Tengo material abundante para el estudio de los grandes movimientos políticos contemporáneos: Socialismo, Fascismo y Nazismo,” Fidel Castro wrote Naty Revuelta in April 1954, “pero no tengo nada del New Deal de Roosevelt” (I have plenty of material about the great political movements—Socialism, Fascism, and Nazism—but nothing about Roosevelt’s New Deal). At the time, Castro was serving the ninth month of a twenty-six-year sentence for his leadership in an attack on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba and was looking to expand his library. Revuelta was a friend and fellow rebel. The two were in the early stage of an epistolary love affair. When Revuelta suggested a book about Roosevelt’s foreign policy, Castro demurred. “What I really want to document,” he explained, “is FDR’s program of raising agricultural prices, promoting and preserving soil fertility, providing credit, forgiving debt, expanding internal and external markets; creating jobs, reducing working hours, lifting wages, assisting the unemployed, aging, and infirm; reorganizing industry, revising the tax code, regulating trusts, and reforming banking and monetary policy”—in short, just about everything he himself wanted to do for Cuba.1
Castro’s romance with Revuelta, which lasted just shy of six months, produced over one hundred letters, only a handful of which have ever been published (in radically abridged form). The available excerpts are tantalizing, revealing a prisoner wrestling with the future of Cuba while immersed in world history and literature and contemplating the meaning of life. Sensing that the letters could help me round out the caricature of Castro that passes for authoritative biography, I reached out to Revuelta in 2014 in much the same way that Castro himself had done a half century earlier: I had material abundante consistent with existing stereotypes, I explained; could she help me with evidence to illuminate the real man? Cubans are wary of U.S. writers revisiting the life of a figure they continue to admire despite his own and the Revolution’s deficiencies. When a friend reported that Revuelta was willing to meet me, I was hopeful if somewhat shy of optimistic.
Gazing out at me from her shaded entryway as I stood in the blazing sunshine atop the steep front stairway of her home in the New Vedado neighborhood of Havana, Revuelta had the caution of an aging beauty accustomed to sizing up approaching predators. Bienvenido, came a low, raspy voice from out of the shadows. I extended my hand, which she graciously accepted, her cold, bony clasp reminding me of my late grandmother. Before my eyes could adjust, she led me onto a sun-dappled terrace, its green wicker chairs surrounded by tropical plants—palm, ficus, philodendron, bird of paradise. A small electric fan whirled futilely nearby, the faint tropical aroma overwhelmed by a cigarette smoldering in a nearby ashtray full to the brim. A glass coffee table was strewn with the day’s newspaper, various magazines, and books, along with a few articles and photographs that seemed to have been cobbled together for me. The letters were nowhere to be seen. Clad in a sleeveless flower-print dress and sandals, the once voluptuous, now reedlike Revuelta seemed to float above the tile floor. “Siéntate,” she said, before continuing in perfect English, “so you’re writing a book about young Fidel.” Sitting down herself, Revuelta erupted in a violent cough, her frail body racked to the bone. Waving away my look of concern, she ordered an assistant to bring us coffee. “Yes,” I said, as she looked at me through emerald eyes with a skeptical smile and characteristic cock of her head. “I want to get this story right, and I’m told you can help me.”
Several months and a few leisurely visits later, I heard that Revuelta was ready to share her letters with me, only to learn upon arriving at her home one afternoon that she had changed her mind. “No hay problema, Naty,” I said, pulling out a letter Castro had written his father from Bogotá. “Let me show you something I just discovered in the archives.” The letter, which few have ever seen, brims with youthful innocence and detailed descriptions of the physical landscape and political economy of Panama, Venezuela, and Colombia. “These voyages impart great wisdom and experience, at the same time that they open up great horizons and perspectives,” Castro told his father.2 Revuelta read on silently, her eyes welling with tears. “That’s so Fidel,” she murmured, “that’s so Fidel.” She then stood up, entered her library, and returned with a thick stack of paper which she plopped down on my lap, punctuating the moment with a single, unceremonious word: “HERE.”
