One day the head of the athletic department at Colegio de Dolores, the Jesuit secondary school in Santiago de Cuba, was asked to select a basketball team to represent the school in a regional tournament. These selections tended to favor the kids from wealthy families. “You know how that goes,” a former classmate remarked, “the more you have the more you’re worth.” Fidel Castro loved basketball and considered himself a superior athlete. The stakes were high, made higher on account of the fancy uniforms supplied by the school, along with the team’s official name, San Ignacio de Loyola, a title reserved for illustrious occasions. Castro expected to be named to this team. He was not. Nor was “a mulatto” who many knew to be the best basketball player at the school.1
Indignant at the snubbing, Castro and the others decided to form their own team. Short of money, they cut the legs off pants to make shorts and bought cheap T-shirts and tennis shoes. They took up a collection to buy a basketball. In a sign that they had not lost their sense of humor, the boys named their team Los Ripieras (the Lowlifes) and set to work, determined to provide their teachers a lesson in homespun meritocracy. When the long-awaited game day arrived, Castro threw himself against the opposition with complete abandon. It was “one against five,” a teammate recalled. “Fidel pass,” his teammates cried, “here Fidel, pass Fidel, Fidel!” Nothing. “At the end, as you might suppose, we lost the game. Basketball requires teamwork.”
Castro was a pillar of the team. This was awkward to say the least. The boys pulled themselves together and prepared for the next opponent. “Gentlemen, this time we are not losing,” Castro announced. Well and good, thought the others, imagining that Castro had learned a lesson. The whistle blew. Then more of the same: “ ‘Fidel pass,’ ‘pass Fidel,’ ‘here Fidel,’ and nothing.” The boys called time-out and kicked Castro off the team. “What do you suppose he did then?” another former classmate asked. “He bought a ball of his own and spent the rest of that term practicing.” Friends describe Castro in mortal combat with himself, right hand against left hand, left against right. When one or the other failed him, he would castigate the offender. “Everyone thought he had lost his mind,” said one witness; “no one could conceive of it.” In the end, Castro acquired competence with both hands and the coach noticed, eventually adding him to the roster. He continued to play “an annoying style of basketball.”
Despite growing up surrounded by family and friends, a mature Castro told a confidant that it had been his “destiny . . . to be alone in everything.”2 This can be read as both a point of pride (he knew what was right and was self-reliant) and a source of hurt (he felt abandoned). This emotional insecurity was honed in childhood and adolescence, as Castro moved from the one-room schoolhouse in Birán to one elite boarding school after another. Though a child of privilege, especially in comparison to his early friends, Castro continued to see himself as an outsider, never sure exactly how he fit in. If this made him insecure at times, it also motivated him to be the best at everything, as he became an island to his father’s walled city.
In January 1934, Eufrasia Feliú convinced Ángel and Lina Castro to send Fidel and his older sister Angela to Santiago de Cuba for private tutoring. Eufrasia had a sister named Belén who taught private piano lessons. Belén could provide the children a better general education than they could receive in the chaos that was Escuela Mixta Rural, No. 15, her sister said. In counseling such a move, Feliú was not thinking entirely about the good of her charges. The political upheaval and economic downturn that gripped Cuba in the early 1930s all but ended luxuries like private piano lessons at the very moment the untimely death of another sister, a physician, deprived the family of income. These twin blows, combined with a schoolteacher’s inconsistent paychecks, pushed the Feliú family to the brink. Something had to be done. By Christmas 1933, when this arrangement was broached, the Castro family was struggling to keep up with two new arrivals, Raúl, barely two, and Juanita, an infant. To have the older children safely out of the way could make things easier.
Ángel and Lina did not know what they were getting their children into. Had they seen the Feliú household firsthand, they might have changed their minds. The Feliú sisters shared a home with their elderly father on Intendente Hill in the Tívoli neighborhood of Santiago, a few blocks down from Parque Céspedes, the city center. Still standing today, the house is located on a small plaza across from what used to be a public secondary school, but which was later converted into a military barracks, and still later a museum. The Feliú house looks a lot like an old saloon. It consists of a single story fronted by a shallow portico supported by thin timbers that reach from floor to ceiling, roughly ten feet high. Three tall, slim doorways face the front, which measures roughly twenty feet across. At the time the Castros arrived, the house had a small living room (with a piano) and two small bedrooms divided by bead-board walls. In one of the bedrooms, the girls’ elderly father, Néstor Feliú, occupied “a rickety old bed.” Attached to the back, with a sweeping view of the city and Santiago Bay, was a bathroom and an outdoor kitchen, as well as a small balcony where Fidel Castro used to take in the sights.
Though small and crowded when the Castro children arrived, the tile floors, decorative appliqués, and panoramic view made this a potentially nice home for a small family capable of keeping up with the maintenance. This was not the Feliús by late 1933. Fidel and Angelita joined a family already swelling with Belén (the piano teacher and would-be tutor), her father, her sister Eufrasia (during school vacations), a recently orphaned girl (whom the family adopted as a maid), and, eventually, Ramón Castro—seven people in all. Where they slept is anybody’s guess. Privacy was out of the question. When it rained, the house leaked.
Castro told more than one interviewer that he was five years old when he left Birán for the big city. The Birán school ledger refutes this. In January 1932, Castro formally began school in Birán at age five. He remained there through December 1933, after two full years of education. In January 1934, Castro, now age seven, moved to Santiago. Ramón Castro joined his siblings in April for the last third of the 1933–34 academic year, which ended in June. Castro also reported that his matriculation at the Feliú home lasted two years. In fact, he boarded with the Feliús on two different occasions, each for a maximum of six months. The first stay lasted from January to June 1934, after which he and his siblings returned to Birán through the end of the year.3
Besides clearing up the historical record, the Birán school ledger reveals the vulnerability of the Cuban educational system to political and other vicissitudes. The upheaval surrounding the dictatorship and fall of Gerardo Machado closed secondary schools and the University of Havana for three years from December 1930 to December 1933. Primary school students posed no threat to the regime, hence many remained open during much of that period. Still, Machado’s fall in August 1933 delayed the opening of Escuela Rural Mixta, No. 15 by a month. The following year, opening day was delayed by two months due to a polio epidemic in Oriente Province. When the school year finally began in mid-November 1934, the three eldest Castro children were back in Birán and in attendance, suggesting that the Feliú experiment had been less than successful.
The Feliús were descendants of Haitian farmers who came to Cuba in the late eighteenth century to escape the Haitian slave revolt led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. They were cultured people who spoke perfect French. They also observed rigorous social etiquette that Castro associated with French customs and upbringing. By the time the Castro kids moved in with them, the family could barely feed itself, despite the fact that Ángel paid the schoolteacher 40 pesos (roughly $1,000 U.S. in 2008 dollars) per child per semester. When Ramón joined his siblings, in other words, the Castros were supplementing the Feliú family’s income by $3,000, not a lot by North American standards, but a windfall in eastern Cuba at the time.
