Fidel Castro - The first rebellion
 
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2007 07:48:34 -0500 (CDT)

Monday October 29, 2007
The Guardian 
www.guardian.co.uk

The first rebellion

Though the son of a wealthy landowner, Fidel Castro grew up in rural Cuba,
where his friends went barefoot and were largely illiterate. In the second
extract from his autobiography, he talks about snobbishness, the cruelty of
his schooldays, and being a 'vengeful little devil'.
 
--

I was born 81 years ago on a farm called Biran, in the former province of
Oriente, not far from the Bay of Nipe on the north-east coast of Cuba. There
wasn't a town, or even a village, just a few isolated houses in a landscape
regularly shaken by hurricanes, cyclones, waterspouts and earthquakes. The
road that passed through the settlement, the old Camino Real, was nothing
more than a mud track along which people travelled on horseback or in ox
carts. There were no motor vehicles. There was no electric light either.
When I was little, we lit the house with candles and kerosene lamps.

My father was a Spaniard from the village of Lancara, in the province of
Lugo, where the custom was to shelter the animals underneath the house. So
our home was built on wooden piles, like stilts, and I remember that when I
was three or four, the cows slept under the house, alongside chickens,
ducks, guinea fowl, turkeys and even a few geese. Two floors above was a
little superstructure that we called the mirador. And it was there that I
came into the world, on August 13 1926, at 2am.

My father was a landowner, who owned and rented some 11,000 hectares (42
square miles) stretching over mountains and into valleys, filled with pine
forests, sugar cane and livestock. Don Angel Castro was highly respected, a
man of great authority in that almost feudal area and time. But he had
worked hard to reach that position: the son of poor campesinos - peasant
farmers - he had come to Cuba in his early 20s to fight in the second war of
independence, which began in 1895. No one knows exactly how he came, in what
conditions. Even after I was old enough to do so, I never talked about those
things with my father. But my brothers and sisters believe that my father
was one of those hard-up Spanish boys who was paid to do military service in
the place of some rich man.

There are many stories of his generosity. When the tiempo muerto came - the
time after the harvest when there was very little work - then often a man
would come and say, "My children are hungry ... we have nothing, I need
work." My father would invent some new field that needed clearing, just to
make jobs for people.

My mother, Lina, was a Cuban. Her family was originally from the Canary
Islands. She, too, was of campesino origin, and her family was very poor.
Her father was a carter, who transported sugar cane in an ox cart.

My mother was virtually illiterate, and, like my father, learned to read and
write practically on her own. I never heard her say that she'd gone to
school. She was a cook, a doctor, a carer for all of us - she provided every
single thing we might need, and she was a shoulder to cry on for any problem
we might have. She brought seven children into the world, all born in that
house, and nobody ever knew where she got the time and energy to do
everything she did.

When I was a child in Biran, fewer than 20% of the people who lived there
knew how to read and write, and even those did so with great difficulty, so
I understand how much an illiterate person suffers. What is an illiterate
person? He's the guy on the last rung of the social ladder, way down there.

In Biran, the people who didn't know how to read and write would ask those
who did to write a letter to the woman they were courting, for example. But
a man didn't dictate a letter - tell her so-and-so and so-and-so, that he
had dreamed about her last night and that he was not eating for thinking
about her, that sort of thing. No, he'd say, "No, no, you just write
whatever you think I ought to write to her." To win over the girlfriend! I'm
not exaggerating. I lived during a time when things were like that.

As for me, I learned to read and write with the help of my mother and by
sitting in the village school, in a class of 25 children of whom I was the
youngest. I don't know quite how I picked it up - probably by watching the
other kids, there in the front row where the teacher had put me.

I was lucky to be the son of a landowner, not the grandson. If I'd been the
grandson of a rich family, I'd have had an aristocratic birth, and all my
friends and all my culture would have been marked by a sense of superiority.
But where I was born I mixed with people from the humblest of origins.

Not far from my own house were some rickety barrack-like buildings, some
huts with dirt floors and palm-leaf roofs, where a few dozen Haitian
immigrants lived in grim conditions; they worked during the cultivation and
harvesting of the sugar cane, which was the farm's major activity. A few
years later, after protectionist laws were passed under President Ramsn Grau
San Martmn, I saw Haitians with whom I had eaten roasted corn on the cob
expelled from Cuba, to face who knows what terrible hardships in their own
country - which was and is even poorer than Cuba.

I also remember the illiterate unemployed men who would stand in line near
the cane fields, with nobody to bring them a drop of water, or breakfast, or
lunch, or give them shelter, or transport. And I can't forget those children
going barefoot. All the children I played with in Biran, all those I grew up
with, ran around with, all over the place, were very, very poor. At
lunchtime, I would bring some of them a big can full of the food that was
left over from meals at my house. I would go with them down to the river to
hunt birds - a terrible thing but it was common to use a slingshot. Later,
when I went to school in Santiago and then Havana, I mixed with landowners'
children, but I didn't acquire bourgeois culture. My parents didn't visit
people and rarely had guests. They didn't have the culture or the customs of
a family from the wealthy class - or the snobbishness. My parents never told
me, "Don't play with this boy or that boy!"

About 100 yards from our house was a cockfight enclosure. That was the main
entertainment in the countryside, apart from dominoes and cards. My father,
when he was a young soldier, loved to play cards, and was apparently
excellent at it. And in my house there was also, from the time I was about
three years old, one of those wind-up phonographs to play music. Nobody even
had radio until I was 10 or 11.

