One Hundred Years of Fidel Castro: From his origins to his poisoned legacy

A century ago, on 13 August 1926, Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born in the small village of Biran, in eastern Cuba. The future great prophet of the ‘second independence’ and the ‘agrarian revolution’ in Latin America was the son of a large landowner who had come to the island as a soldier in the Spanish army to fight against the pro-independence guerrillas, and who later amassed a fortune through various forms of trafficking. His mother, on the other hand, was a maid twenty-five years his father’s junior, whom he married following the presumed death of his lawful wife. And in these murky family affairs, some biographers have glimpsed the origins of Fidel’s very early rebellious streak: at the age of nine, he threatened to set the house on fire; as a teenager, he tried to persuade the peasants to go on strike against his father; and, once the revolution had begun, he sent his ‘barbudos’ to set fire to the family plantations.

His hated father, however, had a profound influence on him, and not merely through a strong genetic predisposition towards stubbornness and authoritarianism. Having fought against the Yankees as a Spanish soldier in 1898, his father – as a large landowner – had, in fact, ample opportunity to quarrel with other Americans whose estates bordered on his own, and thus instilled in him a deep aversion to the United States. He also developed a distaste for Anglo-Saxon culture through the pro-Falangist Jesuits at the Belén secondary school in Havana, where he went to study after being expelled from a college run by the Brothers of the Order of John Baptist de la Salle, accused of hooliganism. However, it was the strict methods of the disciples of St Ignatius of Loyola that ultimately instilled in him a love of learning, as well as a passion for sport and public speaking. The former gave him an athletic physique and led to a few youthful cameos in Esther Williams’s swimming films. The latter led to his enrolment in 1945 at the Faculty of Law in Havana: a sort of Wild West, where a gunshot was considered just as legitimate a means of asserting oneself as a vote. Fidel distinguished himself on both fronts: he was elected as a delegate in his first year of law school, and was accused of double murder.

But by the age of twenty, the simple limelight of Cuba had already become too confining for him. In 1947, he enlisted in an expedition to overthrow the Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo; in 1948, whilst in Bogotá for a student congress, he joined the uprising sparked by the Colombian liberals following the assassination of their charismatic leader, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. Both experiences ended in the grotesque: from the police raid that thwarted the Dominican operation, he escaped by slipping away on a small boat he’d kept ready for just such an eventuality; and from Bogotá, he was urgently repatriated on a livestock plane laden with bellowing bulls that ‘kept him awake all night’. But to the press he recounts adventures that begin to build his legend. He escaped the Cuban police, he says, by jumping into the sea and swimming through a stretch infested with sharks. And during the Bogotá uprising, he claims to have ‘killed three priests’.

In that same year, 1948, he took part in the election campaign as a supporter of Eduardo Chibás’s Orthodox Party: a sort of Caribbean version of the Five Star Movement, whose symbol was a broom. But the leader came only third, and then, on 5 August 1951, he shot himself in the stomach during a live radio broadcast. Meanwhile, Fidel had tried to settle down: he got married, had a son, caught up in six months on the exams he’d failed to sit over two years, graduated and, in 1950, opened a law practice. But in three years of practising, only two clients were able to pay his fees.

Following Chibás’s suicide, he therefore threw himself back into politics, announcing his candidacy with the Orthodox Youth. However, the elections would never take place, due to the coup staged by General Fulgencio Batista on 10 March 1952. At the head of 125 militants from the Orthodox Youth, on 26 July 1953 the 27-year-old Fidel attempted to spark the revolution with an assault on the Moncada barracks in Santiago. It was a disaster, with ten rebels killed in action and a further fifty-nine massacred after being taken prisoner. He himself ended up in prison, having attempted suicide. But public opinion and the Church called for clemency, and Fidel had the opportunity to turn his trial into a spectacle that definitively cemented his popularity. “History will absolve me!” he shouted at the end of a two-hour closing speech. Sentenced to fifteen years, he was granted amnesty after just eighteen months, and on 7 July he set sail for Mexico.

It was whilst in exile that the definitive break with the orthodox Party took place, with the formal establishment of the 26 July Movement. This political split was followed by a divorce from his wife, Mirta Díaz-Balart, whom he had discovered whilst in prison to be working as an agent for the Ministry of the Interior. It was a painful affair, not least because of the ensuing dispute over custody of their son, Fidelito.