It is hard to say where the money went. Eufrasia Feliú took a lavish trip to Niagara Falls the summer after the three kids returned to Birán. The money did not go into food or education, that much we know for sure, as Castro’s memories of the period consist essentially of hunger and ennui. The six or seven members of the household ate from the cantinita, Cuban for a stack of metal plates consisting of rice, boniato, vegetables, sometimes a bit of meat sauce, brought to the house each day by a cousin, who functioned as the family cook. Castro remembers never once feeling hungry in Birán what with abundant food and ubiquitous sweets and delicacies produced on the farm and available at the company store. This was not the case at the Feliús’, where he could have devoured the entire cantinita by himself. The cantinita was meant for the household to share, and not for lunch alone, but for dinner besides. Castro remembers scouring his plate for the last kernel of rice, smashing it with the tines of his fork before transferring it to his tongue where it remained until it melted away. No wonder he remembered these six months as two years. It took a visit by his father later that May or June to confirm what the boy did not know how to articulate in letters home: he was starving, losing so much weight that his shocked father was told upon setting eyes on his emaciated son that the boy had recently been ill.
His mind fared little better. When Castro enrolled in a private school in Santiago de Cuba the next year at age eight, he began as a first grader. Two years of schooling in Birán plus half a year of private tutoring left him functioning at the level of a six-year-old. However gifted a piano teacher, Belén Feliú was unqualified to tutor the kids in even the rudiments of early primary school education, never mind the astonishing array of subjects on the Cuban government’s course list. In fact, Castro recalled, Belén made no effort to teach him anything, leaving him to his own devices, which included memorizing multiplication tables and long division from the front of a spiral notebook. He also read comic books during this period when he could get his hands on them, borrowing from neighborhood kids or reading them on trips to a local market.
Hunger and boredom do not make for a happy child. When Castro pushed back, he was verbally, sometimes physically, chastised. The Feliús were notorious in the neighborhood for their strictness. The local boys (Castro speaks of “friends” here) used to try to bait him into breaking house rules by eating forbidden delicacies. One day, out of the grasp of the Feliús, Castro asked his sister why, able to write with the confidence of a fourth grader, she had not informed their parents about their plight. She had tried, Angela assured her brother, but the Feliús seized her letters and scolded her for informing on them. Which raises the question of abuse. In 1933 Cuba, it did not take $3,000 to put a decent meal on the table twice a day, much less deliver on the promise of giving the kids a minimal education. Years later, Castro told a skeptical interviewer that he harbored no ill will toward the parsimonious Feliús. He said they were victims of a corrupt social system.4
Ángel’s description of his children’s appearance at the Feliús’ inspired Lina to depart for Santiago the next day. Setting eyes on the three, she immediately marched them to a local restaurant, watching as they gorged themselves on ice cream and mangoes. They then all promptly returned to Birán, where they remained through the summer and a politically truncated fall semester. Thereafter there was a noticeable coolness at the family dinner table toward Eufrasia Feliú, who continued to command the Birán schoolhouse. The contrast between how she ate at the Castros and how the Castro kids had eaten with her family was lost on nobody.
That same summer 1934 Belén Feliú married Louis Hibbert, the Haitian consul in Santiago de Cuba. Once united with Hibbert, the Feliú family moved from their cramped saloon to a larger house next door with more space, a little privacy, and plenty to eat. In January 1935, in what seems an act of criminal negligence, the Castros returned Angela, Ramón, and Fidel to the Feliú home as borders in order to enroll them in private school. It was at this time that Castro, now age eight, was finally baptized, the honor of godfather going to Louis, the Haitian consul.5
Looking back on his initial encounter with Santiago de Cuba, Castro retained some indelible impressions. First there was the never-ending commotion of a boisterous commercial center—the crowds of people, the numerous shops, the dazzling array of merchandise. Then there was the arbitrary force exercised on santiagueros by Machado’s police and soldiers. The Feliús’ homes old and new faced a small square on whose opposite side sat the large Instituto de Segunda Eneseñaza (secondary school institute), seized by the Machado government in December 1930, and converted into a military barracks. Castro grew accustomed to seeing alleged criminals dragged through the square and into the building, their cries echoing across the public square.
Castro also recalled instances of xenophobia and scapegoating. In autumn 1933, the revolutionary government issued a set of decrees designed to improve the plight of Cuban labor. One of the laws ordered the expulsion of all unemployed Haitians. Given the seasonal nature of work in the sugar industry, it was not easy to distinguish an unemployed from an underemployed Haitian, and the legislation created turmoil in a Haitian workforce already poised on the edge of the abyss. The job of deporting indigent Haitians fell to the Cuban Army, which exhibited little sympathy and less discernment in identifying targets.
Growing up among Haitians in Birán and living with them on Intendente Hill, Castro witnessed the cost of this supposedly progressive legislation. In Birán, Haitians were rounded up and herded to the ports at Santiago and Nipe. In Santiago, Louis Hibbert, the Haitian consul and Castro’s host and godfather, took the boy down to the harbor to witness heartbreaking scenes of Haitians being packed (“like sardines in a tin”) onto waiting boats as stricken family members looked on. The Haitian exiles, many of whom had been on the island for over a generation, went from “one terrible life of misery and poverty, to another even worse one,” Castro told an interviewer. And nobody seemed to care. Combined with evidence of arbitrary violence on the city streets, scenes like these helped a young boy “understand the world.”6
When Ramón and Fidel returned to the Feliús for the second time in January 1935 (now in the company of their younger brother, Raúl), their parents enrolled them in one of Santiago’s most prestigious boys’ schools, Colegio de La Salle. Founded by the Christian Brothers in 1908, the school was located on the site of what had been the island’s first institution of higher learning, the Seminario San Basilio Magno, established in 1722. La Salle was of French rather than Spanish affiliation. Most of its business was conducted in Spanish, but it taught French rather than English as a second language, and it followed a French schedule, with classes on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, with Thursdays and Sundays off. La Salle differed from its nearby rival, Colegio de Dolores, a Jesuit school where Castro moved three years later, in being low-key and ecumenical. Unlike the Jesuits, few of the La Salle brothers were or expected to be ordained. Established partly to meet the needs of migrants fleeing the Haitian Revolution, the school did not discriminate racially. This did not mean that there were many black kids in Castro’s classes (there was one in his grade), only that blacks were welcome if they were deemed to have the proper background and could come up with the tuition.7
Castro began the year as a day student, returning to the Feliús’ in the afternoon. Castro experienced his entry into a real school as “a big step forward.”8 Still, his country ways, advanced age, and lack of preparation distinguished him from his classmates for all the wrong reasons, and it took him a semester or so to get comfortable. Meanwhile, he continued to bridle under the “feudal discipline” of his godparents. One minute he had no food and dared not complain about it, the next minute he had to eat whatever was put in front of him. “I was bored by all those French rules, that French way of living,” he recalled. Along with the tight leash and occasional spankings, one favorite refrain of his hosts particularly irked him: they would send him away to boarding school if he did not watch himself.
