding, providing solitude, relief from the heat, and a panoramic view of the neighborhood. But the mountains are more than inviting. They are suitable for grazing and home to rich timberland, as well as to valuable iron and nickel deposits. This is what prompted Ángel to establish his farm there in the first place. Though devoted to sugarcane production, he would not leverage his family’s fate on a fickle market. When sugar prices plummeted, he turned to other things, managing to keep afloat while many surrounding farms went under. In a region of Cuba dominated by foreign corporations and run by professional managers, Ángel was unusual for being self-made, self-taught, and all but self-sufficient. He was more than a curiosity, but he was that, too, and it was surely with bemusement and at least a little admiration that the doctor, spinning his wheel to the right, pulled into the lane of Finca Manacas and made for the farmhouse, where his patient, Lina Ruz González, was in labor.
Finca Manacas is said to have been an unusually clean farm, which sounds like a paradox to anyone who has tried to scratch a living from the earth. The cleanliness was not for want of real work going on there. Sugarcane, lumber, citrus, coffee, cocoa, bananas, mango, papaya, guava, passion fruit, potatoes, wheat, cabbage, carrots, beans, lettuce, tomatoes, and indigo were grown and harvested on the property. A dairy provided milk, cream, and cheese from cows, sheep, and goats. A bakery turned out fresh bread. An apiary produced fragrant honey. Owners, managers, clerks, and mechanics shared the grounds not only with the myriad neighbors who showed up to buy groceries, go to work, attend school, use the telegraph, mail a letter, have a drink, play ball, or see a cockfight, but also with horses, mules, cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, dogs, cats, chickens, guinea hens, carrier pigeons, parrots, turkeys, and champion fighting cocks. When it rains in eastern Cuba, it pours, turning roads into rivers, fields into lakes. And yet the Castro farm sparkled, so everybody says.
Immediately to the doctor’s left on entering the Castro farm lay a sparsely wooded field scattered with thatched huts occupied year-round by Haitian workers. Many more Haitians arrived at the farm during the zafra, or sugarcane harvest, joining a collection of Cuban, Jamaican, and other West Indian migrants who wandered the island season after season looking for work. The Haitians who occupied these joupas were regulars. Some of them had families. The ones that did would come to know the Castro children, who showed up on a daily basis looking for playmates and occasionally the forbidden fruit of the aromatic maíz asado (roasted corn), which the children considered a delicacy, but which their mother believed would be the end of them.
“The countryside was freedom,” Fidel Castro told an interviewer.6 Not for these Haitians. If welcome on the Castro farm, they were better off than their compatriots only by degree. Castro the revolutionary leader would come to adopt the Marxist critique that labor under capitalism is scarcely better than slavery (slaveholders were at least responsible for ensuring the survival of their property, the argument goes). These Haitians migrated to eastern Cuba during the American-led sugarcane expansion that peaked during the First World War and the Dance of Millions. Many came without spouses or families, not expecting to stay. Some of the Haitian men shared a single woman in a local form of polyandry. This was not “prostitution,” Fidel Castro later insisted, just a practical response to an obvious problem. The Haitians were reliable workers. Ángel paid them what his son considered a “very low wage.” No one gave much thought to Haitians’ clothing, food, or health care, he said; “they were abandoned to their luck.” And this on Ángel Castro’s farm, reputed to be the most forgiving in the region.7
Which gets us back to the farm’s legendary cleanliness. This was not a product of the boss’s fussiness, Pedro Pasqual Rodríguez Rodríguez explains, but of his “big heart,” of his willingness to provide work that was not strictly necessary. “Paquito” Rodríguez is the youngest of twelve children from a peasant family that arrived in the region in the 1920s after his father and older brothers were laid off by another plantation. They found work in Birán, where members of the family remain to this day. Born in 1925, a year before Castro, Rodríguez grew up alongside the Castro children, attending the primary school on the property and accompanying the Castro children at play. There are plenty of people in Cuba ready to tell a visitor what they think he or she wants to hear about the Cuban Revolution. Rodríguez passed a preliminary test of veracity when, asked whether he knew that the young Castro was destined for the presidency of Cuba one day, answered, effectively, “Hell no. He was a normal kid, like the rest of us, only a little different.”8
Asked to explain that difference, Rodríguez said that the first thing people needed to know about Castro’s life was that “Birán Castro,” as locals knew the place, “was no ordinary farm, Ángel no ordinary owner,” an answer that presupposes a little historical background about early-twentieth-century Cuba.
