On the evening of November 21, 1952, Naty Revuelta tidied her desk, turned out the light in her office, and descended the stairs of the Esso Building, headed for home, a thirty-minute walk. Typically, Revuelta arrived home around 6:30, giving her plenty of time to greet and feed her daughter, Tatín, before putting her to bed and then dining with her husband, Orlando Fernández, a prominent cardiologist. This evening Revuelta worked late, missing Tatín’s dinner and her bedtime, too. There was word of a rally at the university commemorating the execution by Spanish authorities of eight Cuban medical students. Curious, Revuelta decided to take the long way home.1
The university looms over Central Havana like the Acropolis over Athens’ Agora, providing the students a commanding setting from which to air their grievances. In their clashes with Batista’s police, the students literally held the high ground. But the government controlled the power grid, and when news leaked out that there was to be a rally on the Escalinata, the magnificent granite steps leading up to campus, the government flipped the switch, plunging the neighborhood into darkness. Undeterred, the students spread out across the broad steps in little groups talking animatedly, surrounded by bottles of beer and wine.
A half block away, Revuelta sensed that something was awry. “It was too quiet,” she recalled. “I thought I had missed the event.” She couldn’t have; it was still early. Had the police broken up the rally? she wondered. Was anybody hurt? Rounding the corner at the base of the stairway, Revuelta took in “a magnificent scene.” Autumn evenings in Havana can be sumptuous. With the electricity down, the scene on the Escalinata became positively enchanting with groups of young men and women sprawled out on the stairs beneath the pale glow of a crescent moon. This is not how she remembered her education at a fusty boarding school outside Washington, D.C. At mid-century, the University of Havana was as much a political platform as an institution of higher learning. In the aftermath of Batista’s coup, it was one of the few places in Cuba where political opposition could reliably be found.
Naty, I want you to meet someone; come with me. A friend grabbed Revuelta’s hand and pulled her up the stairs where, near the top, ten or fifteen students listened attentively to a charismatic man, nattily attired, speaking with laserlike intensity. Revuelta and her friend came to a halt waiting for a chance to interrupt. We must prove once and for all that we are not as they portray us—a shapeless mob of irresponsible youth. We are the offspring of a noble people with a glorious history and exalted ideas. “Fidel Castro,” Revuelta’s friend whispered. Revuelta stared, entranced. The speaker stood out from those around him like a bolt of color in a world of black and white. “He was eloquent, authentic, authoritative.” As he spoke, his audience appeared hardly to breathe. He finally stopped talking and looked up at the newcomers. “Fidel,” her friend cut in, “I want you to meet Naty Revuelta.”
Once met, Castro was hard to forget. Soon after, Revuelta made a fateful decision, distributing house keys to three men she thought capable of mounting a successful opposition to Batista, and who might be in need of a secure meeting place: Roberto Agramonte, Ortodoxo Party leader and favored candidate in the nullified 1952 presidential election; Emilio Ochoa, Agramonte’s running mate; and Castro himself. “Tell Fidel Castro that if he ever needs a safe place to meet, he may do so at our house,” she told a courier. A few weeks later, Revuelta received word that Castro wanted to drop by her home. That January, Castro came to dinner. The hosts served maple-glazed ham, which Castro praised so extravagantly that Revuelta later sent him the exact same menu in prison.2
Revuelta and her husband listened sympathetically as Castro explained the need for revolution. “We agreed to help him,” she said. “Over the next several months, we opened our home to him, as well as our purses.” Revuelta pawned jewelry to raise money for weapons. “I never collected guns myself, but I helped hide weapons, clothes, and cash, and sewed Cuban Army insignia on belts, jackets, and hats.” Revuelta’s husband, Orlando, was completely on board. Amid escalating repression and censorship, he shared his wife’s impression that Castro had the vision and commitment the nation needed. “We appreciated his desire to reacquaint Cubans with the tradition of self-sacrifice embodied by the Mambises,” she said, in reference to the heroes of Cuban Independence. “We thought he would set a shining example.”