It was not long before Castro resolved to test that threat, erupting in fits of pique and misbehavior that convinced his godparents to call it quits. Castro remembered his liberation from the Hibbert-Feliús as one of the happiest moments of his life. He took to boarding school like a starving kid to mangoes, relishing the opportunity simply to fit in. Like schoolboys everywhere, he enjoyed recess and weekend excursions to various points on the bay best. Schoolwork was a blur of catechism and Cuban history, recess a whirl of sports, games, and wilderness adventures. The new camaraderie made for lasting contentment. “I was happy, because I was with all the other boys. We’d play, and on Thursday and Sunday, they’d take us to a place down by the ocean where there was a big area where there were all sorts of places for sports and adventures.”9
The name of the place Castro loved so much was Rente, a spit of land that juts out into Santiago Bay (and which is now home to a sprawling oil refinery). Arriving at the port of Santiago, the boys would clamber aboard the school launch, El Cateto, for the twenty-minute trip (“pum, pum, pum”) across the bay. Castro fondly remembered the sweet smell of sea air. At Rente, the boys could swim, play ball, and explore sunken ships. Castro and his friends liked to fish and sometimes returned to school with their catch, which would then be prepared for them by the school staff. In retrospect, he described spending four happy years at La Salle, but they were not without conflict. Once comparing La Salle, a Christian Brothers school, to Jesuit schools in Santiago and Havana, Castro noted that the La Salle brothers were less disciplined, less professional, less committed to their work. Some physically abused the boys.
One teacher stood out from the rest, Brother Bernardo, the man in charge of boarding students. It is not uncommon for teachers in such settings to succumb to favoritism. Brother Bernardo took this further than the rest. Bernardo betrayed an unusual fondness for a young boy from Baracoa, not some vulnerable or unhappy kid, Castro noted. One day Castro and this boy got into a dust-up on the launch back from Rente. The boys separated but the conflict remained unresolved as they climbed the hill back to school. Typically, the boys’ route of choice passed through the heart of the city’s red-light district, and they delighted at seeing their teachers blush at the siren calls of the working women. A favorite prank was to ring the bell of these establishments and run away just as one of the brothers approached the entrance. On this particular evening, Castro was in no mood to play. Arriving back at school first, he laid in wait for his nemesis, jumping him and then delivering “a jab” into his eye.10
Castro imagined the episode over. But he had picked a fight with the wrong boy. Brother Bernardo was not happy. At vespers that evening, Castro sensed that he was being hunted, and headed for the chapel gallery, the better to keep an eye on a predatory priest. It wasn’t long before Brother Bernardo appeared at the gallery door and beckoned Castro with a chubby finger. “We walked down a hallway,” Castro recalled, “turned a corner, and after a few steps he asked me, ‘what happened?’ I started to explain, but he didn’t let me finish.” The brother “walloped” Castro on his left ear, then followed that up with a blow to his right ear. “A grown man struck me as hard as he could!” Castro told an interviewer, still ringing with indignation. “This was unjust, humiliating, abusive.” No one saw the brother hit the boy; there was nobody for the boy to turn to. He had to swallow the humiliation.11
This incident occurred toward the end of third grade. Castro was ten at the time, bright, but old for his grade. Castro skipped fourth grade, putting him in fifth grade (age eleven) when he next caught Brother Bernardo’s attention the following fall. The second episode occurred in public one evening when the boys were lining up after study hall before making their way upstairs to their bedrooms. Boys are not made for waiting in lines. On this evening Castro was conversing with another student when yet another blow, lighter this time, on the side of his head took him by surprise. Bernardo had struck again, and though this blow hurt less than the first, it stung more on account of its being witnessed by his peers.12
At La Salle, lunch was followed by a short recess that preceded afternoon classes. The boys moved from lunch to recess as quickly as possible, often taking their food with them. Lunch itself did not amount to much: coffee with milk and pan rapido (a muffin with butter). Recess, by contrast, was high-stakes—a baseball game in which not everybody got to bat, with batting determined by one’s place in yet another dreaded line. One day later that fall, Castro found himself toward the front of the line where a struggle ensued between a couple of boys determined to be the first batter. In this case, Castro himself was not involved. But from Brother Bernardo’s perspective, proximity was proof of guilt, and “Paf! came yet another smack on the head.” What was a boy to do? Absorb yet another humiliation and walk away? Castro threw himself on his elder, biting, punching, and kicking, until he was pulled away. Once separated from Bernardo, Castro approached the headmaster, who naturally sided with his colleague but took no action, or so it appeared.13
But just before Christmas holiday, when Ángel and Lina came to fetch their three boys, they were greeted by news that their sons had become demons—“the worst bandits that had ever passed through the school,” the headmaster said. The news about Ramón and Raúl came as a surprise, as both were known to be courteous and obedient. Suspicion naturally fell upon Fidel. Mortified by his sons’ behavior, Ángel repeated the headmaster’s charges to anyone who would listen back in Birán, even sharing the story with friends and family over the dining room table at Christmastime. Fidel, aware that he was being blamed for what seemed to him to be Bernardo’s bullying, felt hurt and resentful.14
The conflict did not simply blow over. In Cuba, the biggest day of the Christmas holiday is not Christmas itself but Three Kings Day, the twelfth day of Christmas, which falls on January 6. On that day, Cubans exchange gifts and enjoy a celebratory feast. The following day, January 7, life returns to normal, with schoolage children heading back to their classrooms. This January 7, nobody left the Castro house. Ángel had resolved to punish his children by withdrawing them from La Salle. Ramón, never one for school, was delighted (he had always wanted to become a mechanic). Raúl was confused, as if too young to comprehend what was happening. Castro was apoplectic. “I would have become a cattle farmer,” he later remarked, if his father had had his way. Castro begged and pleaded, ranted and raved, even threatened to burn the house down if his parents did not return him to Santiago. “I loved school,” he said. “School freed me.” His parents eventually relented. Years later, a reflective Castro suggested that his parents were simply testing his commitment. How hungry for education was he really?15
Colegio de Dolores, where Castro enrolled as a fifth grader (age twelve) in January 1938, after being effectively expelled from La Salle, was one of the country’s most prestigious private schools. Castro entered Dolores as a day student, staying in the home of Martín and Carmen Mazorra, business associates of Ángel, who owned a department store in the city called La Muñeca (the Doll). The Mazorras were social climbers, Castro later charged, eager to take on a student enrolled in a school that would allow them to “rub elbows with all the rich people who also sent their sons there.” Carmen Mazorra had peculiar ideas about what she might demand of someone else’s child. She told Castro that in order to access the petty cash his parents had set aside for him, he had to get exemplary grades. That was all well and good, Castro thought to himself, for a student used to the rigor and ways of the school. But this wasn’t him initially and his first semester marks showed it. Rather than sacrifice the sweets, ice cream, movies, and “little pork sandwiches” he so enjoyed, Castro doctored his report card to reflect outstanding grades. At the end of the first school year, when the school doled out prizes, Castro was conspicuously absent from the list of honorees. He told his surprised hosts that only year-long students were eligible. The Mazorras were just credulous enough to believe him. Asked later what he thought of his deceit, he replied that deceit is in the eye of the beholder, spinning his behavior as another example of his innate rebelliousness.16