In the decade of Castro’s birth, Cuba continued to struggle with the economic and political distortions introduced by the Platt Amendment, the Reciprocity Treaty, and prioritization of U.S. over Cuban interests at the time of the early Republic. The U.S.-funded recapitalization of the island’s sugar industry created insurmountable barriers to entry for farmers shy of capital, effectively shutting out the middle class while creating a demand for cheap labor. With sugar production dominated by foreigners, and lacking an industrial base, Cuban professionals turned to politics as a way to make a living. As a result, government became an instrument not for solving the nation’s problems but for distributing political spoils. By the mid-1920s, Cuba’s federal bureaucracy and payroll swelled to unimaginable levels as the island became a welfare state for displaced elites, channeling the island’s resources into the pockets of professional politicians.
These political and economic distortions were embodied in the person of Gerardo Machado, elected president in 1924 on a platform of public works, anticorruption, and political and economic independence, but who quickly revealed himself to be a shameless, even sadistic, power monger. Combined with U.S.-funded public works projects, Machado’s bullying might have kept a lid on Cuba. But 1926 marked the beginning of a protracted slide in Cuban sugar prices that would grip the country for the better part of a decade. As sugar goes, so goes Cuba. The falling prices reverberated up and down the nation’s economy, with planters laying off workers and the federal government suspending the salaries of schoolteachers and other public servants, just as protests erupted across the country.
Machado’s response to the protests was clumsy and self-serving. With a pliant Congress executing his will, Machado jiggered Cuban election law to give himself the potential to remain in office through the mid-1930s, while outlawing public demonstrations and suspending constitutional guarantees. Make political opposition illegal, future president Carlos Mendieta warned at the time, and all you have left is violence. Violence ensued. In May 1930, Machado’s police stormed an opposition meeting attended by the war hero Juan Gualberto Gómez, killing eight and wounding dozens. In September, the university erupted, with a student named Rafael Trejo killed by police. Inevitably, Machado’s heavy-handedness provoked further violence. Statues of Machado and other political leaders were torn down. Protesters and police exchanged gunfire. The ranks of martyrs swelled. By the end of the year, schools across the island were shuttered, and the army patrolled the streets.
Machado hung on for another three years, unleashing his police and military, along with a gang of private thugs known as the Porra, on opponents left, right, and center. The opponents responded in kind as the country descended into armed conflict. Always wary of unrest in Cuba, the United States government dispatched a special ambassador to Havana in May 1933 in the hope of establishing a truce and finding a replacement for Machado. Amid escalating violence and with the United States pulling the strings, Machado was replaced in mid-August by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, son of the War of Independence hero of the same name. Unable to restore peace and lacking legitimacy, Céspedes was deposed by a military coup known as the Sergeants’ Revolt on the evening of September 4, 1933.
As if surprised to find themselves in power, the sergeants formed an unlikely alliance with a group of leftists (led by Antonio Guiteras) and moderates (led by Ramón Grau) determined to end Cuba’s dependence on the United States. In late 1933, the so-called revolutionary government abrogated the Platt Amendment, outlawed the importation of foreign workers, distributed land to peasants, granted women the vote, and reduced utility rates, popular measures all. Subsequent measures—the suspension of payments on U.S. loans, the seizing of U.S. sugar mills, land appropriation, and the nationalization of private utilities—robbed the government of moderate support and further alarmed U.S. officials and businessmen, with some branding the revolution communist and asking Washington to send in the Marines. Ultimately, the United States used the question of recognition as a trump card, refusing to recognize the new government until Guiteras and Grau were replaced by State Department favorite Carlos Mendieta.
The one survivor from the revolutionary government was the leader of the Sergeants’ Revolt, Fulgencio Batista, who studiously bided his time as Guiteras and Grau flamed out. Handsome, articulate, and charismatic, Batista was neither ideological nor idealistic. But he was a keen reader of the political winds and a shrewd strategist and tactician. He had a killer instinct and had no compunctions against using violence to achieve his ends. The more unstable Cuba became under Guiteras and Grau, the more Batista liked his chances. Cozying up to U.S. officials, Batista presented himself as the vehicle of order on the island. In late October 1933, with the blessing of the U.S. ambassador, Batista had warned Grau to slow down with the social and economic reforms or be removed; the Cuban people did not want revolution, he said, but a return to normalcy. The old officer corps regarded this as treason and Batista was on the verge of being arrested. Pleading for forgiveness, he survived to fight another day. When Mendieta replaced Grau as president on January 22, 1934, Batista and his army occupied pride of place beside the rostrum.
“American diplomacy has many resources,” writer Julio César Fernández observed at the time; “when the steel of her warships is not convenient, she uses the docile backbone of her native lackeys.”9 Later that year, the U.S. Senate formally abrogated the Platt Amendment, replacing it with a new Treaty of Relations, which increased Cuba’s economic dependence on the United States.