Revuelta was one of a very few people Castro trusted with knowledge of the impending attack. Before departing for Oriente that weekend, Castro asked two things of her: to make him a recording of music to be broadcast over the radio in Santiago de Cuba in the event the attack succeeded (“I recorded . . . Beethoven, Prokofiev, Mahler, Kodály, Berlioz, and the national anthem,” she said); and to distribute the Moncada Manifesto to the press at the exact time the attack took place. “That morning I woke up Orlando to tell him I was running an errand for the Movement and would be back in three hours.” At the home of one of the editors, she learned that the assault had failed. “I was suddenly desperate. I ran to our parish church in Vedado and prayed. For the dead.”3
On December 19, 1953, two months after arriving at the National Men’s Prison on the Isle of Pines, Castro wrote Revuelta a letter. “Naty, what a formidable school this prison is! It is here that I am forging my vision of the world and can complete the task of giving my life purpose.” The familiar tone reflects an epistolary courtship in the early stage of liftoff, but which would fast attain rocket speed. The catalyst for the exchange was a letter she had sent Castro’s mother, Lina, during the Santiago trial. “I am taking the liberty of writing these lines,” Revuelta explained, “because I know you must be going through anguished and terrible times, and I think that perhaps a few words of encouragement that you did not expect could help you find peace in your soul, and more pride for your son Fidel.” Regardless of what Lina thought about her son’s behavior, he needed “the moral and emotional support that only a mother can provide.”4
A grateful prisoner first reached out to Revuelta on November 7. “An affectionate hug from prison,” he began. “I remember you faithfully and I love you [te quiero] . . . although it’s been a while since I’ve heard from you. I treasure and will always treasure the tender card you wrote my mother.” In the immediate aftermath of Moncada, Revuelta had somehow avoided being swept up by Cuban intelligence. Castro was relieved that she was safe and grateful for her help. “If you have had to suffer because of me in any way,” he wrote, “please know that I would happily give my life for your honor and well-being.” He likened his image of her to the reward of personal sacrifice in a noble cause. “What the world thinks doesn’t matter; what matters is what’s inside our hearts. There are things in life that outlast our daily miseries—eternal things, like the image I have of you, which will accompany me to the grave.”5
At the time of this letter, Castro and Revuelta had spoken privately a mere “two or three times.” Though each found the other attractive, they apparently never considered their relationship amorous. In person, that is. In letters, the two let themselves go, as if finding in the epistolary form the freedom and exhilaration missing in their marriages and the workaday world. Sentenced to twenty-six years in prison, Castro would end up serving a mere twenty months of that, but he could not have known that at the time. For the first six of those twenty months, the two engaged in a largely secret love affair that produced over a hundred letters amounting to hundreds of pages. No one needs an excuse to fall in love. But Castro seems to have found in Revuelta the intellectual soul mate he never had at precisely the time he needed one most. If Revuelta was any less tickled than he by conundrums of moral philosophy, epistemology, and historicism, she never let on. As for her, she appears to have initiated this relationship in order to save the Revolution, only to find in its catalyst a passion and purposefulness the likes of which she had never met. Why the romance lasted a mere six months will become clear below, but a love this hot seems destined to burn out eventually. One can trace its trajectory not only in the letters themselves, but in the books he requested from her, which she dutifully tracked down and delivered as he went from simply biding his time and maintaining his sanity to finding his purpose in life, as he put it, and pursuing his one true love, the Cuban Revolution.
Who needs food and water when one has books to read? “When I read the work of a famous author, the history of a people, the doctrine of a thinker, the theories of an economist, or the preaching of a social reformer,” Castro wrote Revuelta in December 1953, “I am filled with the desire to know everything that all authors have written, the doctrines of all the philosophers, the treatises of all the economists and the preaching of all the apostles.” By this time, Castro had been on the Isle of Pines less than two months and was still getting used to it. The intellectual curiosity that Paquito Rodríguez recognized in his young playmate back in Birán comes through in these letters, but so, too, an immense (and expanding) political ambition, along with vertiginous mood swings, as the free flow of ideas collided with the walls of a prison cell. “Outside, I was restless because I did not have enough time,” Castro wrote; “here, where there seems to be too much time, I am still restless.”6
Castro and his fellow rebels occupied a hall approximately forty meters long by eight meters wide, with a floor of granite marble. There was a bathroom at one end, and a marble kitchenette at the other, equipped with a simple coffeemaker. Twenty-seven beds lined the hall in “perfect formation,” their mosquito nets calling to mind army tents in which the rebels took shelter from the invading hordes. Halfway down the hall, a broad archway opened onto a colonnade and inner courtyard where, twice a day, the prisoners could stretch their legs and amuse themselves at games of volleyball. Within a few months, the men settled into a regular schedule. Rising before dawn, they breakfasted, attended classes, broke for exercise, ate lunch, held more classes, relaxed, supped, and attended yet another class, usually led by Castro, on the subject of political economy. At 9:30 p.m., amid strict silence, the prisoners returned to their beds. By 11 p.m., all were generally fast asleep.7
