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Books on Cuba
The Autobiography of a
Slave /
Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba
/
Santeria from
Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories
Fidel Castro and
the Quest for a Revolutionary Culture in Cuba
/
Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the
Twentieth
Century
Singular Like a Bird: The Art of Nancy Morejon
/
Caliban
and Other Essays /
The
Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball
Santeria
Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin America Art /
Culture and
Customs of Cuba /
Man-making Words; Selected Poems
of Nicholas Guillen
Afro-Cuban Voices: On Race and Identity on
Contemporary Cuba /
Afro-Cuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing
on Race, Politics, and Culture
Nicolas Guillen:
Popular Poet of the Caribbean /
Selected Poetry by Nancy Morejon
/
Cuba: After the
Revolution
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Fidel Castro: My Early Years
By Michael Smith
Fidel Castro: My Early Years by Fidel
Castro, with an introductory essay by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Edited by Deborah Shnookal and Pedro Alvarez Tabio. Ocean Press,
Hoboken, N.J., 1998. $14.95
This book is a compilation of interviews and
speeches by Fidel concerning his early childhood and youth.
Although most of the selections have been published previously
in other books and periodicals, they have never before been
brought together in one volume.
An interview with Fidel by Colombian
journalist Arturo Alape is published here in English for the
first time. The book also contains excerpts from a discussion
with a Brazilian priest, Frei Netto, which was previously
published by Ocean Press under the title "Fidel and
Religion."
The time period explored in the book ranges
from Fidel's childhood to 1952, when Gen. Batista took over the
Cuban government in a coup and Castro launched the July 26
Movement, with plans to spark a popular uprising against the
dictator. Along the way, it deals with Fidel's university years,
his training in the liberation movement for the Dominican
Republic, his political activities in Colombia, and his first
study of Marxism.
Fidel's father, Angel, the son of a very poor
farmer from Galicia, Spain, was drafted to fight in Cuba in 1895
during its last war of independence. He then emigrated to the
island at the turn of the century. Penniless, he got himself a
job at a sugar mill; illiterate, he taught himself to read and
write.
Later, he got a group of workers together in
a small enterprise that worked for a U.S. firm to clear land in
order to plant sugar cane and to fell trees to supply sugar
mills with firewood. He built an all-wooden house in the
Galician style, on stilts, in the north-central part of what
used to be Oriente Province on the eastern end of the island.
Fidel remembers his father as "a
extremely kind man" who "never said no to anyone who
asked for help." Fidel's mother, Lina, was Angel's cook.
Her parents had come to Oriente Province by oxcart, 600 miles
from the other side of Cuba. She became Angel's second wife; he
had had three children by his first wife and seven more with
Lina. Fidel was the third oldest of their union.
Lina, too, was illiterate and also taught
herself to read and write. She lived until three years after the
1959 revolution. Angel died in 1956 while Fidel was in Mexico
organizing the expedition that traveled to Cuba on the motor
yacht Granma and successfully took on the U.S.-armed Batista
dictatorship.
Raised in rural poverty
The Castro family lived in the country on a
farm in an area with no cars, muddy roads, and no electricity.
The farm animals lived under the house-turkeys, geese, ducks,
pigs, guinea fowl, chickens, and 20 or 30 cows, which were tied
to the stilts.
A small slaughterhouse and a small smithy
were close to the house, as was a bakery. A small public
elementary school was 60 meters from the house, as was a general
store, telegraph office, and a post office. This was the set-up
in 1926 when Fidel Castro was born.
Fidel remembers summer vacation "when we
went swimming in the rivers, running through the woods, hunting
with slingshots, and riding horses. We lived in direct contact
with nature and were quite free during these times. That's what
my childhood was like."
The farm area where Fidel grew up was not
exactly a town; there was no church in the small population
center, and 15-20 children went to the tiny school, Fidel's
nursery school. He played indiscriminately with the children of
the rural farm workers, white and Black, Cuban and Haitian,
mostly poor. "They were my friends."
Because he was smart and had a talent for
learning, Fidel was sent to live with a family in Santiago de
Cuba when he was 4 1/2 years old. He had yet to receive any
religious training or to be baptized, a omission which caused
him to be called "the Jew."
His mother was a fervent believer who prayed
every day. Fidel's grandmother was also deeply religious,
believing fervently in Our Lady of Charity, Cuba's patron saint.
His mother and grandmother also believed "in several saints
who were not in the liturgy, including St. Lazarus, the
Leper."
Fidel remembers that "the world I was
brought up in was quite primitive, with all kinds of beliefs and
superstitions, spirits, ghosts, and animals that were harbingers
of doom ... for example, if a rooster crowed three times without
getting an answer, that meant some tragedy might occur."
After the triumph of the revolution in 1959,
Fidel went to visit his family in Havana: "The room was
full of saints and prayer cards ... both my mother and
grandmother made all kinds of vows on behalf of our lives and
safety. The fact that we came out of the struggle alive must
have greatly increased their faith. ... I never argued with them
about these things because I could see the strength, courage,
and comfort they got from their religious feelings and
beliefs."
Fidel remembers that he was never religious.
He rejected the dogmas that were imposed on him, believing
instead that religion should be the product of thought and
feeling.
He spent two years with the family in
Santiago, "just wasting my time." The family took the
money paid to them by Fidel's parents but little trickled down
to the young student. He went hungry and "was spanked every
so often."
Fidel found his experience of hardship
"useful" in the sense that he used it to
"launch" his "first act of rebellion" and
successfully argued with his parents to get himself sent to a
boarding school, where "I began to be happy."
