The speaker should shut his mouth!” a voice rang out. “He speaks for the last time.” It was hard to tell where the voice came from, so thick was the crowd in Plaza Cadenas one sultry afternoon in early summer 1949. But there could be no doubting the sincerity of the threat. More than five hundred students, including presidents of the thirteen university faculties, crowded into the plaza to hear leaders of the new “30 September Committee,” named for the day in 1933 when Rafael Trejo was gunned down by police, launch a campaign to end the gangsterismo that had plagued the university for the better part of two decades. With roots in the anti-Machado revolution, the gangs benefited from the malign neglect of former friends in the Auténtico Party (officially Partido Revolucionario Cubano), founded in February 1934 after the collapse of the 1933 Revolution. President Grau, an Auténtico founder, had encouraged the gangs by his passivity. Newly elected Auténtico president Carlos Prío Socarrás formalized the unsavory relationship, exchanging government sinecures for a pledge from gang leaders to cease and desist. The success of the Pacto de las Pandillas (Pact of the Gangs), as the agreement became known, depended on keeping it secret. This required, among other things, suppressing dissident voices at the university, which was like trying to keep the lid on a boiling pot. Trouble was inevitable.
Just the previous April, the university government itself fell victim to violence when gunmen associated with MSR founder Rolando Masferrer (now a senator with legislative immunity) assassinated FEU vice president Justo Fuentes. Later that month, the same group cut down another student, Luis Felipe (Wichy) Salazar. The rally in Plaza Cadenas that day amounted to a declaration of war by the students against the government-gangster nexus, only this was to be a battle of moral suasion in which weapons were strictly prohibited.
Despite the heat, a note of menace shivered through the crowd. The last thing that the organizers needed was for a peace rally to erupt in gunfire. Max Lesnik, one of the founders of 30 September, looked up at the speaker to gauge his response. There stood Fidel Castro, unflappable, baiting the gangsters to expose themselves. Castro “has always been very clever when it comes to finding out what lies behind appearances,” Lesnik said. In the days leading up to the rally, Castro collected the names of all those implicated in the pact, along with the offices they ostensibly occupied. The gangsters were never very far from the university. On this day, they arrived on the scene just as Castro gained steam. “It was a courageous and audacious act,” Lesnik recalled, complete with “names and documents proving his assertions.” The gangsters “were furious and informed the committee that we would pay with our lives. Fidel was informed even as he spoke.”1
On the face of it, Castro made an unlikely medium for an antiviolence message. Since becoming politically active in the spring of 1946, Castro sought protection first from MSR, then from UIR, while articulating an anticorruption platform that made neither the gangs nor the government happy. After returning from Bogotá, he began to spend less time with thugs and more time with genuine political leaders like Lesnik. Lesnik was an acolyte of Eduardo Chibás, who founded the Ortodoxo Party (formally Partido del Pueblo Cubano) in May 1947. The party had its origins in discontent with the administration of Ramón Grau, once a fellow revolutionary and political ally, lately a hapless and corrupt Cuban president. The name Ortodoxo signaled a return to the original principles that had once animated Grau’s Auténticos: national sovereignty, constitutionalism, clean government, and social welfare, among others, now all irredeemably compromised by an administration dependent on U.S. loans and committed to its own enrichment. Chibás was the force behind the Ortodoxos, a controversial muckraker whose Sunday talk show on radio CMQ was so popular that it competed for listeners with Cuba’s beloved radionovelas. In June 1947, nearly half of all Cubans were said to have tuned in to hear him denounce the latest evidence of Grau administration malfeasance.
Despite a late start getting mobilized, Chibás competed in the 1948 presidential election, losing out to his old Auténtico Party ally, Carlos Prío. The Ortodoxo Party won two seats in the House that year, and nine in the ensuing midterm election. Its slogan was “Honor Against Money” (and, more prosaically, “We Promise Not to Steal!”). In October 1948, Chibás accused former education minister Alemán of stealing $20 million from the education budget. Early the next year, he accused minsters of the new Prío administration of embezzling close to ten times that much. Better at launching accusations than at backing them up, he eventually found himself in trouble. In short, Chibás emerged as the conscience of the nation at a time when many Cubans seemed to have forgotten what a conscience even was. Lesnik noticed and immediately signed on, becoming the head of the Ortodoxo Youth. Castro noticed, too, eventually recognizing affiliation with the Ortodoxos as a way to escape the gangs.2
Lesnik and Castro first crossed paths in the Plaza Cadenas in autumn 1948, at the start of Lesnik’s freshman year. In the wake of Cayo Confites, Demajagua, and the Bogotazo, Castro had “a reputation among the students of the highest magnitude,” Lesnik said, and was “known on a different level among the national press.” Journalists regarded Castro as “a leader among his peers and a person capable of staging a demonstration, confronting the police, or throwing a pistol in his belt to exchange fire with a rival group.” Politically ambitious himself, Lesnik was eager to make the acquaintance of those who had “taken a political position against the corruption and gangsterism of the time.” Castro was “young, rebellious and politicized.” From their first meeting, Castro struck Lesnik as “someone bound to be the leader of a very different Cuba . . . or become a martyr.”3
Lesnik had reservations about Castro. Still only twenty-two at the time, Castro possessed what Lesnik called “an exaggerated propensity to violence.” He was idealistic but undisciplined, committed but impetuous. He had “no appreciation for the ideological fundamentals of the revolutionary process.” Nonetheless, Lesnik recognized in him what others had seen: “a figure who had the makings of an exceptional leader—a good speaker, great agitator, valiant, audacious.” By the time the two met, Castro was already sensing the limitations of “the sterile struggle of violence for violence sake.” While retaining his idealism, sense of duty, and fearlessness, Castro had begun to take his role as a student leader more seriously, seeking a place at the table with Lesnik and even Chibás himself. Lesnik and Chibás were happy to have Castro on their side, but only if he truly and unequivocally quit the gangs. The initial evidence was equivocal, Lesnik recalled, describing Castro as a “kaleidoscope,” always adapting to the circumstances, now violent, now thoughtful. But there was more to Castro than met the eye. “It is often said,” Lesnik remarked, “that Fidel talks a lot. What is less known is that he listens more than he speaks. He is a very patient person. Before making a decision, he spends a great deal of time in reflection.”4
Castro told Lesnik he wanted to join the 30 September Committee. Lesnik and Guevara sat down with Castro to establish a few conditions. First, there could be no guns in the committee. Very well, Castro replied, but didn’t Lesnik himself have a gun? Yes, Lesnik conceded, but he no longer carried it. Second, the group had written a manifesto denouncing the public sinecures; all committee members had to sign it. Castro, who never met a manifesto he didn’t like, readily agreed. At that point, Guevara asked Castro who he thought would be the best person to inform the FEU about the new 30 September Committee. That would be me, Castro replied, thus setting the stage for the speech that begins this chapter.