The classes were the prisoners’ own design. Soon after arriving on the Isle of Pines, they established a school named after their fallen comrade, Abel Santamaría. Those with literary friends solicited books. Before long the Abel Santamaría Academy had its own library, which overflowed with titles like Manuel Grant’s Elementary Physics, Salvador Massip’s Geography, Hippolyte Taine’s Philosophy, and Lamartine’s History of the Girondists, along with books by Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Marx, Victor Hugo, José Martí, and many others.8 For some of the prisoners, this school constituted their first and only brush with higher learning, and a few could not conceal their enthusiasm. “We have organized an academy for the purpose of raising our educational level,” a rebel wrote a friend. “Our subjects are philosophy, world history, political economy, mathematics, geography, and languages. We have a very rigid class schedule, and we are all really motivated to learn.”9
The most educated of the group, Castro oversaw the instruction. Every other morning, from 9:30 to 10:00, he taught a course in philosophy and world history. Other rebels chipped in with Cuban history, math, geography, and English. Twice a week, Castro led a class on public speaking. “I read to them for half an hour,” he told Revuelta, “a description of a battle, such as Napoleon Bonaparte’s infantry attack at Hougoumont, or an ideological topic such as Martí’s plea to the Spanish republic or something similar.” Designated participants then discussed the reading, with prizes awarded to the best speaker. Together with the valor the rebels had demonstrated at Moncada, the zeal with which they took up their studies led Castro to insist that they had earned the right to lead the Revolution. No one was glad to be there, he told Revuelta, but it was hard to imagine a more formidable training ground. “The life here, the discipline, the indomitable will, the education—everything is Spartan here,” he wrote, and such was the men’s “faith and unshakable firmness that it can be said of them, too, that they will conquer with their shields or die upon them.”10
In the hostile environment of the prison, the rebels did not rely on goodwill to maintain social harmony. With the school and library in place, they turned their attention to forming a government, complete with constitution, officers, and regularly scheduled meetings. Pedro Miret, a natural leader, was appointed presiding officer. Oscar Alcalde, the accountant, supervised purchases and safeguarded the prisoners’ savings. Pepe Suárez oversaw the distribution of supplies. Israel Tápanes served as secretary. Others chipped in as inclination or proficiency allowed. The constitution established protocols and rules of decorum designed to keep things moving smoothly. If decorum broke down, the rebels could fall back on Article 10, which vested the chairman with absolute power to “ensure the assembly’s success.”11
In short, though hardly a picnic, prison life was not that bad, Castro wrote his parents on October 27, 1953, ten days after arriving on the Isle of Pines. He had just been visited by Mirta and Fidelito, along with his sisters Enma and Lidia. Fidelito seemed bigger and stronger, he noted with pride. Visiting days were the third Friday of each month, from noon to three. The next visiting day was November 20, and he expected Mirta to meet all his and Raúl’s requests. They wanted for nothing and needed no money, as there was scarcely anything to purchase.
After maintaining physical and psychological health, revitalizing the Movement was topmost on Castro’s mind. The benefits of prison—the time to hone his political program, the proximity of the rebel leadership, the solidarity forged by adversity—could not make up for the threat prison posed of silencing him. In late 1953, he reached out to his friend Luis Conte Agüero, an influential journalist and cofounder of the Ortodoxo Party, for assistance in keeping his name and the rebels’ example before the Cuban people. The letter, which Castro asked Conte to publish in the university newspaper, repeated the charge he made in court that the government had committed a massacre and then covered it up with lies. Why wasn’t more being done to publicize this? he wanted to know. Silence amounted to complicity and only confirmed Batista’s gambit that Cubans could be cowed by violence and intimidation. The minute the trial was over, Batista had reestablished constitutional guarantees and lifted the censorship. The ensuing calm made Castro wonder if a quid pro quo had been struck between the government and the press. Even so, it wouldn’t hold, Castro warned. “All of Oriente knows” the truth, and “the entire country whispers it.”12
The fact of his imprisonment forced Castro to try to mend fences with former adversaries, including advocates of civil resistance atop the Ortodoxo Party hierarchy. Castro needed that hierarchy now. The rebels’ political program was fully in keeping with Ortodoxo principles, Castro told Conte. Had the attack succeeded, he planned to relinquish power to Agramonte and Ochoa. The rebels’ first priority was to reestablish the 1940 Constitution, to be followed by land redistribution (indemnified by the state), a program of profit sharing, industrial diversification, the eradication of corruption, and the confiscation of misappropriated wealth. All this was to be achieved constitutionally, he emphasized, the party’s ascendance ratified by a general election. “Speak with Agramonte,” Castro urged. “Show him this letter.” Tell him that those who fell in Moncada were followers of his friend Chibás. It was, after all, Chibás who taught the rebels “to die when the fatherland needed heroic sacrifice to raise the faith of the people and bring about the realization of its historic destiny.”