On 25 November 1956, a small force of 82 men set sail for Cuba from the Mexican port of Tuxpan aboard the Granma. Che Guevara would later describe it as “more of a shipwreck than a landing”, and of the 82 who disembarked, 3 were killed in battle, 22 were executed after their capture, 22 were imprisoned, and a further 19 disappeared without trace. But a small army soon formed around the 16 survivors in the rugged mountains of the Sierra Maestra. Not at a breakneck pace, mind you: 50 men in the early months of 1957; 80 in May; 200 in December; 300 in April 1958; no more than 2,000 by the end of ’58. But this was enough to take on a corrupt regime and a regular army with no desire to fight, whilst the majority of Cubans stood by and watched and the Americans played both sides simultaneously. Whilst the US Air Force aided Batista, the CIA sent Fidel aid worth 50,000 dollars. On 1 January 1959, whilst Batista was fleeing by plane, the vanguard of the Rebel Army entered Havana led by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara: a globetrotting Argentine doctor who had befriended Fidel in Mexico. The most surprised of all was Fidel himself, who would not arrive until six days later.

Alongside Fidel’s 2,000, however, there are also another thousand guerrillas belonging to separate armed groups, and the composition of the 26 July Movement itself is diverse. Fidel’s younger brother Raúl Castro and Che declare themselves Marxists, but Fidel, on the other hand, speaks of a revolution that is “not red but green like the leaves of palm trees”, in order to mediate with openly anti-communist guerrilla commanders of the calibre of Huber Matos or Humberto Sori-Marín; and following Batista’s flight, the United States was the first country to recognise the new revolutionary government. Of the fifteen members of the provisional government, only three came from the guerrilla ranks. Yet within two years, six of them would be in exile and one would have been executed by firing squad. The symbolic turning point came on 21 October 1959, when Fidel had Huber Matos arrested for ‘treason’ after he had written a letter of protest against the ‘infiltration of communists’.

On 4 February 1960, Soviet Vice-President Anastas Mikoyan visited Cuba and laid the foundations for an alliance between the two countries. In that same year, 1960, Fidel nationalised US-owned property, a move to which Washington responded by providing aid to anti-Castro armed groups who had rebelled in the Escambray Mountains and by imposing a trade embargo. On 31 January 1961, diplomatic relations were severed. Finally, on 17 April 1961, 1,500 anti-Castro rebels armed by the CIA landed at Playa Girón. The operation proved a disaster, and the subsequent American withdrawal also led to the demise of the Escambray rebels, who were wiped out following ruthless round-ups. On that 17 April, Fidel called for the defence of the ‘Socialist Republic’ for the first time. On 3 July 1962, the single party was established, absorbing the historic Cuban communists, and it would take the name Communist Party of Cuba from 3 October 1965. The new Constitution, adopted in 1976, was modelled on the Bulgarian one, on the assumption that the two countries had roughly the same land area, the same population and also the same predominance of agriculture in their economies.

Since then, the single-party system and the communist system have remained unchanged, although there have been some developments in Cuba’s system of international alliances, and most recently an economic opening inspired by the models of China and Vietnam. In fact, at the outset, alignment with the USSR went so far that Fidel offered the island as a base for Soviet nuclear missiles, in order to directly threaten the United States. But when the naval blockade ordered by Kennedy forced Khrushchev to withdraw the missiles – bringing the world to the brink of the Third World War – relations eased for a while: orthodox Cuban communists were subjected to a purge, Che publicly attacked Moscow, and Fidel attempted to stir up guerrilla movements across Latin America to rival the local communist parties. Symbolically, however, this second phase ended with Che’s death in Bolivia in 1967, during precisely such an attempt. Incidentally, the operation was so poorly managed that some suspected the Argentine had been sent to his death deliberately to remove the main obstacle to a rapprochement with the USSR.

From that moment on, alignment was once again complete, and Cuba supplied large numbers of soldiers and military advisers for the Soviet wars in the Third World, in exchange for oil and other subsidies totalling 10 billion dollars over 32 years. This is more than Western Europe received through the entire Marshall Plan and all the Latin American countries through the Alliance for Progress – some see this devastating drain on resources as the cause of the Soviet collapse. Thanks to this aid, Fidel was able to build a base of mass support by turning all Cubans into state employees and providing them with free or subsidised goods and services, even as the economy was in tatters and under a climate of authoritarianism that nevertheless drove at least a tenth of the population to flee the country. After the end of the USSR, a ‘special period’ of rationing began on the island, bringing the regime to the brink of collapse. But, surprisingly, Fidel survived – just as Franco in Spain had surprisingly survived the fall of his fascist allies after the Second World War. One of his assets was the long-standing anti-US sentiment among the Latin American public, who often regarded Fidel as a hero, and which consequently prompted the region’s governments not to press too hard for a transition.