Thanks to Ángel Castro’s ingenuity, Finca Manacas was insulated from some, if not all, of the fallout from these developments. In 1926, the year of Castro’s birth, the Cuban government passed a series of laws designed to stabilize a volatile sugar market. The signature piece of legislation, the Verdeja Act, reduced the country’s sugar production by 10 percent, unintentionally making the problem worse by stimulating foreign competition. The ensuing depression lowered agricultural wages between 50 to 75 percent. The value of Cuban exports dropped by as much as 80 percent, inevitably cutting short the harvest, which in the year of Castro’s birth lasted a mere two months.10
Sugar was the foundation of the North American plantations that surrounded the Castro farm. Owned by joint stock companies headquartered in Boston, New York, and Chicago, these farms were run by professional managers with little stake in their employees’ lives. Falling prices cut their profits, forcing them to lay off thousands of sugarcane workers.11 Ángel Castro was an anomaly in the neighborhood. Having lived for years on the edge of ruin, he knew that all that distinguished him from an unemployed worker was persistence and a bit of luck. He was a capitalist and entrepreneur, but of an unusual sort. His principal aspiration was not to amass a great fortune but to provide his children (and some of his workers) opportunities he himself never had. When the Depression hit, he was not responsible to absentee landlords or outside stakeholders. Profit was very much his goal, but not for profit’s sake. This made for curious behavior, Rodríguez explains, like Ángel regularly ripping up IOUs at the company store (where Rodríguez worked as a clerk) and hiring unemployed workers to clean the farm in the dead season.12
One big-hearted farmer could not redress the structural flaws that undermined Cuba’s economy. Ángel could come up with only so much make-work for so many needy people. As word of his largess got around, Birán became overwhelmed with solicitations. Countless workers were turned away. Still, the boss’s reputation held to the end of his life, Rodríguez says, his popularity confirmed by the stream of mourners that snaked its way down the Camino Real one heavy afternoon in autumn 1956, accompanying Ángel’s casket home for burial.
Fidel Castro’s younger sister, Enma, once asked her mother about life during the Depression. Those were difficult times, her mother acknowledged, but never truly threatening. “Of course, it’s easier for those with means,” her daughter observes, “and for those with plenty to eat.”13 Which was precisely the point. Experience taught an aspiring businessman not to bet on one crop. When sugar prices fell and the zafra was cut back, Ángel cranked up production of lumber and cattle, whose markets remained comparatively stable during the downturn. Ángel also made land available to enterprising employees to grow their own food. When the price was right, some even grew their own sugarcane. These subcolonos (small-scale planters) turned over a percentage of their crop to Ángel (who used the money to pay off his own debts). The balance was theirs to keep, and a few managed to amass a small savings.14 The farm’s self-sufficiency ensured that the supply of food remained stable (“I never knew hunger,” Castro later testified), while its cattle and lumber enterprises enabled Ángel to meet his interest payments. This was the secret of Birán Castro, an agriculturally diverse, economically self-sufficient microsystem, a drop of perspicacity in a sea of singlemindedness, a model, if anybody was looking, of what a fertile Cuba might become.15
Past the Haitian “ghetto,” as Castro called it, sits a large circular building with a conical tin roof. A circus tent? No, a cockfighting ring, complete with bleachers capable of accommodating up to a hundred guests. Like everything else on the Castro property, this was a business proposition. With money scarce, the cockfighting took place on Sundays during the zafra, one of the few times when locals could boast discretionary savings. The week between Christmas and New Year’s was chock-full of cockfights, Easter, too, along with a few other holidays. The boisterous, mostly male audience drawn from the property’s forty-two square miles paid a small entrance fee (along with a 10 percent tax on winnings). On match days, cocks battled from sunup to sundown, with as many as fifteen contests on a good day. As night fell, spectators headed home hoarse, hungover, exhausted, many lucky to escape with the shirt on their back.
Cockfighting became popular in Cuba during the War of Independence. Ángel was an aficionado, supplying not only the venue but also a roost of champion fighting cocks. His boys grew up with cocks of their own, and his son testified to the cost entailed in raising a winner. Cocks had to be strong, obviously, hence well fed. Their diet included not only grains and leavings, but fresh eggs besides. They needed stamina as well as pecking power. Abstinence was thought to be essential to both, with the cocks isolated from the obstreperous hens that ruled the farm. By big-city standards, bets were low, 5, 10, occasionally 15 pesos per fight. Guests could bet on individual fights or by the card.