Early the next year, Revuelta sent Castro a note describing Columbia University’s core curriculum, which she had just read about in Time magazine. Her boss at Esso had graduated from Columbia, and he praised the program for immersing would-be poets, doctors, dentists, and engineers alike in the history and literature of the Western tradition. It was precisely the sort of general education that she herself lacked, she said. Wouldn’t it be great if the two of them could introduce the core curriculum at Havana University? Castro responded enthusiastically, but the plan would have to wait. Meanwhile, the two did their best to fill the gaps in the Abel Santamaría Academy library.
In the beginning, Castro’s reading list reflected the scattershot nature of the library’s collection. He found himself drawn to French literature, with its unmistakable social and political lessons. Transported by Axel Munthe’s Story of San Michele and Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale, he was mesmerized by Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe. From Rolland, he told Revuelta, “I get the same feeling I had when reading Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables; I did not want it to end.” Jean-Christophe is the tale of an idealistic German musician caught between personal ambition and idealism and social and familial obligation. The hero endures hardship, persecution, and exile, before ultimately returning home in triumph. Castro sympathized with the hero’s quest for meaning and alienation from his family; whether he himself would one day experience such a reconciliation remained to be seen.
A work of English literature, A. J. Cronin’s Keys of the Kingdom, seemed equally momentous. Cronin provided an unforgettable model of “the man of true merit,” who, upon seeing vain, selfish, and corrupt individuals constantly exulted by a misguided public, nevertheless sticks to his guns and to what he knows is right. Such examples helped Castro endure “days of unending torture and lonely struggle,” making him “better and worthier.” These and other stories confirmed Castro’s growing conviction that life was meaningless unless devoted to some higher purpose. He came to identify that purpose in Cuba’s unrequited dream of Cuba Libre. To his dismay, many of his contemporaries seemed deaf to this historical tradition, as if having been betrayed by one leader too many. For company, he plunged into literature and history, finding affirmation in the lonely heroes of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Turgenev’s Nobleman’s Nest, among others, describing them as “immensely valuable.”
Castro continued to lose himself in novels throughout his prison term. But his letters to Revuelta reveal an increasing interest in history and social theory, with deep dives into Marx’s Capital, the Dean of Canterbury’s The Secret of Soviet Strength, as well as works by Félix Varela, José de la Luz y Caballero, and the forefathers of Cuban Independence. “I’m studying Marx’s Capital in depth,” he told Revuelta in December; “five enormous volumes of economics, researched and set forth with the greatest scientific rigor.”13
Capital was one of the first books Castro taught in his course on political economy. Teaching Capital is no mean feat. Volume I alone comprises a compendium of abstract concepts combined with page after page of vivid illustrations of industrial violence. Castro’s marginalia to Capital reveal him wrestling with Marx’s account of the transition from an economy in which commodities are exchanged to meet needs to one in which commodities are exchanged to make money (i.e., capital), as well as the method by which owners wring profit from labor by lengthening the workday, depressing wages, and introducing new technology. Competition, Marx notes, promotes innovation; innovation displaces workers (while increasing profits), thereby creating a “reserve army of the unemployed.” The system leaves individuals fortunate to find work exhausted, maimed, and dehumanized, with Marx providing examples of working-class immiseration drawn from British newspapers.14
One heartrending example from the city of Nottingham caught Castro’s attention. On January 14, 1860, local citizens came together to consider a petition to reduce the workday to eighteen hours. It was not adults whose fate was at stake here, Marx noted, but children in the lace trade who endured “an amount of privation and suffering . . . unknown in other parts of the kingdom, indeed, in the civilized world.” Nine- and ten-year-olds were being “dragged from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o’clock in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate.” A local clergyman likened the conditions to “slavery—socially, physically, morally, and spiritually.” Such stories reduced the voluble Castro to near silence. “Torpor,” he wrote at the bottom of the page; “numbness.”15
Cubans’ own numbness in the face of inequality and injustice inspired Castro to call for a social revolution beyond an end to the Batista dictatorship. Cuba had seen one self-proclaimed reformer after another rise to the position of president only to succumb to self-interest and the culture of embezzlement. In the face of entrenched power, such reforms could only be won by revolution, Castro concluded, and Marx’s tales of abuse sharpened his denunciation of half measures. In the Prologue to Capital, Marx dismissed as naive John Stuart Mill’s conviction that one could reconcile management and labor through goodwill. “Sycophant,” Castro wrote of the celebrated English civil libertarian; “informer, slanderer.” Castro characterized Mill’s political economy as a “a religio-philosophical system” that attempted to reconcile “irreconcilable doctrines.” The result was “vacuous and empty.”