Cubans reserve the adjective “transcendental” to distinguish events that achieve a place in the timeless struggle for Cuba Libre from everyday events. In Lesnik’s opinion, Castro’s performance that day belonged in the pantheon. Castro raised the hair on the back of necks across the city that day, “denouncing the gangsters, confessing his role, and naming names.” Basta ya!—Castro declared—enough with the self-immolation. It was time for students to stop killing one another and turn their attention to the power behind the violence.
With his speech coming to a close, Castro’s life was in danger. Lesnik did some quick thinking. The original plan was to escort Castro off University Hill on foot. That was now plainly inadequate. It was 7 p.m., still light out, and Lesnik thought to exploit the daylight to save his maverick friend. He told Castro to get in his car, a convertible, located in a nearby parking lot. “We’ll take my car, you’ll sit next to me, and we’re going with the top down.” Lesnik’s close ties to Eduardo Chibás gave him a degree of immunity from the gangs. “It would have been a scandal for the gang leaders to gun me down in the open,” he said; “it simply wasn’t possible.” Lesnik took Castro to his house, where he remained for two weeks. With Castro’s enemies more determined than ever to kill him, Lesnik advised Castro to leave the city. He eventually did so, taking off for the tranquillity of Oriente Province.5
This was Castro’s second extended stay in Birán in just over a year. The previous summer, back from Bogotá and confronting one accusation after another, he sought the calm of the countryside. There, according to his sister Juanita, a conversation with his parents temporarily altered the direction of his young life. The conversation went something like this: “Fidel, it’s time to think hard about your future. . . . All we want for you is to have a career. Forget about all this stuff you’ve been involved in and carry on with your studies! Where would you like to go to school besides Cuba? Choose any university you’d like in the United States.” These were the words of Ángel, the self-made man, urging his son to avail himself of the opportunity he himself had never had. Castro would not hear of it. “Papa,” the son replied, “to study in the United States is very expensive. Let things calm down a bit here and you will see that I will finish my degree.” The father persisted. When it came to education, the parents would hold nothing back. “You always wanted to go to Harvard,” Ángel continued, “that’s what you should do. This old man will not have lived in vain and has not forgotten what he promised you—to provide the time you need to finish your degree.”6
Castro rose and embraced his father. This rare moment of intimacy inspired Lina to speak up. Fidel could finish his degree wherever he wanted, she said. Meanwhile, there were more pressing matters, namely, his relationship with Mirta Díaz-Balart, which a mother did not want to see squandered. The couple were obviously mutually enamored, Lina said. Why not start a family? “Why not get married and go together to the United States?”7 Castro’s friendship with Rafael and Frank Díaz-Balart, and his eventual betrothal to their sister, discredits retrospective accounts of José Ignacio Rasco and other critics that Castro remained an uncultured knave who never fit in at La Salle, Dolores, Belén, or Havana University. The Díaz-Balarts were members of the elite. Collectively, they would never have befriended, socialized with, and consented to their daughter’s marriage to the stick figure caricatured in such accounts.
The Díaz-Balarts hailed from Banes, the United Fruit company town near Nipe Bay. Their father, Rafael José Díaz-Balart, was a lawyer at United Fruit and had once been the town’s mayor. In 1933, Rafael José was elected representative from Oriente and developed an intimate working relationship with Fulgencio Batista, who himself grew up in Banes. Rafael and his namesake both served in the second Batista government. In Banes, as in other U.S.-owned and dominated company towns in Cuba, cultivated, educated families like the Díaz-Balarts enjoyed life on a par with the North Americans who managed the place. Banes was divided into clearly segregated neighborhoods, with the U.S., Cuban, and other expat elite living on one side of the tracks (in this case, river), and the Cuban and other seasonal laborers living on the other.
Jack Skelly, the son of a United Fruit executive who grew up with the Díaz-Balart kids, described management’s side of town as having a “semi-millionaire, country-club style.” A country club there was—known locally as “the American Club”—complete with clubhouse, golf course, tennis courts, and polo field. Banes also boasted a library, elegant parks, and a magnificent church. Adjacent to the polo field were the large, airy homes and elegant front lawns of the Skellys, Díaz-Balarts, and other United Fruit Company administrators. Castro said that despite his parents’ phenomenal success they never mixed socially with neighboring company-town aristocrats. He certainly did. He was a frequent guest at the Díaz-Balarts, often accompanying Rafael, Frank, and Mirta to their beach house, just outside town.8
Castro accepted his mother’s suggestion that he and Mirta tie the knot. And with good reason, evidently, as Skelly describes the young Mirta as one of the most eligible “young muchachas” in the east. A wedding date was set for early October 1948. Banes made a spectacular backdrop for a wedding. By all accounts it was a fabulous event. The festivities kicked off on the evening of October 10, with a shower for Mirta at the American Club. A surviving photo reveals a slight, beaming Mirta in a sleeveless, full-length, flower print dress, surrounded by girlfriends. If she or her well-heeled friends harbored any doubt about her husband to be, it is not visible here. Mirta looks equal parts innocent and ecstatic, her gaggle of girlfriends enthusiastic.