Castro spent the summer of 1938 in Santiago de Cuba in the company of his older sister, Angela, who was preparing for the secondary school entrance exam. That summer, Angela studied under the supervision of yet another Haitian teacher named Emiliana Danger. With little to distract himself, Castro eavesdropped on the lessons. Impressed by the boy’s curiosity, the tutor sometimes included him in the instruction. Looking back on this stage of his life, Castro told an interviewer that he had never had a mentor or a true role model as a child. For a few months that summer, Danger appears to have approximated that description, affording Castro some relief from the echo chamber of his own mind. Danger delighted in his ability to answer questions intended for students far older than he. He credits her with being the first person to ever really challenge him, the first to make him “enthusiastic” about the life of the mind.17
Late that summer, Castro was stricken by appendicitis, keeping him out of school the following autumn just as he was hitting his stride. The surgery went satisfactorily, but the incision became infected, leading to a prolonged and solitary stay in hospital. The previous month, Lina gave birth to the couple’s seventh and final child, a girl named Augustina. Together with the three other little children (ages three, five, and seven), the new arrival left the parents tethered to the farm and Castro more or less fending for himself on the hospital ward. Ramón visited occasionally and the monks checked in from time to time. “I spent almost the entire time alone,” Castro said, insisting that he did not regard his hospitalization with bitterness. He made friends “instinctively,” working the wards like a politician, befriending old and young alike.18
The intellectual sparkle that Paquito Rodríguez recognized in his childhood friend began to exert itself in public around this time. The young patient was as curious as he was social. “I passed hours simply observing my surroundings,” he wrote. He became fascinated by seemingly trivial things—like the ability of the ants on the floor of his room to work together to move bodies thousands of times bigger than their own. He paid rapt attention to the medical care going on around him, conducting his own operations and anatomy class on the lizards and myriad insects that shared his hospital room. The physicians and nurses noticed his curiosity and encouraged him, predicting that he would become a doctor one day.
The best thing about his appendicitis, Castro later recalled, is that it rescued him from the Mazorra family. When he returned to Dolores the next January, he did so as a boarding student. Recounting his exit from the Mazorras, he told journalist Carlos Franqui that “for the second time—third, fourth, fifth?—I made the determination to take action, to leave a situation which fate had confronted me with.” Thereafter, he and he alone “decided all the problems of my life,” he said, which is revealing not because it is true but because it was how he perceived things.19 Former chums from Dolores recall a boy who seemed to shoulder a great sense of responsibility. At times, this inspired Castro to come to the defense of vulnerable individuals and groups; just as often, it led him to try to take on the world alone. Castro’s glowing account of the teacher Emiliana Danger makes one wonder what influence a dedicated mentor might have had on a bright and energetic but solitary boy.
Friends, foes, and former teachers alike describe Castro in a cascade of contradictory adjectives. He was at once sober, reflective, happy, outgoing, modest, respectful, generous, brave, ambitious, restless, nervous, uneasy, audacious, tenacious, and ruthless, often at the same time. Like many kids his age, he was more interested in sports than schoolwork. “He wasn’t much of a student,” one classmate said, but he was a quick read and was an accomplished multitasker. Another remembered him fidgeting incessantly in class, playing with his pocket watch, his mind apparently on the loose. Then a teacher would ask him a question and he would engage, responding “as if it were nothing—as if he had twenty ears.”20
Everyone who knew Castro as a schoolboy comments on his photographic memory. One classmate tells the story of a teacher who collected articles about the Second World War from the Diario de la Marina, the conservative daily favored by the Jesuits. One afternoon the man’s paper went missing and Castro approached him to suggest that he be allowed to leave the school on a brief mission to get him another copy. Castro needed to visit the office of his father’s friend and mentor, Fidel Pino Santos, and thought Pino Santos would be happy to part with his paper. As it happened, Castro was wrong, so he sat down and quickly read the articles, committing them to memory. Arriving back at school, Castro explained that he failed to acquire a paper, but had read and memorized the contents; if the teacher would provide him pen and paper he would re-create the articles for him. The teacher did so and Castro reproduced the articles verbatim. Later that day, a curious teacher went to the library to compare Castro’s account with the originals. The articles matched word for word. The feat went up on the School’s Wall of Honor. “It caused a sensation,” a classmate remarked. “Do you know what it takes to re-create a newspaper article like this from memory?”21
This would not be the last mark Castro left on that wall. On November 6, 1940, Castro wrote a letter to U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had won election to a third term the previous day. “My good friend Roosevelt,” Castro began. “I don’t know very English, but I know as much as to write to you.” Castro was a fan of Roosevelt’s radio broadcasts. The president’s latest triumph made him “very happy,” he said, before continuing, “I am twelve years old. I am a boy but I think very much but I do not think that I am writing the President of the United States.” (Actually, Castro was fourteen at the time, which raises the question of how he got this wrong. The most likely explanation is that he did not want his peers to know that he was behind in school for his age, both for what that might suggest about his intellectual acuity and because of the immense athletic advantage that that would have bestowed upon him.) Castro then asked Roosevelt to send him “a ten dollars bill green American.” After all, he “had never seen” such a bill, and would simply “like to have one of them.” He then gave Roosevelt his address and signed off, “Good by. Your friend. Fidel Castro.” Oh, there was one more thing. Should the president “want iron” to build his “sheaps,” the boy from Birán knew just where to find it, having grown up near “the biggest (minas) of iron of the land.”22 Much to everyone’s surprise, someone in Roosevelt’s office wrote back. When a letter from the president of the United States arrived at school, the administration promptly attached it to the Wall of Honor, making Castro, relatively unknown up to now, a minor celebrity.23
In standing up for himself over the course of his years in Santiago, Castro also stood up for others, and for what he knew was right. At private religious schools like La Salle and Dolores, Church teachings often conflicted with the mission of education. Castro and his friends learned this firsthand in a course on “Anatomy, Physiology and Hygiene” when the time came to take up the subject of sex education. The lecturer carried out his end of the bargain well enough; trouble arose when exam time arrived and the students discovered that the course head had removed the offending pages from the textbook. “We must do something,” Castro announced. With his classmates trailing behind him, Castro approached the teacher (“as if it were nothing, with tremendous tranquility,” a classmate recalled). He requested the missing pages. The teacher responded that there were some things the students were too young to know. How then, Castro demanded, were the students to answer exam questions based on these pages? When the ensuing discussion did not resolve the conflict, the students put their heads together, and came up with another solution, acquiring the pages from a book in an outside library.24
When Castro saw something wrong, he tried to fix it, so much so that his classmates nicknamed him “Lio” (trouble), as he was always getting himself in hot water. “He never permitted abuse and had a tremendous facility in fixing problems,” a classmate remembers. Another classmate, “short, fat, and homely,” by his own description, made an inviting target. One day, the boy got rolled by a bully, prompting Castro to come to the defense of his friend. The bullying stopped. Dolores was notorious in Santiago de Cuba for excluding blacks. But there was at least one “colored kid” in the student body. When one of the teachers referred to the boy as “the negrito” and asked what he was doing in the class, Castro protested, bringing an end to the “derogatory remarks.”25