The level of competition mounted through the day in lockstep with blood alcohol levels. Castro remembered contests so boisterous they bordered on mayhem. An epic fight, a remarkable comeback, a showdown between a callow David and an aging Goliath sent the spectators into a frenzy, the banging of bleachers and roar of the crowd making neighbors fear that war had broken out. In truth, little distinguished this from war. This was “no place for kids,” Castro said. The kids loved it. Years later, the Revolution would ban cockfighting as part of a campaign to eradicate gambling. The social cost was too grave, the revolutionaries concluded, what with the alcohol, lost wages, and time and money spent on raising cocks. Cockfighting strained marriages and promoted the misconception that one could improve one’s lot in life through gaming.
Castro once described his father as “paternalistic.” This needs qualification. Ángel could not have cared less what people did with their money. He liked playing cards and knew when to quit. He liked cockfighting. If people wanted to bet their last cent at his ring, that was fine with him. If people needed work, there was work to be done, and they could take or leave the salary he offered. If Haitians wanted to live on his property, they were welcome so long as they did good work. Cubans likewise. Spaniards the same. Money was money to him, the great equalizer, the price of entry, the reward if you were lucky, the cost if you were not. The color of your skin did not matter, less so your political or religious beliefs. So long as you were not communist.16
Paquito Rodríguez found this last bit out the hard way. On the verge of twenty, owing partly to the example of Fulgencio Batista, who as the man behind the throne in the mid-1930s cultivated communists as a way of controlling the labor force, Rodríguez joined the Communist Party and thought to organize the workers at one of Ángel’s stores. The manager found out and gave Rodríguez a good chewing out. He would keep his politics to himself. “Ángel and Lina had no tolerance for communism,” Rodríguez told an interviewer, a twinkle in his eye.17
Lina gave birth to a baby boy. This was the couple’s third child, after Angela (born 1923) and Ramón (born 1924), with four more to follow: Raúl (born 1931), Juanita (born 1933), Enma (born 1935), and Augustina (born 1938). The parents named the child “Fidel,” after Ángel’s mentor, banker, and friend. Fidel Pino Santos was expected to be the boy’s godfather, but there was no church in Birán, hence no priest, and Pino Santos was very busy. It took over eight years, until January 1935, for parents, priest, child, and godfather to unite and so consummate the boy’s baptism, though by this time Pino Santos’s honor had passed to a man named Louis Hibbert, the Haitian consul in Santiago de Cuba, a long story. Castro was never religious, and as a child is said to have exuded great confidence. He seems to have borne the stigma of his belated baptism like a curse. When word got out that he had yet to enter the kingdom of God, he was teased and labeled “a Jew,” the sting of the epithet softened slightly by the ambiguity that “Jew” was also the name of a local bird, enabling him to conclude, almost plausibly, they can’t be referring to me.
Castro once described his parents as “isolated landowners.” This needs some explaining, as witnesses portray Finca Manacas as a whirlwind of activity. The large sugar centrals of eastern Cuba stretched over tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of acres. The mill itself constituted the heart of a plantation community. Adjoining it were administrative headquarters and somewhat further away housing for managers, staff, and year-round workers. Many of these plantations (Banes and Preston on Nipe Bay, Miranda to the south, Alto Cedro to the west, Marcané to the north) spawned their own towns, with churches, parks, shopping centers, hospitals, golf courses, and distinct neighborhoods. With Finca Manacas at its center, Birán functioned as a microcosm of these larger centrals. Castro often accompanied his father on business trips to the nearby U.S.-owned plantations, noting their “special neighborhoods, beautiful houses, formal gardens, metal screens, electricity, refrigeration, nice furniture, exotic food, and fancy stores full of imported goods.”
A vast cultural chasm separated Ángel and Lina from the university-trained administrators, scientists, and managers who ran the neighboring estates. “My parents did not go out to visit people and only rarely had visitors,” Castro said, by which he meant visitors from the neighboring U.S.-owned plantations. “They didn’t have the culture or the customs of a family from the wealthy class.” Still, if isolated from the North American social scene, Ángel and Lina were far from lonely, as the doctor could attest. Castro was born in the middle of the night, which meant that the doctor did not depart until morning. He awoke in a household that buzzed with activity from sunup to sundown. The town of Birán comprised a steady population of several thousand people. The zafra raised the population by another thousand. The farm’s store and diverse enterprises brought laborers, contractors, and businessmen of all sorts to the Castro home and office. The post office and especially the telegraph office attracted visitors and managers from nearby plantations. There was no dispensary on the grounds, which meant that the Castro home doubled as a clinic, with Lina serving as paramedic, nurse, and occasionally doctor, bandaging and sewing wounds and caring for the sick. Severely sick or injured family, friends, or workers were taken straight to the nearest hospital, always a long way off.
Rodríguez describes the Castro home as a welcoming place. As a young child, he often dropped by the house to play ball, go swimming, or ride horses with his friend Fidel. He never once set foot inside the Castro house, he insists, but others did, including Cuban and Haitian workers. The family was always kind to him. “You need to wait,” they would say; “Fidel will be out in a minute.”
