Fidel Castro soon realized that the rules at the 200-year-old university were different from those at Belén College. He recalled:
When I was 18, I was, politically speaking, illiterate. Since I didn’t come from a family of politicians or grow up in a political atmosphere, it would have been impossible for me to carry out a revolutionary role … , in a relatively brief time, had I not had a special calling.… I had the feeling that a new field was opening up for me. I started thinking about my country’s political problems.… I spontaneously started to feel a certain concern, an interest in social and political questions.45
At first his fellow-students did not know what to make of him. “I was in a panic,” recalled Alfredo Guevara (no relative of “Che”) of their first encounter in autumn 1945. “Here was this Castro dressed up fit to kill in his black party suit, handsome, self-assured, aggressive, and obviously a leader.… I saw him as a political threat.” Guevara, already then a Communist activist and still today reputedly a close follower of Castro’s, was convinced that the very “spectre of clericalism” had come to clean up the campus.46 But he was mistaken: Castro was no one’s instrument. His goals were his own.
It quickly became clear that Castro was not interested only in studying; he also wanted to get involved in university politics. His aim was to become president of the FEU. The groups running the organization courted him as a student with leadership abilities and a gift for public speaking, and the then-president Manolo Castro would have been quite happy to see his namesake succeed him. Evidently some of them trusted the farmer’s son from Oriente to show a firm hand in conducting the union’s crooked practices. Although Fidel realized he could do nothing politically without the UIR or the MSR, he tried various juggling acts. For if he was to be president of the FEU, he did not want to be at the mercy of those responsible for the deplorable state of affairs; he needed to have his own power base. This took time to achieve, and it was only in his third semester that he managed to become vice-president of the students’ union in the faculty of law. For a year or so, he tried to raise his profile as an independent figure.
The MSR was not prepared to accept that and eventually put him on its blacklist. Masferrer’s henchman Salabarría, whom Fidel described as “master of the capital,”47 issued him with an ultimatum: shut up or quit the university. Fidel reminisced:
This was a great moment of decision. The conflict struck my personality like a cyclone. Alone, on the beach, facing the sea, I examined the situation. Personal danger … made my return to the University an act of unheard-of temerity. But not to return would be to give in to threats, to give in before bullies.… I decided to go back and I went back – with arms in my hand.48
Clearly, for a time Castro would draw closer to the UIR and seek its protection.
Back at the university, defying threats with a kind of bodyguard of friends, he began to settle into the role of spiritual grandson of the martyred apostle José Martí and to make the unfinished Cuban Revolution his personal cause. Theory and practice gradually became welded together. From Martí’s voluminous work, “whom [he] never tired of reading in those days,”49 he stored a treasure of quotes in his memory to embellish his carefully rehearsed speeches. He started to make ever more frequent appearances outside the university, acting as main speaker and agitator in demonstrations against the government. The newspapers published reports about him, sometimes splashing them across their pages. Charming and agile with words, tall, youthful and sporting, decked out in double-breasted suit and tie, with dark back-combed hair and a classical Greek profile, the young man just turned 21 cut an impressive figure and answered the dreams of many a potential mother-in-law. According to the later testimony of fellow-students, he was very shy and reserved with women, though anything but chaste. Slightly tending to corpulence, he nevertheless managed to keep fit through his favorite sport, baseball, which he played for the university in spite of the political demands on his time. As we have seen, he performed remarkable feats on the field, and his success in matches against US teams eventually brought him to the attention of American talent scouts. In 1949 the New York Giants offered him a professional contract, with a bonus of 5,000 dollars on signature. “We couldn’t believe he turned us down,” their negotiator later recalled. “Nobody from Latin America had said ‘no’ before.”50
His temperament was beginning to get the better of him. Shortly after a police truncheon had found his head at a demonstration against higher bus fares and left him sporting a thick bandage, he attended a meeting between students and President Grau. When the latter left the room for a brief moment, Castro whispered to his friends: “I have the formula to take power and once and for all get rid of this son-of-a-bitch … when the old guy [Grau] returns, let’s pick him up, the four of us, and throw him off the balcony. Once the president is dead, we’ll proclaim the triumph of the student revolution and speak to the people from the radio.” His companion, Alfred “Chino” Esquivel, immediately squashed the idea: “Listen, dope, you’re off your head.” The president remained alive.51
