Fidel Castro on Fidel Castro

By Greg Grandin, The Nation. Posted July 19, 2008.

One of Fidel Castro's earliest political memories is of Spaniards arguing over the Spanish Civil War, and his first act of censorship, he explains in My Life (Scribner, $40), was done in kindness. When asked by his family's illiterate cook -- a "fire-breathing Republican" -- for news of the war, the nine-year old read him stories that played up loyalist success because he wanted to make him "feel better." Castro's Galician father was a franquista, as were his Jesuit teachers, who prayed for Spain's martyred priests while offering not a word for "the Republicans who were being shot by firing squads." A recent study of Castro's grade school years has him an admirer of fascism, and in My Life, distilled from over a hundred hours of conversations with Le Monde diplomatique editor Ignacio Ramonet, Castro does mention that he collected trading cards commemorating Mussolini's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia. "I became almost an expert on that war in Abyssinia," he says. But Castro remembers this as his first object lesson on modern consumerism: his friends would compete to collect a complete set of cards but "some of them would deliberately never be printed, to make kids buy them, you know. Capitalism."

By the time he had graduated with a law degree from the University of Havana in 1950, Castro was deep into the cosmopolitan Caribbean's "anti-imperialist and anti-dictatorial" politics, advocating for Puerto Rican independence and visiting hospitalized students in Panama who had been injured while protesting US control of the Canal Zone. Years before he and his brother Raúl launched their failed first bid in 1953 to overthrow the Cuban president Fulgencio Batista by seizing the Moncada military barracks, the future revolutionary had already participated in two armed movements, both outside of Cuba. In 1947 he trained to take part in an invasion of the Dominican Republic to overthrow Rafael Trujillo. Organized by the storied Caribbean Legion, an alliance of leftists and democrats that was funded by the governments of Costa Rica, Venezuela and Guatemala, this attempt to restage Normandy in the Caribbean and impose FDR's Four Freedoms by force on what then was one of Latin America's last dictatorships was a disaster. Castro jumped ship soon after the expedition left Cuba and swam back to shore. A year later, he was in Bogotá, Colombia's capital, as part of a pan-American student delegation when a riot careening toward revolution erupted upon the assassination of presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, who ran on a platform of land reform, workers rights and an end to the repression of peasants. This time, Castro committed. He helped seize a police station and commandeer its arms. Swept away by the "multitude on the march," he climbed on a bench and tried to rouse a detachment of soldiers to join the insurrection. "Everyone listened," he recalls, "no one did anything, and there I was with my rifle making my speech."

The riots sputtered out, and Castro returned to Cuba, which was democratic but venally so. The "revolutionary generation" of the 1930s was in power, yet its ideals, modeled on those of the Spanish Republic, were corrupted by the flood of US corporate capital and mafia money. For many Cubans, the countryside seemed to have turned into a giant sugar plantation, the city a giant brothel. At this point, Castro supported the Partido Ortodoxo, which was led by the popular Eduardo Chibás, who set himself the difficult task of invigorating Cuban democracy while accommodating Washington's anticommunism. Castro would become an icon of the armed New Left, held responsible by some for the revolutionary militancy that spread throughout Latin America in the 1960s. Yet already in the 1940s, the University of Havana was overrun by armed gangs that killed under the banner not of Marx, Stalin or Trotsky but of various ideologically indistinct parties fighting for a share of political spoils. Whether Castro overcame or descended into this violence remains a matter of dispute; he has long been charged with committing murder to gain control of the university's student federation. My Life skims over the period with a vagueness that's now common in official histories of the revolution. Yet the rare time Castro admits emotion, much less fear, is when he describes fighting the "powers and all the impunities" of the "mafia" which controlled the university. Banned from entering the campus by students linked to the ruling political party, he went to the waterfront and wept. "That's right," he tells Ramonet, "at the ripe old age of twenty, I lay face down on the sand and cried."

In 1952, with a twenty-six year old Castro on the ticket for a congressional seat, Chibás's Ortodoxos were poised to win national elections. But Batista cancelled the vote and installed himself as president, adding Cuba to a broader political reaction that was then sweeping the hemisphere. In 1944, Latin America could count but five democracies; two years later, the numbers flipped as every country save five became democratic. But the tide turned in 1948 as the landed class, the military and the Catholic Church took advantage of the dawning cold war to go on the offensive. Venezuela began the ten-year Marcos Pérez Jimenéz dicatorship; Haiti's democracy collapsed, paving the way for Papa Doc and his mutilating Tonton Macoutes; and Gaitán's murder hastened a decade-long civil war in Columbia that took hundreds of thousands of lives. Trujillo was still in power, as was the Somoza clan in Nicaragua, and by the time of the CIA's ousting of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 the Caribbean basin was in lockdown. In many countries, especially Batista's Cuba, torture and extrajudicial killing became central components of civic life. "We were promised a world of peace," Castro says of the Allied victory in WWII, "we were promised that the gap between rich and poor would be closed, and that the more developed would help the less developed. All that was a huge lie."

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Greg Grandin teaches Latin American history at New York University and is the author of a number of books, including the just published Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism.

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