At one point, Fidel also found a successor in the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who adopted a Soviet-style oil distribution policy. After the collapse of the USSR, Fidel also managed to attract foreign capital, which transformed the island into a tourist paradise, albeit at the cost of reviving mass prostitution – the eradication of which had been a source of pride for the regime. And at the start of the millennium, with the ‘Pink Tide’ sweeping the region with left-wing governments, Fidel regained influence and allies, and even Barack Obama initiated a ‘thaw’. In the meantime, however, old age had begun to take its toll. From 2006, Fidel began to hand over power to his brother Raúl, although the process would not be formally completed until a couple of years later. It was Raúl who initiated the process of economic liberalisation and transition to a market economy, in which Fidel maintained an ambiguous role: indirectly critical in the many writings he continued to publish, but without ever attacking it directly. This was the tone he also adopted regarding Obama’s visit: the culmination of this process, which, however, did not involve any political opening. The ‘Leftist Wave’ in Latin America also passed; Chávez died; allied governments either fell or found themselves in difficulty.

On 19 April 2016, Fidel Castro spoke once again during the closing ceremony of the 7th National Congress of the Communist Party. He said it might be “the last time” he addressed the assembly, and called for communist ideals to be kept alive. He died on 26 November: the same date, the 26th, as his year of birth and the attack on the Moncada Barracks. Following his brother’s death, Miguel Díaz-Canel, born a year after Fidel had come to power, took the helm. But Raúl is said to continue operating behind the scenes, even now at the age of 95. The economy, however, continues to plummet; the island suffers one blackout after another and is becoming depopulated as people leave; protests are on the rise, as is repression; and the proportion of the population in prison is the second highest in the world. Trump has now launched a new offensive, alternating between harsh new sanctions and offers of engagement. Even a CIA director has visited the island to hold talks, and one of Raúl’s grandsons is among the regime figures with whom Washington is negotiating.

As we wrote in the obituary following his death, ‘Fidel Castro was a giant of the 20th century, a figure who brought a small country to the centre of the world’s attention – a country which, without him, would simply have been remembered as a holiday destination. But, in fact, the same argument can be made, mutatis mutandis, for Alexander the Great and Macedonia, or for Napoleon and France, or for Mussolini and our own Italy. That of a jockey who, in his desire to achieve results beyond his horse’s capabilities, ends up causing it to collapse.”

One hundred years after his birth and ten years after his death, the Cuban regime is holding the “First International Colloquium on Fidel Castro: Legacy and Future”, attended by 1,500 delegates from 63 countries, to whom Miguel Díaz-Canel says that “Fidel is not the exclusive heritage of the Cuban people. It is not enough to manage his legacy; we must emulate him’. However, all things considered, these are low-key celebrations, given the country’s extremely difficult circumstances at present. Far more ostentatious is the enormous metal statue of Fidel erected on Avenida Bolívar in Managua at a cost that has not been made public but is estimated to be substantial, shortly after Daniel Ortega’s announcement that there will be no further elections in Nicaragua. As for the call to “emulate Fidel”, many fear that the statement signals an intention to establish a Cuban-style single-party state, although perhaps in the end it will simply result in the exclusion from the ballot of any opposition that is not merely a sham: as has, in fact, already happened. Among the many analyses, one might perhaps recall “Crisis: How Nations Are Reborn”: the 2019 book in which Jared Diamond observes how the coup in Chile in 1973 in particular, but also the whole wave of coups that shook Latin America between the 1960s and 1970s in general, can be explained by the local bourgeoisie’s deep-seated fear of suffering the same fate as the Cuban bourgeoisie, whom the Castro revolution had forced into mass exile.

This year, however, sees the publication of “L’internazionale reazionaria. Dall’America Latina all’Europa le reti della nuova destra”; a book by Donato Di Santo, formerly head of Latin American affairs for the PCI, PDS and DS, later Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs with responsibility for Latin America in the Prodi II government, and Secretary of the Italian-Latin American Institute. Although he has a wealth of experience in liaising with left-wing groups across the region, he was arrested in Cuba for having contacts with dissidents. His analysis focuses primarily on the right-wing surge in Latin America, which he attributes first and foremost to quasi-Gramscian strategies of intellectual penetration by certain US circles. However, he also highlights the simultaneous authoritarian drift of the left in Venezuela and Nicaragua, in a spiral in which the two extremes feed off one another, and in which the virus that all too often continues to undermine the democratic credibility of the Latin American left is, precisely, Fidel’s poisoned legacy. And that of those who have ‘emulated’ him.