On three occasions Castro was accused of involvement in an assassination attempt, but the claims were never substantiated and turned out to have been at least partly invented for ulterior motives.52 In the first case, he is supposed to have shot a UIR fellow-student in the lung in December 1946;53 other sources suggest that he missed his intended victim when the bullet hit an uninvolved student in the leg.54 On February 22, 1948, the national sports manager Manolo Castro (no relative of Fidel’s) was gunned down outside a Havana cinema. Although a UIR member was arrested pistol in hand as the presumed assassin, a nephew of MSR boss Masferrer publicly accused Fidel of the deed. Apparently, the murder was an act of revenge for the spectacular slaying of UIR leader Tro by Salabarría’s pistoleros, in the course of a gun battle that raged for hours. Many years later, Manolo Castro’s comrade and successor as FEU president, Enrique Ovares, said at his home in Miami to Fidel’s American biographer Tad Szulc: “Fidel had absolutely nothing to do with the Manolo Castro thing.”55 Hugh Thomas, for his part, concludes that Fidel probably took part in a meeting which agreed on the assassination.56 In the third case, a little under four months later, Fidel was accused of shooting a police officer, Óscar Fernández Caral, outside his home on June 6, 1948. Allegedly Caral identified Fidel as the assassin with his dying breath, but after he publicly protested the witness admitted that the police had bribed him to say this.57 In the days following the victory of the revolution, Fidel himself looked back on the period: “I was the Don Quixote of the university, always under the guns and bullets. What I suffered at the university has more merit than the Sierra Maestra.”58 He certainly seems to have been involved in tough battles. “I lived through difficult moments in this university, very difficult, so much so that it is purely by chance that I survived those university years.”59
As in his school years, he trusted very few people sufficiently to take their advice. One of these few was Eduardo Chibás, then a 40-year-old senator, who in spring 1947 left his original political home as an auténtico (a member of the Authentic Revolutionary Party of Cuba, from which Grau and Prío also came) and founded the Partido Popular Cubano (PPC – Cuban People’s Party). The PPC, which soon became known as the “Orthodox” party, won support as the first serious opposition to the government and embraced the values and principles of the heroic freedom-fighter Martí: that is to say, “nationalism, anti-imperialism, socialism, economic independence, political liberty and social justice.”60 Castro immediately joined the party and remained a member until it broke up eight years later. For the first time he too had something like a political home. Chibás, nearly twice the age of the 21-year-old Castro, became his mentor and model. His unyielding and honest political behavior, expressed in frequent radio broadcasts exposing cases of political corruption, made a great impact on Castro and eventually encouraged him to stand for Congress in the parliamentary and presidential elections of 1952.
Meanwhil
e, however, Castro seems to have agreed a kind of truce with his enemies. In the summer of 1947, he was in on the action when the Dominican writer and future president Juan Bosch, together with a group of wealthy exiles, assembled a motley force of 1,200 men to overthrow the bloody US-backed dictator Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Castro thus found himself in the company of all manner of idealists, as well as adventurers and university gang members hired as mercenaries. They carried out two months of guerrilla training, not far from his own birthplace, but the bizarre enterprise failed as a result of treachery. The Cuban navy, apparently under pressure from Washington, boarded their little ship the Fantasma off Cuba’s north-east coast. Profiting from a moment when no one was watching, the chairman of the Cuban University Committee for Democracy in the Dominican Republic – none other than Fidel Castro – jumped overboard and swam nearly 10 nautical miles, through supposedly shark-infested waters, to Saetía in the familiar Bay of Nipe, and then made his way to his parents’ home in Birán. An almighty row ensued with his father – not least because Fidel had wasted the whole semester on his first revolutionary activities.
Castro took a growing interest in Latin American politics. Again like Martí before him, he even became active in the movement for Puerto Rican independence, as well as showing solidarity with the student movements in Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, and Panama, which were demanding an end to colonialist policies (especially of the United States) in the region. In April 1948 he helped organize a congress of Latin American student organizations in the Colombian capital Bogotá – to be held in parallel with the Ninth Interamerican Meeting of Foreign Ministers, which was supposed to prepare the founding of the Organization of American States. Castro traveled with his friend, the FEU general secretary Alfredo Guevara, to a country which for two years had been wracked by a bloody civil war between supporters of the Conservative and the Liberal Party.