Among the three to four hundred privileged and pampered students at Dolores, it was not easy to stand out. But the Jesuits liked sports and the great outdoors. Castro excelled at activities demanding physical prowess. He was particularly fond of basketball and soccer. “He ran like an arrow because he was tall and thin, and of course this helped on the athletic field,” one classmate said. Castro’s prowess at and passion for baseball is exaggerated. Still, he stood out at Dolores as a pitcher. He also loved to swim and row, his classmates say. Above all, he liked to escape to the mountains. When the boys arrived at a destination, “Castro was gone at the opening of the school bus door.” If there was a high peak nearby, he was off; a cliff to climb, gone; a river to ford. Ba! He had “an unusual predilection for nature, for knowing its secrets, he had a tremendous affection for our excursions perhaps because they allowed him such contact.” Everything was a competition among this group of kids. Once in the mountains, the boys would divide into teams and hunt for one another. Whoever had Castro on his team was at a great advantage.26
A favorite destination was the rugged area around Contramaestre, at the northeast margin of the Sierra Maestre. There, teachers and students forded rivers, climbed mountains, fished, and hunted. On the way home, they would often stop for a meal at the home of a classmate named René Fernández, whose family would feed and entertain the students. These visits generated a lot of anecdotes. One classmate recalled the time when the group was watching René’s father stabling his horse after a long ride. This horse was famous in the family for its recalcitrance; only the elder Fernández knew how to handle it. That was all Castro needed to hear. Eager to demonstrate his horsemanship, he asked his friend’s father for permission to ride the horse. As the skeptical father looked on, Castro mounted the horse “as if it were nothing, as if the beast had been accustomed to him its whole life, but that’s not all, he rode the rest of the afternoon, to the farthest paddocks and back as if to prove that he was capable of dominating that superb animal.” The Jesuits praised Castro for his courage, the classmate said. “His fellow students took note.”27
Castro did not just show off at the Fernández house. Those who have entertained a busload of young boys know how rewarding (and how rare) it is when one of the boys engages an elder host. Castro did so at her house, René’s mother remembered. “None of the boys would have anything to do with me, except Fidel and one other boy, who were always the most dear.” René’s sister concurred. “Truly, he was very sweet to Mama. While the others were roughhousing, Fidel entertained Mama in the kitchen.” A teacher at Dolores confirmed Castro’s generosity to those at the margins. “At Dolores,” math teacher José María Patac recalled, “he befriended all the workers, talking to them constantly.”28 Castro stuck out in other ways, René Fernández reported. With an eye for detail and ingenuity, he was mesmerized by the family’s dining room table, for instance, which had been handmade by René’s father. Comprised of two immense circular pieces of wood, one inlaid within the other table rotated like a Lazy Susan, thus enabling diners to serve themselves without bothering their fellow eaters. Attention to detail was “just another characteristic that he had.”29
Though René Fernández never anticipated Castro rising to the presidency of Cuba, he was not surprised that Castro ended up in politics. In junior high school, Castro was a natural leader, winning over peers not by virtue of organization or planning or conscious effort, at this stage, but on account of his natural gifts, which included “his way of treating others.” Castro never waited around for others to do something. He “always took the initiative,” Fernández explains, “inventing or planning something, and then, logically, we would follow him.”30
Like many willful, confident kids, Castro was often the subject of unwanted attention. His blessedly meticulous penmanship is one result of this. He credits teachers at La Salle and Dolores for the good form. At Dolores, students who acted out were made to write sentences during recess: I will not talk or misbehave in class. I promise to respect my superiors. Recess detention was also the secret to Castro’s preternatural capability with sums, or so he said. Long division problems were the favored sanction of a teacher named Salgueiro, who gave the boys “numbers to divide, with six figures in the dividend and three in the divisor, generally with twenty problems per punishment.”
Salgueiro was a special case. Years later, Castro could still conjure his booming voice, “carrying out his ruthless punishment on the boys.” Short and ill-tempered, Salgueiro strutted about the school like a peacock, proud of the terror he inspired. Naturally, the boys reciprocated by tormenting him. One semester, the Castro brothers returned to school from Birán with a parrot, a gift for another prefect who loved animals. By chance, the prefect placed the parrot in a cage in a little garden next to the classroom where “Salgueiro the terrible” ruled. Castro taught the parrot how to talk, not just idle nonsense, but to mimic Salgueiro himself: “Salgueiro, twenty times! Salgueiro, twenty times!” the parrot cried to the boys’ delight. Faced with the choice of losing Salgueiro or the parrot, Dolores authorities “granted the bird asylum,” relocating it to a convent in San José, where it dutifully learned to recite the Lord’s Prayer.31
The Jesuits’ discipline and attention to details fostered a stable environment in which Castro could settle down. Kids who aspired to a bachelor’s degree took an exam in seventh grade known as Ingreso (Entry), sometimes Preparatorio (Preparation). The thirteen-year-old Castro passed his entrance exam uneventfully in June 1940. Entering the baccalaureate raised the stakes of a boy’s education, with the expectation that from there he would go on to the university and ultimately to a position of national leadership. The bachelor’s degree consists of five years of coursework. In his first year, eighth grade, Castro performed satisfactorily. He struggled in Math, uncharacteristically, while doing fine in Geography, History of the Americas, Spanish, English, and Physical Education. The next year, his last at Dolores, he began to stand out, particularly in Geography and Modern and Contemporary History, subjects which would remain dear to him throughout his life. He did well in Math this time, as well as in Spanish, English, and Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene, the course for which he had to scour Cuban libraries to find the missing pages of the anatomy text.32
To his immense satisfaction, Castro spent the summers between these academic years at home in Birán. He was the first person from either side of the family to qualify for the baccalaureate, an accomplishment that bestowed a certain honor at Finca Manacas. Though he was still expected to help out in the office, he was granted considerable latitude, and it was during these summers that he came to appreciate the solitude and serenity of the high country above Mayarí. But Castro’s time on horseback was not totally self-indulgent. In 1940, his half-brother Pedro Emilio, to whom he would remain very close, ran for local political office as a representative of the new Opposition Front. Nineteen forty was a significant year in Cuban politics. The U.S.-led overthrow of the Grau-Guiteras government in January 1934 ushered in six years of political instability, in which six different presidents struggled unsuccessfully to address rising social discontent, often turning to Batista’s army to impose the order that they could not achieve.33
By the end of the decade, Cubans, who saw eye to eye about virtually nothing, agreed to call a constitutional convention. In February 1940, a Constitutional Assembly opened in the capital, with representatives from across the political spectrum. Few expected the assembly to overcome the widespread divisions. The resulting 1940 Constitution was a pleasant surprise. It granted universal suffrage and curbed executive authority. It codified civil liberties, elevated the power of the judiciary, and made judges the final arbiter of electoral disputes. It provided a framework for free and fair elections. Though the new constitution was far from perfect (it lacked enabling mechanisms, making it more aspirational than practicable in the end), it was nevertheless regarded as a model in Latin America and around the world, reflecting the vision of a citizenry committed to the rule of law, open to compromise, tolerant of differences, and dedicated to the common good. Hypocrisy, someone said, is a sign of strength not weakness; only a people concerned about what is right can be criticized for falling short. Individuals and individual governments might fail, but for the first time in its history, Cuba had a self-made constitution to steer by.