The way out of the contradiction between the interests of capital and the interest of labor, Marx taught, was not Millian compromise but revolution. To Marx, and increasingly to Castro, history was the unfolding of such clashes, with landed elites overcoming a crumbling Rome to produce feudalism, then the bourgeoisie overcoming feudal elites to produce capitalism. Mill was a subtler thinker than Marx implied. But for both Marx and Castro, Mill stood in for nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberal constitutionalists—in Europe, the United States, and Cuba, alike—who believed that capitalism and republican government represented the culminating stage of human development, providing the essential foundations of the good life. From this perspective, the exploitation of lace workers in a city like Nottingham constituted an anomaly in the capitalist system. Marx insisted that the workers’ fate was not anomalous but essential to capitalism. In one section heavily annotated by Castro, Marx argues that capitalism and republican government were but the latest stage in an unfolding historical evolution: individual liberties and justice today, social liberty and justice tomorrow—just as Castro had suggested in his self-defense and would argue again in the published version of “History Will Absolve Me,” to which he turned his attention shortly after this encounter with Marx.
Revolution was not the only thing on Castro’s mind. He and Revuelta spent a lot of their time focusing on the fact of their unexpected infatuation, confessing their love, questioning one another’s devotion, and salving wounds inflicted by the inconvenience of a dalliance that seemed destined to remain unsatisfied. Revuelta did not need Castro to tell her that falling in love is exhilarating. He did so anyway. For proof, he cited a book by the Cuban psychologist Emilio Mira y López, entitled The Four Giants of the Human Soul: Fear, Anger, Love, and Duty, writing out long passages by hand. “There is no joy or satisfaction that can compare, in magnitude or quality, with what is felt in such moments,” Castro quoted the author. “There are no words nor metaphors capable of describing that euphoria, that clashing of sweet welfare and passionate rapture, of pleasure and elation, of fullness and ecstasy, that characterizes the awareness of the correspondence, that is, the discovery of the ‘echo’ lover.” Where once there were two individuals, now there is one. “The two lovers fertilize one another mentally and are enshrined in a world much more intimate and durable than the corporal world.” The marvel, Mira y López goes on to explain, is that this “fusion and symbiosis” results not in loss of self, but in the fulfillment of the individual. “Without ceasing to become myself, I become more than myself. I exist in the other. I become in some manner him. I perceive, feel, and share what he feels and lives.” Love reveals the other, as the lover’s gaze penetrates and illuminates him. In the face of that gaze, the world acquires “a new dimension,” exposing the “innermost precincts of personal intimacy.”
Falling in love in letters adds a degree of complexity. Physical separation prevents the intimacy—the casual glances, the accidental touch, the rapturous embrace—essential to discovery and trust building. Fully half of the Castro-Revuelta correspondence is devoted to chastising one another for not writing enough. How else to read the gaps in communication other than as evidence of faithlessness? Not only did the letters take too long to arrive (up to three weeks for a letter to come full circle), but the context in which the one wrote was almost always different from the one in which the other read and, still later, responded. The result was recurrent fits of pique and pettiness.16
The period between Christmas and New Year’s was hard for two lovers at the height of infatuation. He felt forgotten and left out, loath to imagine his beloved in the company of her husband and their friends—the very elite he blamed for destroying Cuba. She felt sad and conflicted, infatuated with her prisoner but forced to put on a good face for people she had grown weary of. The more commonplace these tiffs, the sooner the two got over them. Books proved a medium of repair. One Sunday in late January, Castro wrote a lavish letter which opened with a long poem by the Nicarguan Rubén Darío on the value of the book. Though never himself a prisoner, as far as Castro knew, Darío nonetheless captured the “humane mission” of all books, namely, “to sweeten sometimes to forgetting the bitter and somber hours of prison.” Darío brought to mind Victor Hugo’s biography of Shakespeare, where Hugo compares Christ’s “multiplication of loaves of bread” to Gutenberg’s “multiplication of readers.” Gutenberg reinvented man as a reader, Castro wrote, “with an insatiable appetite for knowledge and with the desire for knowledge the ultimate human concern.” What was once the province of scribes, priests, and intellectuals had now become obligatory, allowing the “immense human bible composed of all the prophets, poets, and philosophers to shine resplendent” in the world’s schools.