The Castro home was never busier than at election time. In pre-revolutionary Cuba votes were openly bought and sold, especially in the rural areas where illiteracy was high and candidates little known. Ángel Castro had something everybody wanted, namely, work, hence he exercised political influence in the region, serving as a middle man between candidates and voters. In exchange for Ángel’s patronage, local residents voted for his favored candidate. Ángel commanded a team of ward heelers, influential neighbors whose job it was to round up votes for local, provincial, and national offices. In the mid-1930s, Fidel Pino Santos, Ángel’s friend and private banker, ran for election to the Cuban House of Representatives. Ángel disbursed funds from his front porch to secure his friend votes. During that campaign, Fidel Castro remembers traffic so heavy in the house that it was sometimes difficult to sleep. “The safe was constantly being opened and closed,” he recalls, “making an inevitable metallic bang.” This was all done in a spirit of innocence and altruism, Castro explained; it seemed perfectly natural to all concerned. What was good for Pino Santos was good for Ángel, and so good for Ángel’s workers.18
Political corruption is capricious, as likely to impede as advance the cause of those caught up in it. Castro learned this lesson firsthand, now watching his father lasso votes for a favored candidate, now seeing him fall prey to the machinations of local government officials. Eastern plantations were monitored by municipal and state authorities who collected taxes, enforced health and safety codes, and, starting in the 1930s, upheld an expanding array of labor laws. Visits by these officials were stomach turning, Enma Castro recalls, with much hemming and hawing and double speak until owners came up with the cash sufficient to speed the swindlers on their way. Enma remembers one such episode coinciding with her brother’s return from university. Coming upon a father recently bilked by two inspectors, Castro pursued the men to a nearby town, where he threatened them with legal action if they did not fork over Ángel’s money. Hours later he arrived home money in hand, turning it over to a humiliated Ángel.
The Castro kids remember Ángel as hardworking, serious, unaffectionate. Enma Castro recalls seeing her parents hold hands exactly once in her lifetime—while riding in the family car. Fidel Castro describes his father exhibiting his fondness for his children by occasionally patting their heads or running his fingers through their hair. No one remembers him picking them up in his arms or hugging them. Like busy fathers everywhere, Ángel talked from time to time about taking the family on a visit to his native Galicia. But the Castros rarely if ever traveled together, and they never went away on holiday. As the family grew and became increasingly rambunctious, Ángel dined alone in his office at the back of the house, a small shortwave radio his preferred company. On Sundays and holidays when the family ate together, Ángel’s presence imparted an air of soberness. When he retired to his office, the table erupted. Ángel “wasn’t much for words,” his son remembered. “He spoke rarely, as least in the period in which I knew him.” It was as if he never learned the meaning of the word play—not as a child in Láncara, not as a stowaway in Madrid, not in the war, not on the hospital ward, not when setting himself up in Birán, not even when entertaining his own children.19
Ángel’s satisfaction in life derived from work. Castro describes his father coming alive during business interactions. “I always noticed that when he left on a trip to whatever place, the central, Santiago, his demeanor changed.” In work settings, Ángel seemed unrestrained, sharing stories and bits of his past that the children never heard about at home. “Perhaps he thought I wasn’t paying attention,” Castro remarked, “but I was.”20 Paquito Rodríguez says that Ángel regularly engaged his workers on his tours of the cane fields. In a country full of absentee landlords and condescending managers, “Ángel worked as hard as anybody on the property. He was not proud. He was plain spoken and intelligent.” Rodríguez says that Ángel welcomed his workers’ opinions and helped resolve their problems, which “made him both unusual and popular.”21 Which is not to say that Ángel was altruistic or blind to the conflict between labor and management, simply that he seems never to have forgotten his peasant roots.
Not all accounts of Ángel are glowing. One of Castro’s former schoolmates, an exile and sworn enemy of the Castro regime, tells a damning story, unsubstantiated by evidence, of Fidel Castro once beating a striking worker with the flat blade of a machete, while his father looked on approvingly.22 The story is apparently meant to convey a father’s cruelty and a boy’s bullying: like father, like son, the dictator to be. It is hard to know what to make of such accounts. The story contradicts the testimony of all who knew Ángel, whether intimately, as a family member, or impersonally, as a boss or colleague.23 Such stories defy the logic of the father’s life. It seems hard to imagine him succeeding in eastern Cuba as a teamster, contractor, storeowner, manager, planter, ward heeler, and king maker, hemmed in by U.S.-owned plantations, while relying on others’ good will for his survival if he bullied, intimidated, and abused his workers. But what do others say?