In July 1940, Cubans went to the polls to elect the first president and Congress under their new constitution. One of the candidates in the presidential election was the man behind the preceding years of civil authoritarianism, Colonel Fulgencio Batista. Though this election is said to have been cleaner than previous contests, it was not untainted, as the experience of Castro’s half-brother Pedro Emilio suggests. A political novice, Pedro Emilio lacked the support network that elevated his father’s friend Fidel Pino Santos into office. As a result, Pedro Emilio had to turn for help wherever he could find it, including his young half-brother. When Castro returned to Birán for vacation in summer 1940, Pedro Emilio furnished him with a stout horse and a stern command to visit all the households on the plantation and emphasize the importance of the upcoming election. This included teaching the peasants how to vote, literally how to cast a ballot for their choice instead of the opposition candidate.34
The peasants were sparsely scattered, the weather scorching hot. Castro recalled long, tedious days on horseback. “I visited hundreds of campesinos,” he said, most if not all of them ready to vote for a son of Don Ángel. If only they had been allowed. At the three polling places on or adjacent to the Castro farm, Batista’s soldiers turned up on election day to garner votes, in some cases preventing citizens from casting votes at all. Castro’s half-brother lost his election by eighty-two votes; between five and six hundred locals were said to have been prevented from voting.35
Castro went home for the summer between ninth and tenth grade and did not return to Dolores. Instead, he moved on to Havana to attend the country’s most prestigious school, Colegio de Belén. Characteristically, looking back on the switch years later, Castro told an interviewer that the choice was entirely his; he had long heard of Belén, was intrigued by its reputation, and informed his parents of his decision. They were duly “enchanted,” he said, and the rest is history. The world according to Castro. I decided and my word was done.36
Is there another explanation? Critics credit a lost fight with pushing Castro out the door at Dolores. But that seems to contradict everything his schoolmates suggest about the boy before and after. Castro’s record as a quitter is thin. More likely, a conversation between his parents and Fidel Pino Santos altered his fate. Had his parents dreamed of sending their kids to school in Havana? Had Pino Santos twisted Ángel’s arm? The historical record does not say and we will probably never know.37
Havana’s size and human density astounded the easterner. Castro was met by his namesake and “pseudo godfather,” as he put it, Fidel Pino Santos, now a representative in Congress. Pino Santos had promised Ángel and Lina that he would look after their son. Castro could not wait to escape his clutches. First, they toured the city, cruising by the new Capitolio and Presidential Palace, both a product of Machado’s public works largess, both sparkling after a late-summer monsoon. Down the Prado they continued, out onto the Malecón, the magnificent seawall built by the North Americans at the beginning of the century. Santiago de Cuba sits well up its eponymous bay, and it has nothing to rival the tempest-tossed Malecón, seemingly all that saves Havana from being washed out to sea. After stopping for a quick drink at Pino Santos’s Vedado home, Castro arrived at school with his heart in his throat. “I was a guajirito,” he remembered, a peasant, “my new classmates savvy and world tested.”38
Colegio de Belén, long since relocated to Miami, was situated in the eastern suburb of Marianao, a thirty-minute bus ride from downtown Havana. There, in 1925, the Society of Jesus opened what Cubans would come to know as the Palace of Education, a $1.5 million improvement on the original school founded in 1854 in the heart of the Old City. One can only imagine Castro’s amazement as Pino Santos turned left off 41st Avenue onto 66th Street, the school’s ornate pedestrian bridge and four-story columned facade looming over him. From the front the school appears more grand than elegant, its outside walls a reflection of the contemporary monumental state-building style. Walking through the school’s magnificent bronze doors, decorated with paintings of the Last Supper, Spanish conquest, and other Jesuit iconography, Castro would have discovered that the building’s virtues lie within, its monumentality yielding to a combination of medieval fancy and youthful folly. Floor after floor of magnificently tiled cloisters rise from manicured courtyards dedicated to meditation, basketball, and play. Belén comprised both primary and secondary schools. Its simple, gridlike layout (four large cloisters attached in the middle) allowed for segregation by grade when necessary, while making school-wide convocations easy.
Now the Instituto Técnico Militar, the building’s public spaces are especially impressive. School officials looking to convene the one-thousand-plus student body might choose from a handsome dining room, a plush theater, any one of the four courtyards, or the school chapel, such is the building’s embarrassment of riches. Chapel seems too humble a name for the school’s place of worship. The large nave is flanked by fluted Ionic columns, between which hang Arts-and-Crafts-style chandeliers, curiously at home amid the classical motif. The central and radiating aisles are ornately tiled. A generous second floor gallery accommodates overflow students, who might peek out from rows of square-shaped Corinthian columns. A large apse envelops an altar separated from the nave by an intricately carved marble rail. Over the apse looms a vast fresco that includes the Virgin and Child, Spanish conquerors, humble priests, and an African slave being hoisted to his feet by an earnest abolitionist. There are no Indians in sight. Alabaster bowls, parquet floors—truly the chapel has it all. The coffered ceiling is surely the highlight. Gold-plated flowers burst from a turquoise background surrounded by meticulously carved woodwork.
And that is only the chapel. Never mind for now the indoor swimming pool, billiard hall, and observatory. In erecting their new home, the Jesuits intended to make a statement. A statement they made. More than lucky, students at Belén were spoiled rotten at a time when only one in twenty Cuban children got as far as secondary school. Belén was a launch pad, built by insiders for insiders dedicated to nothing so much as to ensure that the boys retained their place in the social hierarchy. How then would a newcomer, an outsider, do?