Letters like this one confirmed Revuelta’s sense that the key to Castro’s survival was intellectual stimulation. She plied him with moral and philosophical conundrums. He wrote back with long and detailed observations of a playful, nimble, and penetrating mind. Examples abound, but one from later that spring comes especially to mind. One lazy Sunday afternoon found Castro tussling with Section One of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, entitled “The Transcendental Aesthetics of Space and Time.” Castro confessed that Kant’s dense and difficult text had put him to sleep (“space and time disappeared for a good while,” he quipped). But not for long. The German philosopher’s idea about the relativity of time and space reminded him of Einstein’s formula for energy, E=mc2. What was the relationship between these two apparently incompatible concepts? he wondered. Kant believed that he had identified the “definitive criteria that saved philosophy from being buried, beaten down by the experimental sciences,” Castro explained. But had Kant met the same fate as Descartes, whose philosophy succumbed to the hardheaded proofs of Copernicus and Galileo? Kant was not offering an account of the “nature of things,” but rather the process through which we arrive at knowledge—indeed, whether it was even possible to definitively comprehend nature. Kant’s was “a philosophy of knowledge,” not a theory about the objects of knowledge. Hence “there should be no contradiction” between the thought of these two giants.17
Kant’s work called into question philosophy’s attempt to establish the essence of things beyond individual perceptions. Does the individual’s idea of the good, for example, correspond to some reality that transcends experience? Or is individual experience of the world—fickle, capricious, idiosyncratic—all there is? At stake here, Castro knew, was the possibility of agreement not just about philosophical puzzles but about the foundation of knowledge itself—and about history and policymaking. Kant’s insistence that it was futile to look for the essence of things outside human experience made him radical in his day (and a progenitor of modern relativism). But Kant held out the possibility of agreement between individuals and peoples thanks to human intuition, which linked the mind to the surrounding world. Via the mechanism of intuition, Kant arrived at a (Newtonian) notion of space and time not so different from the philosophers he critiqued, and Castro was right to recognize a contradiction.18
Moreover, Kant did in fact meet the same fate as Descartes, as Castro put it, when Einstein disproved Newtonian physics, thereby exposing Kant’s reliance on Newton. Put simply, despite his apparent relativism, Kant remained loyal to the universal aspirations of the Enlightenment, namely, to understand the world in its essence. Einstein himself did not escape the evolution of quantum physics. What happened to Kant would one day happen to Einstein. Confronting these issues, “along with the many others that constantly torment us,” Castro was awed by both the limits and aspiration of human knowledge. He found the “relativity” of knowledge “saddening,” he told Revuelta. How many theories, he remarked, “now outdated, were treated like the Bible! How dearly man has paid for the progress of humanity!”19
Castro’s abstract ruminations had practical relevance. The contradictions in Kant corresponded to tensions within Castro’s emerging worldview. On the one hand, Kant’s acknowledgment that human understanding changes with context was consistent with Castro’s belief in progress. On the other hand, Kant’s insistence that some concepts endure (the categories of space and time, for instance), jibed with Castro’s appeal to timeless virtues like nationalism, patriotism, and self-sacrifice. Revolutions are not driven by hypotheses, but by a single-minded vision that sweeps doubt aside. If Cuba were to progress, Castro argued, it would do so because there still flowed in the veins of some citizens the timeless virtues that had inspired the fathers of Cuban Independence. In the short term, the tension between Castro’s progressivism and conservatism, his relativism and resolve, could be turned to tactical advantage.
On February 12, 1954, President Batista visited the prison. Nearing the infirmary where Castro and his men were confined, Batista heard some prisoners singing and believed the serenade to be in his honor. Upon edging closer, however, he discovered that the hymn was intended to humiliate him: the Moncada prisoners were at full throat, singing what would become known as the “Marcha del 26 de Julio,” after the day of the Moncada attack. Batista flew into a rage and left the prison, vowing to take revenge. Two days later, on February 14, Valentine’s Day, Castro and a few of the leaders of his group were removed from the common holding pen and placed in solitary confinement. Most of the men were soon released. Castro’s confinement in solitary lasted until June 27, some 134 days.20
With fewer distractions, Castro bore down on his books, mining them for historical lessons and examples. “Now that I have no magazines or newspapers, no radio, nobody to talk to, I have fewer worries,” he told Revuelta. Never had time passed more quickly. “The characters of history, the novels and ideas of great thinkers of all times make great companions, useful and unforgettable.”21
In March Castro immersed himself in a series of novels from which he drew concrete historical lessons. One was Doña Bárbara, by the Venezuelan writer-politician Rómulo Gallegos. The novel explores the confrontation between urban development and rural traditionalism. Elected president of Venezuela for a brief term in 1948, Gallegos regarded modernization as indispensable to Venezuela’s prosperity, while insisting that measures be taken to preserve the country’s social and cultural traditions, a challenge on Castro’s mind.22 Another was A. J. Cronin’s novel The Stars Look Down, a contrast of two young men from mining families whose growing consciousness of exploitation leads them in very different directions, with one fighting in Parliament for the rights of miners, the other ascending the ladder of mine ownership. Castro had confronted a similar choice after graduating from Law School in 1950, when his parents thought he might manage the family business.23