Enma Castro says that Ángel had an experienced team to deal with wayward workers. Most of the policing among the workers was carried out by workers themselves. “Fool,” a disgruntled worker would be told, “do you think things are better at United Fruit?” Why, Enma asks, would a successful businessman delegate the punishment of a worker to an ignorant son? On school break, the Castro kids were expected to contribute on the farm—in the office, sometimes in the store, “never in the fields,” Enma says. Finally, the zafra did not coincide with the children’s school vacations. Since age seven, her brother was away at school during the zafra, she observes. “That story is preposterous.”24
Rodríguez concurs. If that episode were true, he says, he would have known about it, and he never heard talk of such a thing. If anything, he said, the Castros went out of their way to protect workers from the rural guards introduced by the U.S. military government at the turn of the century and whose job it was to keep order in sugar country. One year, there was a rash of cane burnings in the region around Birán. The guards accused Rodriguez’s older brothers of perpetrating the acts. Hearing that the boys had been arrested, Lina rushed to their defense. “They didn’t do it,” she told the guards; the Rodríguez boys would never do that. “These are my fields,” she said. “These are my workers. I know what goes on here.” Despite her protest, the guards took the boys in for questioning, but not before Lina sent along her eldest daughter, Angela, to ensure the boys’ safety.25
With Ángel focused on the business, Lina functioned as the family’s center of gravity, guiding and correcting the kids and managing the household staff. The house had a cook and two maids who cleaned and did the laundry. Serious (if not somber) in photographs, Lina was the life force of the Castro farm. Twenty-eight years Ángel’s junior, she had her first child with him when she was nineteen, leaving her closer in age (and spirit) to her children than to her husband. Children and neighbors describe Lina as playful and full of life, with a sailor’s tongue. She was known to fire a rifle to alert the family that it was suppertime. She kept a personal flock of sheep, which accompanied her around the farm. When the children needed medical care or a shoulder to cry on, she was there. And not just for family. Paquito Rodríguez remembers Lina plunging a bleeding hand in hot water, greeting his howls of protest with the admonition to “stop his bleating and be a man!”26
Lina also ran the company store and assisted Ángel with bookkeeping. Indeed, Castro credits his mother with keeping the farm afloat. Ángel was only partly literate and entirely self-taught. Lina, an autodidact herself, was good with numbers. She was also a stickler for discipline and order, a characteristic she passed on to her son, Fidel. Castro described her as both the farm’s “overseer” and “the family economist.” The Castro siblings respected their father. They worshipped their mother. “Nobody ever knew where she got the time and energy to do everything she did,” Castro said; “she never sat down, I never saw her rest one second the whole day.” Lina gets more credit for providing her children an education than her husband. “Without her,” Castro remarked, “I assure you that I—who always loved to study—would be a functional illiterate.”27
Despite rarely receiving formal visitors, Ángel and Lina regularly entertained their immediate neighbors. A typical evening found the parents perched in the living room or on the veranda in the company of the fellow Spaniards who helped run the place, playing cards and dominoes, listening to the Victrola, talking politics. The group included an Asturian bookkeeper, a telegraph operator named Velero, and García, the cook, who moved from the machine shop to the kitchen on account of rheumatism, and who was said to have been hopeless culinarily. Fidel Castro was attracted to the bookkeeper, who spoke many languages and translated the news of the world to assembled guests. Trained in the classics, this man regaled Castro about the Greek orator Demosthenes, “who put a little stone in his mouth to cure his stuttering.”28 Home from school in summers, the growing Castro would pay this favor forward, reading news of the Spanish Civil War to the illiterate García and fellow members of the cosmopolitan microcosm that was Finca Manacas. Constitutionally conservative, Ángel (and García) sided with the Nationalists in the conflagration consuming Spain. But there were few barriers to entry in the Castro sitting room. Lina and Ángel were open-minded and ecumenical and did not let ideological differences get in the way of the camaraderie.29
Besides the post and telegraph office, the one other public building on the Castro farm was Escuela Rural Mixta, No. 15, a one-room primary school. Constructed of local lumber, it was painted a cheerful blue, topped by a red metal roof, and had the charm of a little church. Its doors and windows were hung with heavy wooden shutters that could be thrown open to the breeze. Its interior was simple, with a polished wood floor, gray walls, and a large slate chalkboard. There were desks for thirty students, with a few desk-less seats at the front of each row reserved for pupils too young to write. It was on one of these front row seats that Fidel Castro began his education long before officially matriculating in January 1932. With his older siblings ensconced in class, there was little else for him do, and he simply refused to be excluded.