By age sixteen, Castro had come to cut quite some figure. If you have to resettle at this age, it helps to be tall, handsome, athletic, smart, independent, and resilient. Castro was all of these things and more. Entering Belén, he had lost the roundness in his face that distinguished him at Dolores (and which he would later recover). He had a strong jawline, full lips, wide nose, heavy brow, and a dimple in the middle of his chin. He had brown hair that tended toward dirty blond at the end of a long summer in the sunshine. The boy that arrived for tenth grade was still rail thin. By twelfth grade he had become a veritable stallion. “We called him ‘the horse,’ ” a Belén classmate remembered, such was his physical and athletic stature.39
The only thing worse than being dropped off at a new school is parents or guardians who overstay their welcome. “I was delighted to be free of my pseudo godfather,” Castro remarked. The first night on the dorm made clear that he still lacked a few necessities. So the following day he hopped on a streetcar and headed into the center of the city, alighting at Parque Central, just off the Prado and across from the Capitolio. Castro walked from shop to shop, taking in the sights and picking up a belt, the school uniform, and a guayabera. During the chaos of opening days, the cultural chasm that distinguished the kid from rural Oriente from his cosmopolitan peers was impossible to miss. Castro wore his differences like the zoot suit he picked up in Santiago before departing for the capital, and it was not long before his classmates called him on it. “And what is this,” they laughed, “a peasant?” Those boys were “members of the aristocracy,” Castro explained years later, “the bourgeoisie, the oligarchy, proud of their customs and fashion. They had a good laugh at my expense.”40
José Ignacio Rasco vividly remembered Castro’s arrival at Belén in autumn 1942. Two years Castro’s senior, Rasco grew up in Marianao, not far from the school, which he attended from first through twelfth grade. Rasco’s father sold life insurance for a North American firm with offices in the capital. After graduation Rasco continued on to the University of Havana, where Castro joined him two years later. At the university, Rasco studied law, eventually opening his own firm, before ultimately returning to Belén as a schoolteacher. Rasco was a true believer—in Christianity, in private religious education, in the benefit of U.S. influence in Cuba, in class distinctions, in the status quo. As adults, Rasco and Castro could not have been more different. Rasco spent the Revolution on the sidelines, departing for the United States in 1960.41
The two boys had many classes together. They shared an interest in sports and politics and the fate of Latin America. Like the kids at Dolores, Castro’s new classmates were impressed by his memory. “He had the most prodigious memory I’ve ever seen in my life,” Rasco remarked. “We’d ask him, Fidel, what does such and such a book say on such and such a page, and he’d answer exactly.” In Belén, students took two parallel exams in each subject, one corresponding to what they had actually covered in the classroom, the other a standardized exam mandated by the Department of Education. Castro’s memory helped him significantly on standardized exams, especially, Rasco said; Castro often passed such tests “with perfect scores.”42
Socially, Castro was at once “extremely shy” and charismatic. Students threw themselves at him. Castro was ecumenical in his friendships, did not play favorites, and was “a sensitive reader” of people and social situations. He possessed “a psychological radar to know what people were thinking,” to read their minds, “to penetrate people,” Rasco said. Castro’s memory played a role here. Rasco recalled an incident just after the Revolution when, on a trip to Uruguay, Castro ran into somebody at the airport that he hadn’t seen in years. He remembered everything about the guy. At the same time, Castro seemed a little reticent upon first arriving at Belén, something Rasco found “very curious.” When other kids would argue about sports or politics, Castro held back, never really mixing it up with classmates until his senior year, by which time Rasco had moved on to the university.43
Like kids his age, Castro was more interested in what went on outside of class than in. Having entered Belén little interested in books and literature, he left the school a “fanatic reader.” With women, Castro betrayed “panic-like fear.” Infatuated by a girl from the local neighborhood in Marianao, Castro asked his friend for advice about how to talk to her. Tell her you like her and want to go out with her, Rasco advised. Castro did so and was summarily rejected. Rasco confirms the Dolores boys’ accounts of Castro as a hard worker on causes that compelled him, recalling an audition for an “oratory academy” taught by a Jesuit father named Rubinos. To be admitted to Rubinos’s class, each student was required to make a ten-minute speech, without notes. Rasco remembered Castro almost wetting his pants. “He was nervous, his legs were shaking. He was tremendously shy.” Castro won admission to the class.44
Rasco reported that Castro expected to be the best at everything he tried his hand at. “He wanted to be champion in ping-pong! But I was. The one thing he couldn’t succeed in was pole vault; he was too big. I was champion pole-vaulter because I was very thin. I used to tease him, saying ‘you know why you can’t pole-vault? Because it’s the only sport women have never done.’ It used to drive him crazy.” Rasco, whose egotism seems to have rivaled Castro’s, remembers an incident on the baseball field that speaks to Castro’s perseverance. “He wanted to be a champion pitcher, like me, but he had a problem throwing. So he would practice from dawn until dusk on one of the school’s diamonds. When the catcher got tired and left, FC would throw the ball against a wall and continue practicing all alone.”45
The Belén curriculum was a mixed bag, which Castro later criticized with increasing vehemence. In 1985, he described Belén as “a wonderful school,” some of whose teachers “were highly trained scientists . . . very knowledgeable in physics, chemistry, mathematics, and literature.” Convention has it that Castro never paid much attention in class, completing his coursework on his own on the eve of his exams. Photographs from Belén contradict this. In one image, a group of juniors are scattered around a bench in a physics laboratory, examining the conductivity of liquid. Some of the boys appear a little distracted; Castro focuses laserlike on the task at hand, as if relieved to be free from the rote learning that characterized Belén’s history, religion, and language classes. The image confirms the good fortune of the Belén boys, the lab as beautiful as it is well-equipped, with elegant wood paneling and handsome shelves stocked with beakers, scales, mirrors, and stoves. (See Insert 1, Photo 13.)
Belén was not entirely to blame for clinging to recitation and memorization in its language and liberal-arts curriculum. The Commission on Cuban Affairs blamed U.S. educational orthodoxy introduced at the turn of the century for inhibiting experienced-based learning. By the time Castro showed up in autumn 1942, elite private schools like Belén were hamstrung by reforms written into the 1940 Constitution, which mandated that they comply with the niggling national teaching standards (even deploying public school proctors to oversee baccalaureate and other qualifying exams). Standardized tests put a brake on innovation in Belén’s classrooms, forcing teachers to emphasize content over analysis and quantity over quality, turning students into receptacles. Still, the experience at Belén was not entirely oppressive, and Castro emerged from its gilded halls a forceful and confident debater.