This book is not a defense of Fidel Castro. My aim is to re-create his life as he actually lived it, moving forward, without the benefit of hindsight. With this in mind, I ask a favor of the reader: suspend for a moment the image you have of a bearded revolutionary clad in green fatigues, communist at conception, anti-American in utero, bilious at birth, and harken instead to a saga that begins in a small stone farmhouse in northwest Spain at the end of the nineteenth century. The reward for doing so may not be a more likable Castro, but one whose aspirations, accomplishments, and failures make sense in light of the political and economic conditions that inspired and constrained them.
Readers willing to take this leap will learn a few things that may surprise them. Castro did not commit himself or Cuba to communism until after the triumph of the Revolution in January 1959. He did so, ultimately, not as an end in itself, but as a means to the end of securing the Revolution from domestic and foreign opposition, including the United States government. This argument holds both for Castro’s embrace of the Cuban Communist Party in 1959 and for his alliance with the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Had Castro been more successful in building a disciplined political party to match his guerrilla army before he came to power, his turn to the PSP (which had never demonstrated much interest in him or his armed struggle) would not have been necessary.
Castro grew up a liberal nationalist, inspired by the unrequited dream of Cuba Libre—a Cuba free and independent of foreign rule and dedicated to the well-being of all its people. This program comprised both constitutionalism and civil rights, along with a set of social entitlements that included access to education, health care, employment, and a decent standard of living (common in Cuban cities but harder to find in rural areas3). In his late twenties a maturing Castro tied Cuba’s struggle for sovereignty and independence to a liberal tradition that encompassed the English Civil War and the American, French, Haitian, and Latin American Revolutions, at the same time that he insisted that Cuba had a unique contribution to make to social and political science. Citing both Montesquieu and Simón Bolívar, he imagined Cuba charting a third way, at once democratic and socialistic.
Castro’s rise is incomprehensible without an understanding of Cuban history and the history of U.S.-Cuban relations, which he knew like the back of his hand. The dream of national sovereignty and self-determination was hardly unique to Cuba, but Cuba waited an especially long time for independence. When Cubans thought they had it in their grasp in 1898, the United States snatched it away, inaugurating six decades of political and economic subservience that haunts Cuba to this day. Throw in the constraints of the Cold War, and the fate of the Cuban Revolution seems overdetermined. Despite arguments to the contrary, the U.S. government was never prepared to recognize the Revolution on Castro’s original terms, making his alliance with the Soviet Union all but inevitable.
Castro’s liberal nationalist agenda was neither original nor inherently revolutionary. Cuban politicians had been espousing this platform since the founding of the Cuban Republic in 1902, only to become distracted upon taking office by the opportunity for financial gain. By contrast, Castro meant it when he said it, making him not only radical but dangerous to establishment politicians, left, right, and center, as well as to the outside banks and corporations, many of them North American, which pulled the strings. Call it a fixation, call it an obsession, call it what you will: Castro experienced Cuba’s subservience to the United States like a scarlet “S” tattooed on his chest, resolving at a remarkably young age to once and for all win Cuba’s liberty even at the cost of liberty itself.
Castro regarded the struggle for Cuba Libre as part of a larger anticolonial project that encompassed not just the rest of Latin America but much of Africa and Asia besides. To critics, Castro’s internationalism appeared at once dangerous and grandiose. U.S. officials accused Castro of meddling in other countries’ affairs, as if the United States alone was authorized to do so. To Castro, as to Guatemala’s Jacobo Árbenz, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, and countless other revolutionaries fighting to rid their nations of colonialism, it simply made sense to combine forces. There was strength in numbers. Again, this idea was hardly new at the time. Simón Bolívar and José Martí had seen it much the same way a century before.
Castro was not motivated originally by money or power. He grew up on a plantation in eastern Cuba owned by his parents, which stretched forty-two square miles across some of Cuba’s most valuable farmland. By the time he was old enough to choose a vocation, his parents’ enterprise included not only sugarcane production, but lumber, cattle, and mining operations besides. If it was money or influence he was after, he did not have to take on a U.S.-backed military dictatorship to get it. As a newly minted lawyer in 1950, he was practically granted the keys to his parents’ kingdom only to look the other way. He simply would not be domesticated. He spent much of his mid-twenties making common cause with the men and women who first put their lives on the line for independence from imperial Spain. Their work remained unfinished a century later, and Castro worried that they were being forgotten. Much of his quixotic (some would say reckless) behavior represents his attempt to reacquaint Cubans with this revolutionary tradition.