At the time of Castro’s birth, Cuba had the highest literacy rate in Latin America. According to a government pamphlet from the era, the aim of education was to prepare students to fulfill the obligations of citizenship, while giving them “the confidence to cling to what they know is right.” More than a mere physical space in which stilted professors enforced a fragile order, the Cuban primary school was said to comprise a “living spirit” in which students experienced “the joy and contentment of a free and secure life,” while mastering an array of subjects that included Spanish, reading, writing, arithmetic, biology, geography, history, civics, morals, agriculture, physical education, music, and art.30
Looking back on his introduction to primary school, Castro said that few if any of the rural schools realized this mandate because of a lack of resources and social inequality. “My classmates, the children of humble farmers, generally used to go barefooted to school and they wore very bad clothes,” he told Naty Revuelta. Despite being bright enough, his neighbors did not have the support required to succeed at schoolwork. As a result, most dropped out. This “social fatalism,” as Castro called it, was only magnified later in life.31
Castro’s observations on the state of primary education in rural Cuba are confirmed by a study made a few years after his birth by a team of visiting U.S. scholars known as the Commission on Cuban Affairs. The Cuban Republic had not met its ambitious goal of extending primary school education to all its children, the commission observed. Nationwide, less than half of eligible children were enrolled in school, and most of these in the first two years. Though modeled after the U.S. school system, Cuba spent a meager $13.90 per pupil per year in primary schools, less than one third of the money allocated by the most cash-strapped U.S. states at the time. Cuba’s primary school curriculum was outdated and “irrelevant” to the lives and needs of rural students especially, the U.S. commission reported. As a result, illiteracy remained a problem throughout the country. In 1932, nearly one in four pupils were enrolled for less than a full school year; average daily attendance was estimated at 77 percent. In a single month (November 1933, for instance), over half of school-age children were not enrolled in school. These numbers, skewed in favor of the cities, did not begin to tell the story in the rural areas, which the commission labeled “a calamity,” and where illiteracy exceeded 50 percent. Castro estimated illiteracy in the Birán of his youth to be as high as 80 percent.32
The student-teacher ratio in Cuban primary schools was roughly forty-five to one, with teachers responsible for classrooms packed with students ranging from kindergarten through sixth grade. Statistics do not tell the whole story. There was a lot of turnover in the teaching profession and sometimes no teachers at all. In 1930, when a woman named Engracia Perrand showed up in Birán, she was one of three teachers to come through the school in a single year. Moreover, it was not so much the class size that impressed Perrand (the number of pupils hovered around twenty or so throughout the decade) as the students’ range in age and ability, “with all but fully-grown men occupying the first-grade row.”33
Conditions such as these led a maturing Castro to conclude that justice in the realm of education would depend on deep-rooted political and economic reform. “Everything that might be done relative to technique and organization of teaching won’t be worth a damn,” he told Revuelta, “if the status quo of the nation is not profoundly altered where the root of the tragedy lies, from the bottom up.” He had come by this conclusion not through reading Marx and others, but by “the palpitating reality of life.” No amount of “great teachers or resources” could “prevent the son of a humble peasant from drowning sooner or later.”34
The woman Perrand replaced was named Eufrasia Feliú. Feliú arrived in Birán in spring 1927, nine months after Castro’s birth. Feliú was Haitian, of “mixed-race,” in Castro’s words, which in Cuban parlance meant light-skinned.35 Perrand lived in one of the outbuildings on the Castro property and ate with the family. Castro’s name formally appears in her ledger in January 1932, when he was five. Though modeled on U.S. elementary schools, which at this time began with kindergarten, most Cuban primary schools began formal teaching with first grade. Like Perrand, Feliú remembers a four-year-old Castro occupying the middle seat in the front row. Curiously, the Castro kids, surely the most privileged at the local school, did not progress systematically from grade to grade. The 1933–34 school ledger reveals eleven-year-old Angelita enrolled in third grade (one would expect her to have been in sixth), eight-year-old Ramón enrolled in second grade (instead of third), and the seven-year-old Fidel’s grade unspecified, as if, six months after completing his first semester ( January–June 1932), he had yet to make it to the first grade. This delay would later give Castro an athletic advantage over his fellow classmates.36
During her brief spell at Escuela Rural Mixta, No. 15, Perrand boarded with the Castro family. Perrand confirms accounts of the Castro household as open and inviting, recalling long evenings of dominoes surrounded by family, friends, and even the rural guards. At night Perrand entertained the Castro children with tall tales, which she made up as she went along, passing them off as gospel. The Castro children delighted at exposing inconsistencies in her stories. It often fell to Perrand to put three-year-old Fidel to bed. “Engracia, you sleep with me,” the boy would plead. She escaped his clutches only after more stories and favorite lullabies. The children insisted she share whatever they themselves enjoyed. “They tried to give me the best of everything, games, dolls, fruit, whatever. Fidelito would run up to me and say: ‘take it Engracia, it’s for you!’ ”37