The couple were married the following Tuesday, October 12, 1948, at 10 a.m. in The Church of Our Lady of Charity in Banes.9 Castro’s mother, Lina, led the Birán delegation, which included his older siblings, Angela and Ramón, and their spouses and children, as well as his younger brother, Raúl. To their eternal disappointment, Enma and Juanita were off at school and unable to attend. “The wedding was elegant,” Lina wrote her daughters. “Mirta looked gorgeous and happy, Fidel, too, it goes without saying; they made a handsome couple, indeed.” The town’s who’s who turned out for the occasion, and “there was a spectacular reception at the American Club.” Lina remembered feeling overcome with contentment. “For the first time in a long while, I saw Fidel at peace,” she said, “totally enamored—which is all we wanted for all of you, to be happy.” The couple was showered with gifts, the most conspicuous a pair of alabaster lamps from Fulgencio and Marta Batista. The lamps made “a big impression,” Lina reported, despite being “not all that pretty.”10
Before bidding the newlyweds farewell, Lina took them aside and presented them with a gift of 10,000 pesos ($100,000 in today’s money). Castro was flabbergasted. “Ten thousand dollars?” he said. “No, mama, the old man has lost his mind, that’s more than we can accept.” Never mind, his mother rejoined. Amid further protests and fervent thanks, the couple were off, first to Miami, then on to New York City. This looked to be an auspicious start, with the family hoping that the wedding marked the first stage in Castro’s domestication, with children, a law degree, and—who knows!—his return to Birán to run the family business all to follow. “Everybody regarded that marriage as the way to save me,” Castro remarked years later, “to tranquilize me with bourgeois concepts. After that marriage, they were prodigal with me.”11
A little prodigality goes a long way. The couple arrived in Miami in mid-October (“There were few tourists,” Castro observed, “so prices were low”). This was his first trip to the United States. Fond of food, he was struck by the number of options available, waxing rhapsodical about the “T-bone steak” and “smoked salmon.” The newlyweds went to the beach and took in the sights. Miami did not feel all that different from Cuba, however, and they soon left for New York City. Arriving in New York, Castro described a sensation akin to that of encountering Havana for the first time, awed by its grandeur and energy, while appreciating the potential for loneliness in a city of millions of people “struggling to make a living.”
The couple rented the basement apartment of an elegant brownstone at 156 West 82nd Street, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “That was my first experience of a harsh winter,” Castro recalled. “The only thing we had was a very old heater.” Castro used outings to the local delicatessen to practice his English. The city’s delis fascinated him, with their combination of food, staples, medicine, and hardware. This seemed “very strange,” he said, “as in Cuba the pharmacy is the pharmacy, the bodega the bodega, and never the twain shall meet.” The newlyweds lived a simple, domestic life, with trips to the countryside and occasionally to New England to keep them busy. “We’d buy food in the delicatessen and take it home to cook, as I always loved to do that.”
On weekends, they were often joined by Mirta’s brother Rafael, who was studying in Princeton, and his new wife. Familiar with the area, Rafael functioned as a tour guide. Together the two couples took in the sights—the Museum of Natural History, the Statue of Liberty, and the Empire State Building. They went to Broadway plays and ate in local restaurants. This high living was not cheap, especially when they hosted their inlaws. Despite the Díaz-Balarts’ own wealth, Castro remembers often picking up the tab. Castro also frequented the bookstores that dotted Columbus Avenue and Avenue of the Americas. He bought an English-language copy of Marx’s Capital in a local bookstore, regarding the nation’s willingness to allow the sale of Marxist literature as a contradiction.12
Through all the sightseeing, Castro remained fixated on the idea of studying “political economy” at Harvard, Columbia, or Princeton. He and Mirta bought a used car, drove to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and apparently checked out Harvard in person. In truth, Castro would not have been qualified for graduate school in the United States even had he already possessed a law degree, which he did not. “The title of Bachelor and certain degrees are granted in Cuba after very abbreviated schooling,” the Cuba Commission noted back in 1935: “Cuban students who go to institutions of higher education in Europe and North America for advanced work find themselves in an embarrassing and disappointing situation.” Someone with a doctorate from the University of Havana might be classified as a freshman.13 Castro seemed to recognize this. Despite visiting the Ivy League schools, he called the idea of his studying political economy in the United States “an illusion.” Even had he been qualified to attend a U.S. university, the demands of graduate work in the States did not jibe with his solipsism. In U.S. graduate programs, students were expected to attend class and participate in intensive class discussions, which Castro never liked to do.