Castro’s solicitation for Cuban peasants and workers was deep-seated and sincere. Growing up on his parents’ plantation, Castro’s playmates were invariably the children of peasants and farm laborers. Returning home on school holidays, he easily fell back in among them, cherishing the local ways even as he became increasingly worldly. Crucially, his own parents were born and raised in peasant households, his father amid crushing hardship, a fact which no amount of new wealth could disguise. Observers later remarked that Castro always seemed at ease when engaging peasants and workers. This comfort was literally in his blood. As a young boy joining his father on his rounds of the cane fields, Castro witnessed more than just a conventional encounter between labor and management; these were also, at some level, exchanges between peers, his father’s economic mobility providing fodder for his own Pan-American Dream.
Castro grew up feeling like an outsider, not an outcast, exactly, but an island, vulnerable and alone. Old schoolmates describe him as preoccupied at times, even detached. During the Great Depression and periodic price collapses that afflicted Cuba’s sugar economy the Castro children never remember going hungry. This could not be said of their neighbors, and Castro recalled often scraping together leftovers to share with friends. At boarding school in Santiago de Cuba and Havana, he was greeted as a hick. Later, at the university, he described feeling isolated and exposed. Later still, he grew frustrated by Cubans’ passivity in the face of a stultifying status quo, as if he were the lone voice in the wilderness calling the people to a higher end. He wasn’t, of course, but he saw it that way, a fact that would become increasingly important as he began to attract followers and build a movement whose outcome would depend on his ability to work productively with others.
Castro believed his record of sacrifice and single-minded dedication to the cause of Cuba Libre gave him (and him alone) the legitimacy to lead the revolutionary struggle and, eventually, the revolutionary government. This, too, is debatable as there were many capable opposition leaders pushed aside by fate, accident, or by Castro himself. The last man standing is not necessarily the most deserving or most qualified. Still, Castro could be excused for thinking the Revolution would not have been waged, much less won, but for him. His extravagant claim to be the embodiment of the Revolution stems partly from the unlikelihood of his family’s rise from rags to riches and of his surviving innumerable mishaps and setbacks, including sepsis at age seven, gang warfare at the university, a foiled invasion of the Dominican Republic, revolutionary upheaval in Colombia, and the Moncada Barracks attack, just to name a few.
The odds against Castro surviving to win and lead the Revolution appear preposterous in retrospect. Once captured after Moncada, he should never have been brought in alive; once jailed, the key to his cell should have been thrown away; once freed, he should have been eliminated while in exile; once bound for home with eighty-two men aboard a boat built for eight (including crew), he should never have survived a botched landing; once ashore he should never have eluded the government ambush that reduced the eighty-two men to fourteen; once in the mountains, he should never have outfought Batista’s military; once victorious, he should never have outlasted innumerable U.S.-backed plans first to deny him victory, then to overthrow his government, finally to assassinate him. Considering all the pawns in the Cold War who have come and gone over the years, he should never have outlived nine U.S. presidents, while vexing a tenth, if only posthumously. Cats have nine lives, Castro had nine times nine. But we make our own luck, the saying goes, and Castro was a maestro. He believed he was chosen. Given this litany, it’s hard to argue with him. This does not justify many of his actions or excuse his seizing power for half a century, but it helps explain them. Only I could have done this; only I can see this through.
Finally, as with so many world historical figures, Castro’s strengths were the source of his greatest weaknesses. He was at once brilliant and arrogant, charismatic and overbearing, courageous and reckless, pragmatic and quixotic. He had a killer instinct, as those in his line of work always do. Capable of real affection, he possessed a coldness at the nether reaches of the Kelvin scale. In the end, he was able to love one thing and one thing only—not his first wife, Mirta, not his son, Fidelito, not even himself. He loved the Revolution. At the height of his powers, he was said to have been able to tolerate one person on a day-to-day basis, Celia Sánchez, not a lover exactly, but someone whose commitment to the Revolution rivaled his own. In waging and defending the Revolution, he could be simultaneously stoical and self-pitying, forgiving and vengeful, solicitous and autocratic. Not all of these characteristics are easy to explain. Many are hard to defend. This book attempts to account for as many of them as possible.