Long before then, because I was the son of a rich man, I had become the
victim of exploitation. When I was six, my parents thought it would be a
good idea for me and my sister Angelita, who was three years older than me,
to study in Cuba's second city, Santiago de Cuba, in the south-east of the
island. There we would live at the house of Biran's schoolteacher, Eufrasia
Feliz. I was curious to see what that would be like, so I went without a
second thought.

Santiago was a small city at that time, compared with what it is today, but
it still made a tremendous impression on me, very similar to when I was 16
and saw Havana for the first time. It was here that I first saw the open
sea, and I was stunned.

The teacher's home had a porch with a beautiful view of the Sierra Maestra
mountain range and the Bay of Santiago was nearby. But the interior was
narrow, dark and damp - just a little living room with a piano, two bedrooms
and a bathroom. The roof would leak when it rained and everything would get
wet; it seemed to rain more inside than out. This was home to me and
Angelita, the teacher's father, Nistor, and his other daughter, Belin, who
supposedly taught the piano but didn't have a single student. Later on,
there was also a campesina, Esmirida, whom they brought in as a maid. They
never paid her a penny. The teacher herself remained in Biran during the
school year but came home during the holidays.

I had gone to Santiago for my education, but once I was in the teacher's
house I was never given a single lesson. I was just there, without even a
radio to pass the time. The only thing I ever heard was the piano: do, re,
mi, fa, sol, la, ti, bang, bang, bang. Can you imagine, a couple of hours
every day listening to that piano? It is amazing I didn't turn out to be a
musician.

The teacher's sister, the pianist, was meant to give me my first-grade
classes, elementary school, but it never happened. Instead, I taught myself
to add, multiply, subtract and divide from a school notebook, whose back was
printed with the basic tables. But that was all I learned, except perhaps
"French manners". The family, who I think had Haitian roots, spoke French
perfectly, and they had a very good formal education. And all those rules,
all those rules of etiquette, they taught them to me from the very
beginning. You had to speak very politely, you couldn't raise your voice,
you couldn't say a single improper word. Once in a while they would spank
you, to keep you in line.

I soon tired of that life, that house, that family, those rules. It was the
instinctive reaction of a small, mistreated animal. Worst of all, though,
was the hunger. Biran was like a paradise of abundance, and my parents had
to scold us to make us eat: "Eat this soup, eat that meat, eat this, eat
that." In Santiago, they would serve just a little bit of food, and what
arrived for lunch was also supposed to do us for dinner. The food came from
the house of one of the teacher's cousins, whom they called Cosita - "Little
Thing". She was a very fat lady, and apparently she was the one who ate all
the food. The cooking would be done at her house, and another cousin would
bring over the cantinita, a stack of round metal containers holding a little
rice, some beans, sweet potato and plantains. I remember using the edge of
my fork to pick up the last grain of rice on my plate. And rice was cheap!

Of course, there were mitigating circumstances: the teacher's family was
poor. They lived on her salary; that was all they had. And the government
often didn't pay teachers their salary. Sometimes they would have to wait
three months or more for their money. That created uncertainty and
self-centredness. Every centavo, the way it was spent, was a question of
life and death for Eufrasia Feliz and her family.

At least, it was at the beginning. After a while, my older brother Ramsn
came to join us, which meant three sets of fees coming in. As the household
became richer, the teacher saved up money, bought some furniture and even
went on a trip to Niagara Falls. She brought back some little flags as
souvenirs. What misery! You can't imagine the hours I spent listening to her
talk about her journey. It was Niagara this and Niagara that, the same
stories over and over. And all of this was paid for with our hunger! My
sister recently told me that she tried to write to our parents to tell them
what we were going through, but our hosts intercepted her letters.

Eventually, however, my mother visited Santiago and discovered that all
three of us were skinny and half starving to death. That day she took us out
of there and carried us to the best cafe in town; I think we devoured every
bit of ice cream in the place. It was also mango season, so she bought a
sack of delicious little Toledo mangoes. That sack didn't last 10 minutes.

The next day Mother took us home to Biran. By now, we three children were
sworn enemies of that teacher, who would come to our house to have lunch and
always pick the best pieces of chicken out of the rice. Perhaps what came
next was my first act of rebellion; it was definitely vengeance.

During term-time, the teacher lived in Biran's schoolhouse, which had a roof
of corrugated metal, and one evening, as it got dark, we armed ourselves
with slingshots we had made from forked branches from a guava tree and some
strips of rubber. There was a bakery nearby, and we took all the firewood
for the oven and made ourselves a fort, and we set up a bombardment that
seemed to last half an hour. It was wonderful! The rocks landing on that
zinc roof above the teacher's head! By the time two or three were hitting
the roof, there would be two or three more in the air. You couldn't even
hear the yells and screams that we imagined the teacher was making for the
noise of the rocks hitting that roof. Oh, we were vengeful little devils.

---

7 This is an edited extract from My Life by Fidel Castro with Ignacio
Ramonet, published by Allen Lane on November 1 at #25. ) Ignacio Ramonet and
Random House Mondadori, 2006, 2007. Translation ) Andrew Hurley 2007. To
order a copy for #23 with free UK p&p, go to www.guardian.co.uk/bookshop or
call 0870 836 0875.

=======

http://www.guardian.co.uk/cuba/story/0,,2201088,00.html

=======