Young Castro Research
Fidel Castro was not the bombastic, bilious revolutionary that we think we know. In fact, he was inspired by a very ordinary idea—a Cuba free and independent of foreign rule and dedicated to the wellbeing of all its people.
This essential liberal nationalist vision was stymied by a combination of historical factors, including the history of U.S.-Cuban relations going back centuries, the political and economic distortions besetting the young Cuban Republic, and the constraints of the Cold War, which converted a passionate political reformer into a committed revolutionary.
Though hardly the first to call for a free and independent Cuba, Castro meant it when he said it, making him not only radical but dangerous to establishment politicians left, right, and center, and to the outside banks and corporations that called the shots.
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.
Ángel Castro
Born in a peasant family in rural Galicia, Fidel Castro’s father Ángel was a first-generation entrepreneur and capitalist determined to ensure that his children never had to suffer the hardship he endured. (courtesy OAH)
Ángel Castro
In 1920, Ángel (45) met Lina Ruz González (19, seen here on horseback), who entered his household as a servant but quickly became his soul mate.
Castro Album – 3
Despite their age difference, the couple forged an effective partnership, with Ángel tak- ing care of the farm work while Lina balanced the books, ran the company store, and raised a family.The couple would have seven children in total, all of them born before they were married in 1943.
Fidel Castro as a young child
Fidel Castro, pictured here as a young boy, was born on August 13, 1926, on his parents’ vast farm in Birán, in what was then Oriente Province. Castro credited growing up alongside the children of his father’s Cuban and Haitian labor- ers with inoculating him against the snobbery and racism prevalent among many wealthy Cubans. (courtesy OAH)
The Castro Farmhouse
The Castro farmhouse. The bare undercarriage provided shelter for animals and farm equipment, the generous porch was the site of social gatherings, card games, and political wrangling. (courtesy OAH)
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The one-room schoolhouse on the Castro property. Castro always appreciated the value of education but never had much patience for the give-and-take of the classroom.
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At age seven, Castro was sent away for private tutoring to this home in Santiago de Cuba, where he passed six long months at the hands of an incompetent tutor. Starved for intellectual nourishment, as well as food, he regarded the experience as a form of banishment.
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The next year, Castro, at left with brothers Raúl and Ramón, entered Colegio de La Salle, an elite private school in Santiago de Cuba, where he relished the contact with peers and recreational excursions around Santiago Bay.
Castro 09
On school holidays, Castro loved to ride and hunt in the countryside above Birán, much of it owned or leased by Ángel, sometimes in the company of friends and siblings, but often on his own.
Young Fidel Castro riding a horse
So much time spent alone in the wilderness instilled in him the virtue of self-reliance, which proved useful as he moved from boarding school to boarding school, from university to politics, and from politics to guerrilla warfare.
The Castro Family
Castro, standing at left, surrounded (moving clockwise) by sister Angela, brother Ramón, sister Juanita, an aunt, and brother Raúl.
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At the age of twelve, having worn out his welcome at La Salle, Castro, second from the left in the front row, moved up the hill to Colegio de Dolores, one of the most prestigious schools on the island. Peers and prefects alike were impressed by his curiosity and athleticism.
Castro 13
In autumn 1942 Castro departed Santiago de Cuba for the nation’s capital and Colegio de Belén, a veritable factory of politicians and businessmen.
Castro 13
Castro, second from the left, quickly made a name for himself as a top athlete and student leader.
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Castro, second from left, on his basketball team.
Castro – 18
Though accomplished at soccer and basketball, Castro (at left on an outing in Pino del Río) also loved hiking and mountain climbing, sometimes helping his teachers get the boys out of dicey situations.
Castro – 19
In his last year of high school, Castro was selected as one of several Belén seniors to defend private school education before an audience of alumni, family, and political luminaries. Castro, who would later dismantle Cuba’s private education system, de- livered a much lauded performance.
Castro – 20
One of three valedictorians of the class of 1945, Castro’s caption reads: “He stood out in all subjects related to letters. Excellent and dependable, he always defended the School flag with valor and pride. . . . He goes on to a career in the Law and we have no doubt that he will fill the book of his life with brilliant pages.”