The food improved and he got out on Thursdays
and Sundays for breaks. But some of the teachers sometimes hit
the students. A monitor in charge "hit me with a fair
amount of violence. He slapped both sides of my face. It was a
degrading and abusive thing." This was in the third grade.
In the fifth grade, a teacher hit Fidel in
the head twice. "A violent confrontation" ensued.
Fidel decided not to go back to that school and instead
convinced his parents to let him go to Dolores College, a Jesuit
school, as a day student.
He reflected that while he was not against
discipline, "children have a sense of personal
dignity" and hitting them "is monstrous and
unacceptable."
Fidel was then tutored by a Black woman, who
was the first person to ever encourage him. She set goals for
him and got him interested in studying.
He was 10 years old and credits her as the
person in his life who came closest to being his mentor. He
began to get excellent grades.
Training with the Jesuits
The Jesuits were Spaniards, politically
reactionary supporters of the dictator Franco. "I think
that the traditions of the Jesuits and their military spirit and
organization go with the Spanish personality. They were
rigorous, demanding people, who were interested in their
students, their character and behavior," Fidel remembers.
Although he rejected the Jesuits' religious
teaching, he said that "later on I formed a belief and
faith in the political arena."
Fidel developed into an outstanding athlete,
particularly in basketball, soccer, and baseball. The Jesuits
encouraged hikes and mountain climbing, risky and difficult
activities, which they thought developed an enterprising,
tenacious spirit. They never dreamed they were training a
guerrilla.
The school was an upper-class institution,
attended by children of professionals as well as those of the
very rich bourgeoisie, who had an aristocratic spirit. Fidel's
family, who lived in the country amongst poor people and who
worked every day, gave him a lesser social status.
Fidel thinks that this prevented "the
misfortune of acquiring that class culture, mentality, and
consciousness" that would have made it difficult for a
person to have "escaped bourgeois ideology. "
"Humans," Fidel concluded,
"are the product of struggles and difficulties. ...
Problems gradually mold a person in the same way that a lathe
shapes a piece of material-in this case, the matter and spirit
of a human being."
Castro developed a sense of justice-what is
fair and unfair-and as sense of personal dignity. The Jesuits,
he said, "valued character, rectitude , honesty, courage,
and the ability to make sacrifices."
First readings about socialism
Castro went to Belen College, the most
prestigious high school in Cuba. He studied capitalist political
economy and drew socialist conclusions, "imagining a
economy that would operate more nationally."
He was a supporter of Jose Marti's ideas in
high school and "always wholeheartedly identified with our
people's heroic struggle for independence in the past
century."
Then, in his junior year, he read "The
Communist Manifesto." It "had a particularly
significant impact on me" because of the "simplicity,
clarity, and direct manner in which our world and society are
explained."
After all, Fidel noted, "you don't need
a microscope or a telescope to see class divisions that mean
that the poor go hungry while others have more than they
need."
"Who could know this better than I, who
had experienced both realities and who had even been, in part, a
victim of the two? How could I fail to understand my
experiences, the situation of the landowner and of the landless,
barefoot farmer?"
Fidel became a popular student leader both in
college and in law school, where he was elected student body
president. In law school he read Lenin's "Imperialism: The
Highest Stage of Capitalism" and "State and
Revolution," and "had a full revolutionary outlook,
not just in terms of ideas, but in terms of how to implement
them."
His main contribution to Cuba, he believes,
was figuring out how to combine Marx and Marti.
Before he organized the failed attack on the
Moncada barracks in 1953, Fidel had participated in two other
actions. He joined an expeditionary force in Cuba that was to
sail to the Dominican Republic to mount an offensive against the
dictatorship there. The plan failed but Castro was the only
soldier not captured. He opted to get away by undergoing a long
ocean swim.
Next, at age 22, in 1948, he organized on the
international scene. He traveled to Panama, Venezuela, and
finally to Colombia, the site of the founding conference of the
Association of American States, in order to expose the OAS as an
instrument of American domination.
While he was in Colombia, the popular leader
and probable next president, Gaitan, was assassinated. Fidel
managed to get arms and to join the popular upsurge.
The masses were defeated, being leaderless
and without political education. He says that 11 years later, in
Cuba, things happened differently.
The U.S. government opposed Castro even
before the revolution. From the beginning and to date, they have
tried to assassinate him, physically and morally. According to
common wisdom, he is a cruel dictator, even worse than Qadaffi,
or the current demon, Saddam Hussein.
Others believe Fidel Castro to be a great
leader of humanity and a great humanitarian-an extraordinary
person, the likes of whom is rarely seen over the centuries.
It is thus of interest to read about Fidel's early
years, for surely, as the poet Milton understood,
"Childhood shows the man as morning shows the day."
*
* * * *
My Early Years opens with a brief
biography and a "personal portrait" by Gabriel Garcia
Marquez. Editors Shnookal and Alvarez Tabio draw their first
selection, "Childhood and Youth," and fourth piece,
"Preparing for Moncada" (Castro's unsuccessful 1953
attack on the Moncada army garrison in Santiago de Cuba), from
Castro's May 1985 discussion with Brazilian priest Frei Betto.
In "University Days," Castro's September 1995 speech
at the University of Havana recollects the period when he
attended that law school and first became involved in politics.
Castro explained his experience in the April 1948 popular
uprising in Bogota, Colombia, in a September 1981 interview with
Colombian journalist Arturo Alape. Includes photographs of
Castro as a child and young man. |