Then there was Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, the saga of a disillusioned American pilot struggling to find the meaning of life in the aftermath of World War I. Apparently, Larry Darrell, the book’s hero, reminded Castro of himself. It took an act of will, he told Revuelta, “not to devour it in one sitting.” At the end of the war Darrell suffers from what today would be called PTSD. As he casts about for meaning, friend after friend counsels him to tighten the old belt, find a stable job, pull himself together. The more Larry resists, the healthier he becomes. Forsaking conventional happiness for authentic experience, he recovers his wits just as his friends and family endure one setback after another.24
In her relentless struggle to keep Castro distracted, Revuelta sent along newspaper clippings as well as books. One exchange reveals Castro’s evolving criticism of the cultural elitism he met in secondary school in Santiago de Cuba and Havana. In late winter 1954, the conservative daily Diario de la Marina published an essay by the musicologist Orlando Martínez, lamenting what he called Cuba’s “Cultural Tarzans,” those middle-class professionals whose lack of sophistication and bad taste transformed Cuba into an intellectual and cultural wasteland. In response, the critic Rafael Suárez Solís accused Martínez of lamenting the symptom of a problem long in the making without identifying its cause—namely the detachment of the country’s culture industry from its people. The debate generated a lengthy response from Castro on the problem of cultural production, just as Revuelta intended.25
“I read the articles,” he wrote, “and much prefer Solís to Martinez.” Where Solís was “popular, democratic, humane, and practical, Martínez was sour, resentful, exclusive, and vain.” Not only did Martínez seem to be responding to “some secret wound,” but he was condescending, as if looking down from some “cultural Sinai.” Critiques of this sort required artistry, Castro observed, and he contrasted Martínez to his beloved Romain Rolland, whose light touch, absolute control, and geniality allowed him to engage an audience without offending it. Castro conceded that Cuban audiences lacked a certain sophistication, but whose fault was that? Surely not their own, as this “blue blooded intellectual” implied, looking out from his “ivory tower.” Cultural coarseness was not a product of chance but a symptom of the “shameful sterility of Cuba’s bereft, apathetic, and castrated upper classes.”26
The solution was not to segregate the learned from the ignorant, but for artists to tap into the nation’s cultural traditions. The ancient Greeks had long since demonstrated that theater, ballet, orchestra, and art would have no problem retaining an audience so long as it revealed something essential, new, and relevant about everyday life. This required no sacrifice of taste or sophistication. Once won, audiences could be educated as well as transported. But that would never happen by distancing art from the public, or by disdaining audiences eager to be entertained.27
An increasingly critical prisoner recognized similar condescension in Revuelta’s philanthropic social circle, the topic of yet another pointed exchange. She was an active member of diverse philanthropic causes (the League Against Cancer, for instance, much in the papers that spring). What was behind the public obsession with “good service” he asked. Surely, in a nation with gross inequality like Cuba’s philanthropy was necessary. But he was struck by the vanity of it all, the preening, posing, and partying that inevitably went with it. Moreover, addressing real social problems by charitable giving threatened “to aggravate or put off a long-term solution.” He did not doubt that the money that Revuelta and company collected would go to the purchase of an appliance, the erecting of a building, or funding a room and improving treatment,” just as they pledged. But what if it rained the day of the anti-cancer drive? What if the collection were poor and they lacked the money to carry out their good work? “The poor things will die,” he said, as everybody throws up their hands and bemoans that “God is evil for commanding the rains!”28
In short, by this time, Castro had concluded that the nation’s political, social, and cultural problems required real solutions beyond the reach of individual conscience, no matter how well-meaning. The crisis in housing, education, and health care were “problems for the state to resolve.” The way to address inequality was not through philanthropy but by taxing “the owners of 5th Avenue and Country Club mansions, recreational farms, aristocratic clubs, inheritance, and luxury.” Only then could Cuba ensure that no patient died because a rain shower had put off a fundraising drive, or because some soaking-rich countess had taken ill. It was past time for the very rich to lapse into extinction—“like Siboney Indian chiefs and manatees.”29
One Saturday in spring 1954 Castro asked Revuelta for a copy of Batista’s legal statutes. He was apparently working on the revision of his Santiago trial speech. The following day was Sunday, and he promised to write her a proper letter. But Sunday came and went without his usual detailed note. He wrote her simply to say that he was too busy to write. Late that evening, he divulged the source of his distraction: he’d been juggling two volumes by Marx (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon and The Civil War in France) and one by Lenin (State and Revolution), all three related and of “incalculable value” to a prisoner wrestling with his vision of a future Cuba.30
The Eighteenth Brumaire took up the question of why the French bourgeoisie, vanguard of the Revolution of 1789, had become the brake on revolution two generations later, when, in December 1851, they joined hands with their old enemy, the landed elite, and conceded to the ascendancy of Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon’s nephew. By this time, the biggest threat to bourgeois rule was no longer a wilted aristocracy, but working-class unrest. The nation’s industrial leaders agreed to sacrifice political and civil liberty in exchange for order, a choice that would have been very familiar to Batista-era Cuba. To Marx (as increasingly to Castro), the once vaunted Republic had come to embody narrow commercial interests masquerading as the nation.