Castro was constantly surprised by the cultural differences he encountered in the United States. One day, he and Mirta visited the Díaz-Balarts at Princeton. Castro remembers strolling the opulent grounds on the day of the Harvard-Princeton football game. Amid the merriment and colorful tents, one thing especially caught his attention: lawns “overflowing with young men and women, who interacted with extraordinary freedom, kissing and caressing one another, in front of everybody.” He was not opposed to “natural relations between the sexes,” he insisted, but this struck him as “true debauchery.” The couple’s time in the United States overlapped with the 1948 presidential election, in which Harry Truman defeated Thomas Dewey, to everyone’s astonishment. Out on the streets one afternoon in New York, the president-elect’s caravan whizzed by the Castros with great fanfare. Castro conceded to not knowing much about Truman at the time. But he admired the way an underdog had thrown “himself into battle and won a great victory.”14
To his family’s surprise, the newlyweds returned from the States just before Christmas. Arriving in Miami on the way home, Castro used what was left of the wedding money to buy a Lincoln Continental. Once back in Havana, he realized he needed money more than a flashy car, and he quickly sold the Lincoln, using the returns to move into a new apartment in Vedado. As if humbled by his brush with higher education in the United States, he resolved to finish his law degree as quickly as possible. Taking stock of the many exams between him and a degree, he calculated that it would take him a year and a half of preparation and test taking. Friends and family remember him throwing himself into his studies with customary abandon. In boarding school at the time, Juanita often visited the newlyweds on weekends in the company of her sister Enma. Castro “rose at exactly seven in the morning,” Juanita recalls, “studying until sunset with complete dedication.” By the following June, when Castro renounced the Pacto de las Pandillas with Lesnik looking on, he and Mirta were expecting their first child. At Lesnik’s suggestion, he retreated to Oriente once more. It would be both cooler and calmer there than in the capital, and Mirta and baby would have the support of her family in Banes.15
Castro did not let his studying that summer get in the way of occasional fun. Skelly remembers meeting Castro at a United Fruit Company beach party, where he showed up in the company of his in-laws. The young men passed many hours at the fireside “arguing the merits” of capitalism. Barbara Gordon, like Skelly, the child of an ex-pat U.S. administrator atop the United Fruit hierarchy, reports that Castro had been coming to those picnics since befriending Rafael at the university. Gordon was friends with Mirta, and remembers her and Castro’s courtship as “normal, natural, and unremarkable.” Such picnics included a mix of U.S. and Cuban administrators, as well as friends from neighboring plantations, officers of company ships, and sometimes personnel from the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, a few hours to the south. Dinners were at once low-key and elaborate, and might include goat stew or roast pig, along with rice, beans, and plantains. A local band entertained the crowd in the evenings, and naturally there was plenty to drink. Skelly recalls sitting at a picnic table with a group of young friends when Castro showed up on Mirta’s elbow, a cigar neatly tucked away in his chest pocket. According to Skelly and Gordon, social interactions in the east were more relaxed than in the capital. There was never any question of Castro fitting in or being unwelcome at these United Fruit Company affairs.16
Often Castro would remain at the beach for a few days as Mirta and the new baby retreated to her parents’ home. “Night after night,” Skelly recalls, the boys would talk politics over games of canasta. By this time, Carlos Prío had replaced Ramón Grau as president. In office for nearly a year, Prío had done nothing to curb the rampant corruption. Skelly remembers Castro and Rafael Díaz-Balart being “on fire” at the very mention of Prío’s regime. In those days Rafael, not yet a Batista man, “saw eye to eye on everything with Fidel,” Skelly says. Díaz-Balart was better read, but Castro stood out for his “eloquence.” His “line of reasoning was sharper.” Skelly notes that Castro passed many a night whiling away the hours in conversation with local fishermen, explaining his plans for Cuba.
Puerto Rico Beach provided a break from violence but not from guns. “Fidel loved guns and rifles in those days,” Skelly notes, and often spent the time hunting. Skelly confirms Paquito Rodríguez’s account of Castro’s mischievousness. Once, while paddling contentedly around the swimming hole, Skelly heard the “crack, crack” of a gun and saw the water dancing up around him. Whipping around, he found Castro sitting on the “porch with a .22 in his hand, cigar in his mouth, laughing like hell, yelling, ‘te la voy a pelar, Americano’ (I’m going to scalp you, American)!” Castro was “very charming,” Skelly concludes, just like Batista.17
Gordon remembers Mirta’s stepmother being strict with the family’s only daughter (Mirta’s biological mother died in childbirth). The couple often “hid out” at Gordon’s house just down the street from the Díaz-Balarts’ to escape a mother’s watchful eye. “We had a big property with a large porch and a beautiful, secluded garden in the rear,” Gordon says. “The two were always very proper.” Gordon recalls Castro attending at least one big U.S. Independence Day celebration at Puerto Rico Beach. United Fruit always provided food and drink and music and fireworks. Asked to describe the young man, Gordon describes Castro as “a typical kid, just like the rest of us, playful, energetic. And very fond of Mirta.” Castro also struck Gordon as “open, friendly, warm, a talker, not a dancer. We were typical teenagers.”
Gordon has a photograph from January 1949 of Castro and his blushing bride at the beach. Side by side, they hold hands against a brilliant blue sky, with only a vigilant stepmother in the background. They were just back from their honeymoon in the United States, though by the gleeful smile on Mirta’s face the honeymoon was not yet over. Nestled in the crook of Castro’s arm, she wears a white blouse, capped at the shoulder, and a green wool skirt. Castro wears flannel pants, a black belt, and a white long-sleeve shirt with flap pockets, neatly tucked in. (The last unsolved riddle of his life may be his ability to stay cool, despite seeming radically overdressed.) A pocket watch hangs from belt loops of striped, gray-flannel pants. She looks fourteen. He looks as young as he did before he became involved in university politics—closely shaved, baby-faced—though with one notable difference. Having given up sports by summer 1946, he is developing the paunch that will accompany his rise to power. And there is hint of the double chin that he will try to conceal beneath that parsimonious beard. The photograph reveals the couple as contented as they will ever be.