Castro – 21
The grand staircase, or Escalinata, at Havana University, which Castro entered in autumn 1945 as a first-year law school student. (J. Hansen)
Castro – 22
Arriving at university, Castro, seen here in his ubiquitous tie, first tried his hand at sports. Unable to compete on that level, he soon turned his attention to university politics, winning election as class delegate from Legal Anthropology to the Federación Estudantil Universitario in spring 1946. (courtesy OAH)
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Castro passes a paraffin test. University politics was a rough and tumble affair, and Castro often found himself on the wrong end of the law, always managing to elude the government’s charges. (courtesy OAH)
Castro – 24
In autumn 1947, the notoriously corrupt administration of President Ramón Grau tried to appropriate Cuba’s Liberty Bell, struck by Carlos Manuel Céspedes at the start of the Ten Years War in 1868. Castro led the student protest, coming to the attention of the nation’s press corps for the first time. (courtesy OAH)
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Castro en route to a student congress in Bogotá, Columbia in 1948. He saw his fight for reform in Cuba as part of a larger hemispheric, even global, struggle for democracy and social justice. (courtesy OAH)
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Castro and his bride Mirta Diaz-Balart, at their wedding celebration, October 11, 1948, at the American Club in the United Fruit Company town of Banes. The couple honeymooned in New York City. (courtesy OAH)
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Castro confronts Cuban Army General Quirino Uría at a student demonstration in January 1951. Castro’s family hoped that marriage and the arrival of a son, Fidelito, would lead to his domestication. It did not, as Castro’s involvement in national politics deepened. (courtesy OAH)
Castro – 28
In March 1952, Fulgencio Batista overthrew the government of President Carlos Prío. Dismayed by the nation’s passive response to the coup, Castro led these men in a foiled attack on the nation’s second largest military barracks in Santiago de Cuba on July 26, 1953. (courtesy OAH)
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Individuals arrested in the Moncada attack were assassinated on the spot, their bodies dispersed across the barracks in a sloppy attempt to cover up atrocity. (courtesy Marta Rojas)
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Picked up a few days later, Castro was interrogated by Colonel Alberto del Rio Chaviano, who tried to implicate Carlos Prío, Cuban Communists, and other political opponents in the attack. Seen here, Castro takes full responsibility. (courtesy OAH)
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No photographs were allowed inside the courthouse where the Moncada attackers were tried that September. Castro, seen in this cartoon rising to his own defense, turned the tables on the government so effectively that he was soon banished from the proceedings. (courtesy Marta Rojas)
Castro – 32
Castro was sentenced to twenty-six years in prison for his leadership of the Moncada attack (he would end up serving twenty months). Prison provided a useful time out, with Castro honing his political program and boning up on guerilla warfare with books provided by his friend Naty Revuelta. (courtesy Naty Revuelta)
Castro – 33
Castro looked forward to visiting days as much as any prisoner. No visitor provided more solace than his son Fidelito, here seated on his father’s lap at the Model Prison of the Isle of Pines. (courtesy OAH)
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Thanks to a nationwide amnesty campaign that would become the foundation of the political arm of the July 26th Movement, Castro and his fellow Moncada attackers were liberated from prison on Mother’s Day 1955. (courtesy OAH)
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Returning to Havana from prison, Castro was ripped from the train by a jubilant crowd, hoisted on its shoulders, and paraded through the city. (courtesy OAH)
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In his first press conference upon exiting prison, Castro made clear that he intended to continue his protest against Batista’s 1952 coup with all the rights and privileges guaranteed by the 1940 Constitution (then suspended). (courtesy OAH)
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Castro had a voracious appetite and loved to cook. Forced into exile in Mexico in July 1955, he is seen here with fellow conspirators enjoying one of his specialties, spaghetti marinara. (courtesy OAH)
Castro – 37
In November 1956, Castro returned to Cuba to begin the guerilla war, against the strenuous advice of allied dissident groups. Arriving on the southeast coast with 83 men aboard a boat built for eight, Castro ran aground, losing most of his equipment and some of his men in a mangrove swamp a mile wide. (J. Hansen)
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Fifteen men survived the botched landing, eventually making it to the nearly impenetrable fasts of Cuba’s Sierra Maestra. With the Sierra providing cover and local peasants acting as commissary and quartermaster, Castro waged a successful war of attrition defying seemingly impossible odds. (J. Hansen)
Castro – 40
Batista fled the country on New Year’s Eve 1958-9. On January 2, 1959, Castro began a week-long march to Havana on which he convinced a hitherto largely aloof Cuban public that he, they, and the Revolution were one and the same. (Getty images)