It is often noted that the Castro home in Birán had everything—post office, telegraph office, bar, inn, company store, primary school, cockfighting ring, dairy, apiary, and bakery, but notably not a church. Absent a local church, and despite his mother’s deep faith, Castro never came to appreciate the tranquillity and repetition of simple religious practice. He bridled at what he deemed to be the contrivance and even coerciveness of religious education. “Every day, we had the same ritual,” he complained; “it was quite mechanical . . . repeating the same prayers over and over, saying the Hail Mary and Our Father mechanically, had no positive effect.” The inability of a person so intuitive to recognize the role of ritual in promoting solidarity is striking. The sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and texture of church—the soft light, musty cushions, burning candles, prayerful murmurs, exotic verses, enchanting music, sour wine—left a budding revolutionary cold.46
Despite their differences, Castro and the Jesuits agreed that a healthy body was a key ingredient to a sound mind. Castro distinguished himself on Belén’s athletic fields, as Rasco attests. But he was nowhere more contented than in the mountains. Compared to the Sierra Maestra or his native Sierra Cristal, the mountains of Pinar del Río, in western Cuba, and in Matanzas, to the east, seem small and insignificant. But one can lose one’s way, get sucked down a river, or break a leg. Castro, as we have seen, claims never to have benefited from the give-and-take of a mentor. After Emiliana Danger, Amando Llorente, a pre-ordained priest at Belén, was the next closest miss. At Belén, he and Castro came to know each other well thanks to their shared passion for the woods.
Settling in at Belén, Castro found himself drawn to Llorente, a priest in training not so much older than his charges who was able to let his guard down with the boys. Castro could read a river, follow a trail, navigate a range of mountains, and Llorente and his fellow teachers soon put their trust in him. The teachers made him “Explorer General,” a position roughly equivalent to an Eagle Scout. Photographs from these trips reveal a supremely confident Castro clad in khaki pants and shirt, boots with chaps, pith helmet atop his head. (See Insert 1, Photo 16.) Eventually, his teachers allowed him to lead excursions into the western mountains. Some of these trips lasted longer than expected, causing consternation among school authorities. Some required quick thinking and nimble footwork to avoid cresting rivers and flash floods. In a few cases, Castro is said to have gotten his teachers out of trouble, fording flooded rivers to lead a group to safety. The Jesuits admired Castro’s competence and audacity. His classmates, scions of the Cuban elite, accustomed to the streets of the capital, noticed their teachers’ noticing. Castro’s prowess in the mountains won him recognition from Llorente and his colleagues in the school yearbook his senior year.47
Three years at Belén transformed Castro from a reticent peasant into a confident, self-assured young man. He left the school just before his nineteenth birthday, and photographs from his senior year suggest he had become comfortable there. One image reveals ten young men, all seniors, posing on a terrace in one of the school’s courtyards. Seven of this fortunate cast sprawl casually on two benches. Three others stand behind, arms draped naturally over their friends’ shoulders. The school day is over. The jackets have come off. Some of the boys have stripped down to T-shirts. The gabardine pants and cap-toe oxfords are the give-away. Privilege, thy name is Belén. The boys are well cropped, closely shaved, and simply beautiful. Castro is one of the standers. He appears a little darker than the others, his clothes perhaps a little less expensive. But he is no less at home in the photograph than they, no less confident, defying claims he did not belong. (See Insert 1, Photo 14.)
There are other photographs—from the football pitch, from the classroom, from a reception for a Putumayo Indian visiting from Colombia—confirming Castro’s social status. In these photos, Castro is impossible to miss, tall, thin, chiseled, at once serious and at ease. Where it matters, he is central, now occupying the focal point, now seated at the side of a teacher, in team photos among the tallest, and always closest to the front.
One of the most anticipated events of the Belén school year was the awarding of prizes to students in each of the four classes pursuing the bachelor’s degree. In 1945, the year Castro graduated, prize night was organized as a “parliamentary debate” featuring six distinguished seniors (preuniversitarios), charged with defending private religious education from state meddling. In late March of that year, as the event took place, the Cuban Congress debated legislation to compel private schools to bring their curriculum in line with national sentiment rejecting falangism, fascism, and Nazism. Like Jesuit schools throughout the world, Belén sided with Franco in the Spanish Civil War, seeing communism, not fascism, as the existential threat—and regarding the law before the Cuban Congress as leftist. That year, Belén officials thought to exploit prize night, always covered by the press, as an opportunity to advance their ideological agenda.
Castro was one of several seniors selected to address an auditorium packed with the archbishop of Havana, members of Congress, government officials, and numerous other dignitaries and well-wishers. The task of defending the school from predatory lawmakers was divided among the speakers. Castro was given the job of comparing state intervention in private education from country to country, including Europe and Latin America. His contribution was more descriptive than prescriptive, but he won praise for responding with composure to the intervention of at least one powerful politician, Congressman Dorta Duque. Still, Castro’s remarks were not universally admired. A journalist for the communist newspaper Hoy (uncertain if the speaker’s name was “Fidel Casto or Casto Fidel?”) castigated “the aspiring starlet” for swallowing hook, line, and sinker the propaganda of “the Totalitarians of Havana!”—a delightful taunt given the way history turned out. Perhaps the students could be forgiven, the writer allowed, for falling into their teachers’ trap.48
Being selected as a prize night speaker was only one of several honors bestowed on Castro his senior year. When his mother, Lina Ruz, showed up at graduation to celebrate the first person on either side of the family to be awarded a bachelor’s degree, she swelled with pride as her son was awarded valedictorian and athlete of the year. In the words of the school yearbook, Castro distinguished himself “by his love of the school and the enthusiasm with which he has defended its name in almost all the official sports of the school.” At once “excellent and collegial,” he had earned “the admiration and affection of all.” Noting that he had opted to pursue a career in the law, school officials predicted that “he would fill the book of life with brilliant pages.”49
Looking back on Castro’s education from those heady days at the end of senior year, it is hard but to conclude that a country boy had come a long way since first being shunted off to Santiago in autumn 1934. Castro’s ragged path through school suggests that love is not the only thing that money can’t buy. It can’t buy sage parenting, either. Though able to appreciate the value of a good education, and able to pay for it, Ángel and Lina Castro seemed to have no idea about the kind of support required for a first-generation student to compete with the children of Cuba’s elite. At times the couple seemed naive, not questioning the motivation for their son’s obstreperous behavior at La Salle, for instance; at times they seemed willfully blind, surrendering Castro and his sister Angela to the Feliús with not the least idea about what they were in for.
Much of this is understandable, given Ángel’s and Lina’s own upbringing. But that does not make things easier on a young boy. Castro insists that he felt no ill-will toward his parents or his various hosts. His impetuousness and his willingness to deceive his elders suggests otherwise. This, too, is understandable, perhaps. The point is that this period left a mark. The young man who emerged from Belén in the spring of 1945 was both accustomed to going it alone and yet eager to be accepted. Years later, he would appear solipsistic, overconfident, and stubborn at times, conciliatory and apologetic at others. Looking on the bright side, his school days also left him confident, motivated, intellectually curious, and, above all, resilient. A young man from his family background with his upbringing and education was bound to make mistakes and unlikely to forge a conventional path through life. But he would be hard to keep down and was developing the skills and strength to right and defend himself.