Besides providing tranquillity and recreation for the expecting couple, the extended sojourn in the east afforded Fidel and Raúl Castro an opportunity to get to know each other as young men. Fidel was four years older than Raúl. The two had not spent much time together since Fidel’s summer vacations from Belén, when Raúl was just entering his teens. In 1949, having dropped out of school, Raúl was working in his parents’ business, and seemed pleasantly surprised to learn that his brother had become a font of higher learning. “You know Juanita,” Raúl spoke up one day, “the more I talk to Fidel the more I realize that we have a lot in common; he’s well prepared and dominates any discussion.” The brothers talked for hours that summer, Juanita notes, with the younger brother listening (too) attentively to his older brother’s opinions. Nobody bothered to question what all the chitchat was about, focusing instead on its happy effect: Raúl’s decision to accompany his brother to Havana in the fall to finish his baccalaureate. He, too, wanted a university education, and the family was thrilled, Ángel especially. Fidel could help Raúl prepare for the university entrance exams, and generally watch over him. Curiously, Castro turned out to be a natural, if conventional, teacher, surprising in an autodidact. “You can’t imagine what a fine teacher he is,” Raúl wrote his sister. “He’s put me to work studying the dictionary and gives me lots of homework, for example, assigning me words from A to C one day, more words the next, and so on. He says that the dictionary teaches a lot and I totally agree!”18
With Fidel’s help, Raúl was admitted to the Social Sciences Faculty at the University of Havana. There, Raúl’s education continued, much of it of political rather than academic in nature, as was the norm in those days. Like his older brother, Raúl came into contact with socialists and members of the Cuban Communist Party (PSP). Unlike his brother, Raúl found the communists’ arguments compelling, eventually joining the Union of Young Communists. This was all unbeknownst to the family back in Birán, of course. “Never in their wildest dreams could my parents have imagined that Raúl would fall for that,” Juanita says. “Had my father known, he would have gone directly to Havana and put an end to it.”19
Mirta gave birth to a son on September 1, 1949. Named Fidel Ángel Castro Díaz-Balart after his father and grandfather, “Fidelito,” as he was known, kept Castro close to home through much of that fall and winter. Fidelito was not the first grandchild but all agree he was the most spoiled. Fidelito was a happy, exuberant child, his demeanor mirrored in the face of a beaming father. Nothing made Castro happier than his son. “Fidel has a son,” Lina said to Ángel, “he’s about to finish his degree, he’s put aside university politics, and Raúl has returned to his studies thanks to brother’s influence. What more could we possibly want?”20
Once back in the capital, the couple lived in an ample apartment in Vedado, accompanied by Mirta’s brothers, Rafael and Frank. The excitement of a new child did not distract the single-minded Castro from preparing for an avalanche of exams that coming June. “If there’s one thing I admire about Fidel,” Enma wrote home that year, “it’s his determination to study without end and finish his degree . . . he studies from morning ’til night, rising early, putting on a robe, that’s all.”21 Castro would not have been able to pay the rent, dedicate himself to studying, and support his growing family without his parents’ generosity. After graduating from high school, Juanita returned home to help run the family business. She remembers Ángel marching into the office one day and asking her to arrange for a monthly stipend of $500 (roughly $5,000 today) to be sent to Fidel. Lina, too, wanted to do her part. She opened up credit accounts in several stores in Havana where the couple could buy groceries and other necessities, promising to pay the bill. The parents treated the newlyweds like the college students they were, buying them furniture on visits to Havana, and taking them out to nice restaurants.22
At the University of Havana, students did not have to matriculate to take final exams. Due to his political activity—and his participation in Cayo Confites and the Bogotazo—Castro had not taken an exam since the end of his freshman year. He passed ten exams in June 1946, passed seventeen more in December 1949, leaving twenty-two to go by the following June. He did this work entirely on his own, consulting nobody, attending no classes. He later remembered achieving “outstanding” marks in “the majority” of the exams, which is not quite true, but he earned “outstandings” in roughly half of them, including labor law, civil law, penal law, family law, property, administrative law, and legal anthropology, as well as in political economy, juridical philosophy, and Cuban and Latin American history.23 Castro was not under any illusion about how his professors regarded this. Years later, he told a friend that at least one professor criticized his “disengagement” and reproached him “for not dedicating myself more seriously to coursework.” Castro himself seemed a little ambivalent about his feat, remarking later, “I never told him that for one of the subject tests (Family Law) I only studied three days, and for the other (Labor Law), one day. In truth, that did not constitute prowess; I was always an irregular student. To pass these subject tests was easy if you possessed a good memory.”24
In June 1950, Castro became the first person on either side of the family to graduate from university. Ángel Castro, now seventy-four and generally rooted to the farm, made the trip to Havana. “It is worth the pain as the boy has made my dreams come true,” he said. For the occasion, and in the manner of proud parents back in Spain, Ángel presented his son an eight-carat diamond solitaire, large enough to build a church on. “No, Papa,” the son responded. “I can’t accept that. Save it for Mama, she is the one who deserves it for all the sacrifice she has endured.” What the graduate really needed was a loan, which he intended to use to rent office space. Ángel complied, allowing Castro and two friends to open a law firm at 57 Tejadilla Street in the Rosario Building in Old Havana, around the corner from Plaza de la Catedral. In a neighborhood thick with law offices, Aspiazo-Castro-Resende, as the firm was called (after Castro and his associates, Jorge Aspiazo and Rafael Resende), soon made a name for itself, taking up the cause of poor and indigent city dwellers.25
Castro’s first cases evolved from practical necessity. The office needed furniture, so they consulted carpenters and purchased wood at a local lumberyard. In the season Castro arrived, many of the carpenters he met were indebted to the yard owner. Castro resolved the brewing conflict by helping the yard settle accounts with wealthy debtors while forgiving the smaller obligations to the individual artisans. The carpenters and their friends came to know and like him, calling on him when they were in trouble. He advised them about their rights and the workings of the law. His partner Aspiazo tells the story of him and Castro going to visit one of the carpenters in his home. The carpenter was delayed, and the two lawyers sat in his kitchen with his pregnant wife and their little girl amid humiliating squalor. The client never showed up, and the two got up to leave, Aspiazo recalled, but not before Castro asked Aspiazo for five pesos, which he slipped underneath a coffee cup on the way out of the kitchen. “Tell your husband not to worry about the debt,” Castro told the woman as he walked out the door.26
In September 1951, Castro sued two powerful public officials, including the notorious police lieutenant Rafael Salas Cañizares, for the murder of an Ortodoxo Party activist named Carlos Rodríguez. He also defended squatters in a Havana slum called “La Pelusa,” who were to be evicted to make way for an upscale development. Neither suit succeeded, but Castro’s advocacy was sincere (and pro bono), and people noticed. Aspiazo-Castro-Resende did not limit their advocacy to Havana. They helped small farmers retain their land and defended students hauled into court for disturbing the peace. Much of this was run-of-the-mill stuff, Aspiazo conceded. Still, he remembered his newly minted partner being commended by a judge after a particularly elegant closing statement. To Aspiazo, Castro was a tireless “crusader,” an inveterate opponent of “price gouging among utilities and transportation companies,” and of “abuse, embezzlement, and dishonesty” of all kinds.