In March 1954, Castro still believed that republican government could be reformed (if only by “revolution”); Marx insisted it be overthrown, replaced by a government of the workers. This raised the question of the role of the peasantry in making revolution, and here Marx differed from Castro in relegating the peasantry to a secondary part beneath the urban working class. Small-scale agricultural production left peasants socially and geographically isolated from one another, Marx believed. On peasant farms, there was no division of labor to speak of, hence no specialization, no innovation, no stimulation of diverse talents. By proximity alone, peasants seemed to have more in common with landlords than with urban laborers. Just witness Louis Napoleon’s France, where peasants comprised a solid bloc of conservative support.
Meanwhile, in The Civil War in France, Marx revealed how the new emperor tried to be all things to all people (except the workers). Peasants took pride in being told they were the heart of France, capitalists took heart in order and efficiency, the old landed elite swelled once more at talk of empire and invocations of national glory. Of course, this did nothing to address real working-class grievances, and workers rose up in Paris in 1870, ultimately speeding Louis Napoleon into exile. From March to May 1871, France was ruled by “a dictatorship of the proletariat” known as the Paris Commune. The Commune’s successful, albeit brief, seizure of the reins of government led Marx and others to debate the role of the state in a proletariat revolution. Should the working class seize and appropriate state institutions, as Marx had argued in The Communist Manifesto? Should the state be crushed and dissolved, as Marx had come to believe as he looked on at events in Paris from London? And what about the standing army and the national police? The hallmark of the state is a monopoly on the use of force. Designed to promote the interests of capital, democratic republics entrust the monopoly to capitalism’s police. The first act of the Paris Commune, Castro read, was to abolish the national army and replace it with a people’s army, something Cuba’s revolutionary government failed to do in 1933, as Castro would later note.
By the time he got around to Lenin’s State and Revolution, Castro’s faith in the state as a vehicle of progressive reform was under siege. In his Discourse on Inequality, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of Castro’s favorite philosophers, exposed the rule of law (outside a social contract) as an instrument by which the propertied justified and protected its wealth from the un-propertied masses. Marx took Rousseau’s criticism up a notch, describing the state as a tool of capitalist self-interest, designed to keep labor in its place. State bureaucracy made a mockery of the ideal of public service, as the state was simply not designed to serve the public. If this were true, then it would not suffice to simply seize control of the state, as the Paris Communards had imagined; the state, too, would have to be destroyed. Lenin suggested this be a matter of steps. In the first stage of revolution, once in the possession of workers, the state could serve as the guardian of society as a whole, taking possession of the means of production and abolishing class distinctions. By so doing it would eliminate its own reason to exist. With a government of (corrupt) people replaced by an administration of things, the state could be allowed to wither away.
Castro was transfixed. The state was the hammer of capitalist rule, democracy its subterfuge. Controlled by oligarchic elites, elections in so-called democratic states did not represent the will of eligible voters, much less that of the disenfranchised majority—women, laborers, racial minorities, the illiterate, and so on. At best, democratic elections confronted voters with a dispiriting question, namely, which representatives of the ruling class shall represent us? How much of this Castro believed at this time, he did not say. But it did not take a communist to recognize that fifty years of democratic rule had not brought Cuba honest, efficient, public-spirited government, or an economy balanced between agriculture and industry, imports, and exports, and capable of sustaining local, national, and international markets. Castro promised Revuelta that he would read these books to her one day. In fact, she told him, she was not all that interested in Marx. Among other things, she was skeptical of Marx’s notion that conflict was the product of human institutions, regarding it rather as a remnant of animal aggression. Castro clarified that he had not written to endorse Marx’s and Lenin’s ideas, but simply to signal his pleasure in reading them in light of one another. Asked at his trial in Santiago what a book of Lenin was doing among Abel Santamaría’s possessions on the eve of Moncada, Castro shrugged. “Anyone who isn’t curious about such texts is an ignorant fool.”