Perrand provides the earliest descriptions of the young Castro. Three-and-a half-years-old at the time they met, Castro was plump and heavy. “I could scarcely lift him. He had rosy skin and was very cute. His hair was dirty blond. He was playful, fiddling around with this and that just like any child.” Mimicking the students around him, Castro taught himself the alphabet. By the time Perrand departed that June, he could write his name, “Fidel.” Perrand described a lively, mischievous boy, who addressed the school janitor as “Old Woman.” Perrand chastised him whenever he did so, prompting him to smile at her and ask, “When you grow old are you going to be like her?”38
The next earliest description of the boy comes from a carpenter who worked on the estate named Juan de la Cruz Mugelsia Labañedo. There was always some fence, building, or piece of furniture in need of repair, and Ángel liked to turn to Spaniards, better still Galicians, for skilled labor. De la Cruz and several fellow Galicians were felling a tree one day, when one of the men, high atop the branches, began to holler, “Boy! Get away from there! Get away from there!” The boy in question was the young Castro. The danger was a ditch that bisected the farm and ran down toward the orchard. A tropical storm had just plowed through the region transforming a trickle into a torrent, which proved too tempting for a four-year-old to resist. Rather than crossing the stream over a nearby bridge, the boy waded in, misjudging the strength of the current, and was swept away.39
The boy’s head disappeared as the warning cry rang out across the property. Recognizing the danger, de la Cruz dashed downstream, plunged into the water, and thrashed about, praying his hands would hit on an arm or a leg, a piece of clothing, a lock of hair—anything. To his relief, the boy bumped into him, and he pulled the youngster from the water, blue in the face and scarcely breathing. “I took him by the feet and hung him upside down,” de la Cruz recounted. “Then I thumped his chest, and he sprang to life, coughing out a bit of water.” De la Cruz described Castro’s fearlessness that day as typical. Castro was confident and matter-of-fact, de la Cruz said, socially as well as physically. He never sought others’ approval before acting, always plunging in headfirst. They boy was also defiant. When summoned by his father to do this or that, the boy would often answer simply, “no.”40
Boarding school eventually robbed Paquito Rodríguez of his childhood friend. When Castro returned from school on holidays, the boys renewed their camaraderie, playing sports, exploring the countryside, climbing mountains, chasing girls, riding horses high into the hills to go hunting. Castro always prided himself on his swimming ability. Rodríguez claims he could outswim Castro any day. Rodríguez and Castro also liked to box. Castro wore thick-soled shoes and would step on his opponents’ foot to immobilize his adversary and gain a tactical advantage. The young Castro was tall, making him a fierce opponent in the ring. “Fidel could beat his older brother Ramón.” Rodríguez describes Castro as very social, but also as someone who enjoyed solitude and reading, which set him apart from the neighborhood kids. “We’d be walking around somewhere and he would stop suddenly and come up with the craziest questions,” Rodríguez said. “He was always asking about things I never understood. I’d say to myself, ‘where in the world did that come from?’ ”41
Enma Castro confirms Rodríguez’s account of his brother’s curiosity. “He would follow my dad around constantly asking questions: ‘what’s this?’ ‘what’s the point of that?’ ‘how does this work?’ ” This, along with the visits to the American plantations, may have been the closest Fidel Castro came to developing an emotional attachment to his father. Both were inquisitive and mechanically minded. Both liked to know how things worked. The father seemed to recognize something of himself in his emerging son. There was another thing Rodríguez remembers that set Castro apart. Though a gamester, as quick as any to seize the advantage in a running race, swimming contest, or boxing match, “he hated bullies, liars, and crooks.” If he saw somebody picking on a weaker kid or one of the rural guards abusing a worker, “his mood would change instantly, and he would take action.”42
These anecdotes from Perrand, de la Cruz, Rodríguez, and others match the account that Castro provided about his childhood over the years. Castro speaks of playing with his brother and the local kids, going swimming, hunting with slingshots, bow and arrow, and rifles, and riding horses in the mountains. “On vacations, I kept in permanent contact with nature,” he said. Like boys everywhere, the kids from Birán were constantly getting into trouble—and constantly worming their way out of it. The most penalized transgressions involved barnyard animals. The boys apparently liked to not only target but inebriate their parents’ chickens, turkeys, and waterfowl. They bombarded the schoolhouse with a homemade mortar cannon, and they were regularly called out for their foul language or disrespect. Boys will be boys. Ángel was the symbol of authority, Lina the disciplinarian. The threat of punishment was always worse than the fact. When occasionally sentenced to their father’s belt, the boys simply hid it or stayed out of sight until the storm had blown over.43