Castro’s legal acumen proved as useful in getting himself out of legal jeopardy as it did in representing clients. In autumn 1950, public secondary school students across the country protested a series of decrees issued by the new education minister, Aureliano Sánchez Arango, which restricted the rights of student organizations. To ensure compliance, Sánchez Arango posted a police officer at the door of all secondary schools. In early October, as school was set to begin, students in the city of Cienfuegos went out on strike, calling on peer institutions across the nation to join in. Others readily did so in strikes and public demonstrations. Alarmed by the unrest, Interior Minister Lomberto Díaz banned student associations entirely, while prohibiting public assemblies. In Cienfuegos, the president of the student association was expelled from school for six months. What were concerned students to do?27
Contact the FEU, someone in Cienfuegos suggested. At the university, the FEU had created an ad hoc “Fighting Committee” to support peers across the country, even declaring its own seventy-two-hour strike in an act of solidarity. With the Cienfuegos strike entering its sixth week, the students scheduled a public demonstration for the afternoon of November 12. They notified the FEU, which dispatched Fidel Castro and Enrique Benavides Santos to Cienfuegos. The two arrived at the association’s headquarters on the evening of November 11, just as student leaders were involved in a heated discussion. Local army and police officials had ordered them not to hold a public rally. They had a constitutional right to meet and speak as they saw fit, Castro informed the group. Off they marched to army headquarters, where Castro repeated what he had told the students to the captain of the local police, a man named Faustino Pérez Leiva. Pérez Leiva was not impressed. “I don’t know the laws,” he said. “I don’t know the students’ grievances. I don’t discuss orders. I enforce them. The meeting is over.”28
The students faced a difficult choice: they could cancel the rally, as the government ordered, thereby forsaking their principles and forfeiting their rights; or, they could assert their rights and confront the government, knowing full well that they would be brutally suppressed. They voted to proceed, vowing to occupy City Hall that evening and put their case to the people of Cienfuegos. That afternoon, calls went out across the province for people to support the students and vindicate the Constitution. As the organizers made their way toward City Hall, Castro and Benavides were arrested and charged with creating a civil disturbance. With Castro out of their way, police and army officers descended on the crowd with clubs, bullwhips, and machetes. Scores of people were injured.29
By autumn 1950, Castro was known to police and army officials throughout the country. That night a question arose about what to do with two outsiders who could not mind their own business. Since the Machado days, one favored solution was to release captives at gunpoint and order them to flee, then cut them down on the run—the Ley de Fugas—thereby absolving police and army officers of culpability.
Early in the morning of November 13, Castro and Benavides were removed from their cell by rural guards, herded into a waiting car, and driven into the countryside. A second car followed also full of police officers. Aware of their captors’ plans, the two tried in vain to kick their way out of captivity. After a long drive, the cars stopped and the doors opened when, suddenly, a third car pulled up alongside the others. A man leapt from the car and cried out: “What’s going on with these boys? Answer me!” It was the president of the Cienfuegos city government, who was suspicious about what the officers had in store for the captives. The men were returned to the city jail, where yet another protest erupted at dawn on their behalf. By this time, Ortodoxo leaders back in Havana had been informed of these developments. Thanks to the intervention of Eduardo Chibás the two were freed on bail.30
Castro did not wait for the trial to defend his presence at Cienfuegos. On November 15, he published a broadside in the local newspaper addressed “To the People of Cienfuegos.” For months, he explained, students in Cienfuegos and throughout the province of Santa Clara had been campaigning for the delivery of much needed classroom material. Rather than engaging the students constructively, the secretary of education launched a costly and cynical publicity campaign meant to discredit and ultimately silence the students. Lacking resources to refute the government’s disinformation, the students responded by the only means available to them. They took their grievance to the street. In doing so, they were hardly imperiling the public welfare or acting irresponsibly. On the contrary, Castro wrote, by defying attempts to stifle them, they were vindicating “the glorious history and elevated principles of the nation.” Judging by their overwhelming response, the people of Cienfuegos thought so, too.31
“To the People of Cienfuegos” constituted the earliest (and one of the fullest) defenses of civil rights and liberties that Castro ever made. Governments restricted the rights of speech and association at their peril, he said. Once civil liberties are suppressed, aggrieved citizens have little recourse besides violence. Moreover, it was imprudent to leave the fate of “fundamental rights” in the hands of “capricious ministers.” Suppose a minister “lacked morals and scruples, or was the bastard son of the current situation?” Customary rights and constitutions elevated liberty behind the reach of individual whim. Wasn’t it always the same with tyrants? They claim with perfect equanimity that they are all that stands between public order and chaos. The people know the truth, Castro said. It was ministers like Alemán and Sánchez Arango, “who disturb the public and private peace, who do not respect public norms and sentiments, who violate the Constitution and mock the rights of citizens, who upset the apple cart of natural order, peace, and justice.”32
In this, as in so many of Castro’s public remarks, the constitutional lawyer vied with the street fighter to combat the bullying perpetrated on the Cuban people by Sánchez Arango, Alemán, Salabarría, and the rest. Where were the public officials who looked on their office as more than an opportunity for self-aggrandizement? he asked. Castro cited chapter and verse of the 1940 Constitution to vindicate the student protest and his role in supporting it. Cubans may enter and remain in any part of the national territory, come and go as and wherever they please without needing permission from anybody, the Constitution declared. The interior minister had treated Castro and Benavides as “strangers.” In Cuba, “there is no such thing as strangers, no such thing as instigators among invited guests.” Neither Castro nor the students would be intimidated. He looked forward to confronting the government’s “lies and bad intentions” at trial.33
The trial took place on December 14, 1950. Castro and Benavides traveled to Cienfuegos on the overnight train. The FEU assigned a local lawyer from Cienfuegos named Benito Besada to defend the accused. Years later, Besada remembers the travelers falling into bed at his home that morning as he went off to consult the prosecutor. When he returned, he found Castro sound asleep with Emile Zola’s book J’Accuse! lying on his chest. Besada shook Castro awake and warned him that proceedings in so-called Urgency Courts like this one were always a little unpredictable. There was no formal indictment and no way to anticipate the judges’ states of mind. No problem, Castro replied, informing his colleagues that he intended to act as his own defense attorney at the trial. The case was bigger than the two individuals, he said. The Constitution itself was on trial here, and he intended to vindicate it in his testimony and in cross-examination of witnesses. Besada and Benavides worried that Castro would only complicate an otherwise straightforward legal process. Castro cut off their protests by returning to Zola. After lunch, the three men headed for the courthouse, where Castro asked Besada to procure him a gown to wear in court.34
The trial began with testimony of the local police captain, Manuel Pérez Borroto. Pérez repeated the charge that the accused had come to Cienfuegos only to disturb the peace and claimed to have evidence to support his accusation. The courtroom was packed with students, dissidents, and the general public, some won over by Castro’s recent newspaper article. One by one, prosecution witnesses took the stand. None of them could confirm the police captain’s account. Finally, Castro’s and Benavides’s names were called. The two objected to the style of the court proceedings and announced that they would waive their right to testify. At this point the judge asked if they had representation. Castro informed the judge that he would defend himself. Castro then donned his black robe and took his place alongside Besada.
When his turn came to cross-examine witnesses, Castro called Pérez, whose case promptly disintegrated. As Castro lit into Pérez for debasing the public trust, the government prosecutor interrupted and asked the judge to dismiss the case. Castro then used the opportunity of his closing statement to launch a structural critique of corruption and injustice in Cuba. “Fidel spoke in the manner of Zola, with a no less valiant ‘J’accuse!’ ” Benavides recalled. Such talk was unheard of in the Villa Clara Court. When the judges retreated to their chamber, Castro asked Benavides how he thought he had done. “Well, kid,” Benavides replied, “I’m sure they are going to find you guilty.” In fact, the judges ruled two to one in Castro’s favor, and the charges were dropped. The room erupted in celebration as the chief magistrate ordered the courtroom cleared. Castro and Benavides were surrounded, the episode putting yet another feather in a young lawyer’s cap.35
Castro’s law degree also came in handy back in Birán. In 1951, Ángel asked his son to help settle accounts with his friend Fidel Pino Santos, slowly dying of hepatitis. In the heart of the Depression, Ángel had transferred the title of Finca Manacas to Pino Santos in return for credit needed to keep his business afloat. This enabled Ángel to avoid the usurious fees that caused many Cuban farmers to lose their businesses to U.S. banks. Ángel’s debt did not amount to anything close to the value of his enterprise. By the early 1950s the debt was all but paid off, with neither Ángel nor Pino Santos paying much attention to the paperwork. With Pino Santos on his deathbed, Ángel asked Fidel to take on the sensitive task of approaching his godfather not-to-be to ask him to restore the title to Ángel’s name. Castro agreed. “It was a delicate problem,” he said. Pino Santos “was an age-old friend close to death.” More than a business transaction, this “was fundamentally a mission of diplomacy.”
Castro found Pino Santos physically feeble but mentally lucid. “I had no problem persuading him,” Castro said. “He told me that he understood, that I was right, and from his hospital, he gave me instructions about how to resolve the issue, including transferring power of attorney to me.” By midsummer 1951, the matter was settled, the papers filed in municipal court in Santiago de Cuba. Pleased by the outcome, Ángel rewarded his son $3,000 pesos for a job well done. Looking back on these events years later, Castro characterized the relationship between Pino Santos and his father as “just” and “logical,” an intriguing statement coming from a critic of capitalism.36
Despite a good start as an attorney, Castro and his partners recognized that he was more cut out for politics than for legal work, and he soon left the firm. In fact, he had dabbled in national politics even before he received his law degree. In 1948, he ran for the position of Ortodoxo Party delegate to the Oriente Provincial Assembly. Chibás’s platform of honest government, economic independence from the United States, and agricultural and industrial development jibed with Castro’s own budding political commitments. So did Chibás’s fearlessness and unwillingness to compromise. Skeptical of Castro’s pistolero past, Chibás came to know Castro through Lesnik and other friends at the university. There was plenty to like in the young firebrand, as Chibás himself learned at the party meeting that year. Ortodoxo cofounder Emilio Ochoa was running for governor of Oriente Province. The party’s reach was limited, and Ochoa wanted to unite with other parties to form a political alliance. Could the Ortodoxos join such an alliance and still be worthy of the name? A meeting of party delegates was called in Havana, with Ochoa, Chibás, and Castro in attendance.
As Chibás listened attentively, Ochoa discussed his plan. It was agreed that the plan would not be adopted without unanimous support. Chibás polled the delegates, all but one of whom gave their consent. The holdout was Castro. There can be no coalitions with tainted parties, Castro insisted, in his best imitation of Chibás himself. A coalition would water down the party’s ideology. The only beneficiaries would be the party’s more established rivals. Ochoa’s motion was defeated. Castro was vindicated at the next meeting of the Ortodoxo National Assembly, where a platform opposing political coalitions carried the day. Ochoa took revenge on Castro at the next meeting of Ortodoxo delegates by simply not inviting him to attend.37
In autumn 1951, Castro ran again for Ortodoxo Party delegate, this time from the Cayo Hueso neighborhood of Central Havana. Castro saw Cayo Hueso as a stepping-stone to winning a nomination to the Cuban House of Representatives, hoping to replace a popular local figure named Adolfo Torres. Torres remembered Castro approaching him to explain that he intended to take over Torres’s seat. Castro then copied the names of every Ortodoxo member in the neighborhood and sent them personal notes. He later thanked voters for showing up. Castro’s initiative inspired Torres to take action himself. “So great was his connection to the masses,” Torres said, “that I had to quickly set my mind to address the situation.”38
Castro’s former law partner Jorge Aspiazo remembered the candidate making house calls among the shopkeepers and slum dwellers he had represented as an attorney. Castro had a ready-made constituency. “He visited every single Ortodoxo member in the neighborhood of Cayo Hueso. He would explain the objective of his visit, asking constituents to look him in the eye. He then described his plans for the country. If they trusted him, they should vote him, if they didn’t trust him, they should vote for someone else.” To everyone’s astonishment, Castro won easily, gaining more than three hundred votes.39
Castro’s fellow Ortodoxo candidates benefited from his energy and organization. The archives overflow with pamphlets he wrote on his own and others’ behalf. The pamphlets are at once attractive, decorous, and forceful. A typical pamphlet alerts the audience to an upcoming radio show, timed to commemorate an important date in history when Cubans rose up to confront injustice. Besides mentioning speeches by fellow candidates, there is almost always a deferential nod to senior members of the party, usually Chibás, Ochoa, or Roberto Agramonte. Then comes a reminder of what is at stake in the local and national elections: “Against crime! Against theft! Against corruption! Against barbarity! Against the miserable exploitation of our people rises the valiant and accusatory voice of the Ortodoxo Party!” Be sure to turn up, the candidate urges, before signing off in peronalized calligraphy, “Fidel Castro.”40
Once elected, he followed up with customized thank-you notes. “Dear Comrade,” reads one, “by this means I express my sincere gratitude for your collaboration in the primary election for Ortodoxo Party delegate from the barrio of Cayo Hueso, which I won.” Then comes an expression of satisfaction for the success of his fellow candidates, along with the assurance that the delegates-elect took nobody’s support for granted. He finishes with a vow to “fight without rest until the final victory.” Similar note cards went out in the new year, always accompanied by a thank-you, a quote from Martí, and a pledge to never to give up the fight.41
Flush from the Cayo Hueso victory, Castro put his name up for nomination to the Cuban House of Representatives in the upcoming 1952 election. Meanwhile, he looked for every opportunity to get his message out, eventually winning a half-hour slot on the local radio station in Havana, “La Voz del Aire” (On Air). Lesnik remembers being impressed by Castro’s energy and ingenuity. “I was the head of the Young Ortodoxos,” Lesnik explained, “and he had influence among all the youth of the party and among the workers and among the most fervent party activists. He made a fabulous campaign, sending out one hundred thousand envelopes, each with a hand written personal note.” Nobody had ever seen anything like this, Lesnik said. “I used to send out thirty cards at Christmas time to members of my executive committee. He sent cards to everyone affiliated with the party in the province of Havana.”42
In August 1951, the Ortodoxo Party suffered a grievous blow: after charging a Prío administration official with corruption that he could not substantiate, Chibás shot himself in the stomach at the close of his weekly radio broadcast. He died ten days later, instantly becoming a martyr and creating an opening among the ranks of Ortodoxo members, radical reformers, and opportunistic dissidents. Castro said and did all the right things in the days following Chibás’s suicide. It is hard to find a picture from those days and not identify a solemn Castro gazing out from among the mourners. Castro’s growing stature in the party is evident in newspaper accounts from the time. “This is the most extraordinary grief that has ever happened in the history of the country,” Castro was quoted in Alerta. “It is enough by itself to banish in terror the spokesmen of the outrages of criminal and ruthless government that the Republic endures.”43
Chibás died August 16, 1951. The following day, at a ceremony at Colón Cemetery, Ortodoxo leadership issued a declaration written by Castro vowing to carry on their leader’s campaign, commitments, and ideals. Corrupt members of the Prío government were warned not to take comfort in Chibás’s passing. His life and work would find new urgency in the thousands of Ortodoxo members more dedicated than ever to redeeming Cuba from passivity, decadence, and gluttony.44 With Chibás gone, journalist José Pardo Llada became the most known Ortodoxo figure. Pardo Llada had a beige Chevy, recognized wherever he went. Castro bought an exact replica for his campaign for representative. “He went everywhere in it,” Lesnik says. “Everyone would run up to it, thinking Pardo Llada had arrived! People would run up to Fidel and say, ‘Hey, is this Pardo Llada’s car?’ Fidel would reply, ‘Yes, he lent it to me for the campaign.’ He wanted everyone to think that he had Pardo Llada’s support!”45
Castro’s growing political commitments complicated things on the home front. By the first years of the new decade, the house husband who liked to boast about his spaghetti Bolognese seldom made it home for dinner. “Fidel almost never comes home,” Mirta wrote Ángel and Lina back in Birán. “He lives for Ortodoxo Party politics, and to tell the truth I feel abandoned; we don’t talk much, as he spends entire days away.” Ángel and Lina’s financial assistance, Mirta confessed, was all that kept her “afloat.”46 In short, Mirta was finding out the hard way that there would be no domesticating her husband. The comforts of the hearth could never compete with the excitement of the forum—and later the coliseum. One wonders how Ángel and Lina responded to her cri de coeur. They, too, once voiced the hope that their son would settle down. As lifelong fighters and dreamers, they must have recognized themselves in their son’s attraction to the strenuous life. Born with privilege and stability thanks to them, his and their life projects would be very different. Comfort and ease were not for him by choice any more than they had been for them by necessity.
It was around this time that Castro broke the news to Mirta that they would not be moving to Paris, a dream that the newlyweds had apparently hatched together and which Mirta continued to cling to in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. Enma Castro remembers the scene as if it were yesterday. While visiting Mirta one evening, she witnessed her brother return home from work in a state of great agitation. “Mirta,” he finally blurted out, “we’re not going to Paris. I got this wrong. I’m not going to study in the Sorbonne. I’m staying here in Cuba and announcing my candidacy for representative from the Ortodoxo Party. I will fight in Congress, and one day I will seize power!” Mirta saw dreams of walks along the Seine and afternoons in the Jardin du Luxembourg dissolve before her eyes. “But Fidel,” she cried out, “you promised! And not just me, your parents, too, that we would go to Paris and you’d get your master’s degree. You can’t do this. You just can’t!”47
Unaccustomed to being challenged, Castro exploded, grabbing the closest object at hand—in this case one of the matching alabaster lamps presented the newlyweds by the Batistas—and smashing it on the floor. “Coño, Mirta!” he exclaimed. “Don’t argue with me, we’re not going! That’s that!” Enma dropped to her knees in a vain attempt to corral the shattered pieces, and for all she knew a marriage. Mirta recoiled in shock, as if recognizing in this act of destruction a harbinger of things to come.48