On April 7 in Bogotá, Castro met the popular leader of the Liberal opposition, the lawyer Eliécer Gaitán, who struck him as in many ways similar to “Eddy” Chibás. Two days later, an hour or so before they were due to meet a second time, Gaitán was gunned down in the street in front of his office. The presumed assassin, the mentally deranged Juan Roa Sierra, was lynched on the spot by an angry crowd. Gaitán’s death triggered a day-long orgy of violence, during which Fidel allowed himself to get carried away with gun in hand amid the streetfighting. “I realized that it was a revolution.… Gaitán’s death was a terrible crime. So I took sides.… There was tremendous disorder, almost no discipline and no organization.… I was filled with revolutionary fervor, trying to get as many people as possible to join the revolutionary movement.”61 More than 3,500 people were killed during the disturbances, which have gone down in the history of Latin America as the bogotazo. Subsequently, the security forces blamed “communists from Cuba” (that is, Castro and his comrades) for the acts of violence. But “the truth is,” he said later, “that we had nothing to do with it. As young, idealistic, Don Quixote-like students, we simply joined in the people’s rebellion.”62 They only barely escaped with their lives. “It’s incredible, truly incredible, that we weren’t all killed.”63 Was Castro a Communist by that time? “I had already studied the basics of Marxism-Leninism,” he tells us, “but I could not say that I was a Marxist-Leninist at that time, much less a member of the Communist Party or even of the Communist Youth.”64
On October 12, 1948, two days after the inauguration of Grau’s successor Prío as Cuban president, the 22-year-old Fidel Castro married a philosophy student of the same age, Mirta Díaz-Balart, the sister of his fellow-student and friend Rafael Díaz-Balart. The ceremony took place in the Catholic church in the bride’s home town of Banes, in Oriente Province, not far from Fidel’s own birthplace. As it happened, Fulgencio Batista also originated from Banes, a town that owed its very existence to the United Fruit Company. Mirta’s father was its mayor and public prosecutor, and apparently also worked for Batista, so that Fidel was marrying into a family with the best political connections. Admittedly he seemed to belong in the opposition, but there was a secret hope that the family bond might recoup his evident political talents for the other camp. The bride’s father came up with 10,000 dollars for their three-month honeymoon, and Batista himself is said to have contributed 1,000. The couple traveled to Florida, and then by train to New York, where Fidel apparently bought a copy of Marx’s Das Kapital.
The following year saw the birth of their son, on September 1, 1949. In keeping with Cuban tradition, he was given his father’s name – only in the diminutive form of Fidelito (“Little Fidel”). Soon Castro was finding less and less time for the family. It was his wish that, despite having affluent parents, they should live in the most modest circumstances, which meant at first a hotel room in Havana and later a sparsely furnished two-room flat. From his own father he received 80 pesos a month. But for a while they had so little to eat that their child fell seriously ill with deficiency symptoms. When his car was taken away because he could not keep up payments, Castro temporarily sank into depression and kept to his bed. He kept his wife out of his political activities, perhaps because he felt suspicious of her family.
Soon after the founding of the Orthodox Party, Castro started to build a power base of his own in the shape of a youth organization, the Acción Radical Ortodoxo (ARO). But in 1949, when the ARO and the youth organization of the Communist Party set up a “30th of September Committee” to combat the spread of political gangsterism, his unexplained associations with the gangs meant that he initially had to remain outside. Feeling compelled to make a spectacular gesture that would clear him of all suspicion, he publicly distanced himself from both the UIR and MSR in late November 1949 before a meeting of heads of faculties and some 500 students; he astounded his audience and delighted the newspapers by naming all the gang members, politicians, and student leaders who had been profiting from the “pact” with President Prío. “The problem then was to get Fidel out of there alive,” remarked Max Lesnick, leader at that time of the Orthodox Youth Association. He placed Castro in the passenger seat of his Cabriolet and, using the element of surprise, simply roared off in full view of everyone. He then hid Castro for a fortnight in his apartment, because those he had accused were in such a rage that “he would [have been] killed if he went out in the street.”65 Friends persuaded Castro to make himself scarce for a while, and he spent a period of four months “in exile” in New York – again like his model Martí. Not even his wife, left at home with the three-month-old Fidelito, knew where he was staying.
When Castro returned to Havana early in 1950, half a year was enough for him to catch up with two missed years of study. “No, I was not a good student.… I became a last-minute crammer, … a good finalist.”66 In any event, his quickness of comprehension and his exceptional memory ensured that in September 1950, at the age of 24, he passed his exams and became a doctor three times over: in law, social science, and international law. His marriage to Mirta Díaz-Balart had opened doors to the Cuban oligarchy and well-paid legal work, as well as bringing such advantages as membership of the exclusive Havana Yacht Club (to which not even Batista was admitted, because of his half-caste origins). Castro’s brother-in-law Rafael Díaz-Balart, who at that time was leader of the youth wing of Batista’s Unitary Action Party, set up a meeting between Batista and Castro in the former’s luxurious estate near Havana, even though Castro was already considered a political opponent.67 But the future dictator did not manage to win the young man’s support for his interests. Instead, Castro and two ex-student friends opened a legal advice center for poor people in a rundown office block in the Old Town; he continued to live from hand to mouth and moved back into politics.
A mysterious event occurred on the evening of August 5, 1951, when Eduardo Chibás, who had excellent prospects of becoming president after the 1952 elections, shot himself in the belly with a .38 Colt during his weekly radio broadcast. Castro rushed over and took him to hospital, bu
t he died there 11 days later. As the reason given for Chibás’s act of despair was his inability to prove the charges of corruption he had made against one of Prío’s ministers, Castro now felt compelled to furnish the proof posthumously for his former patron. He came up with the goods four months later, and their publication unleashed a major political scandal.
Many already thought that Castro was not just a promising contender for Congress but a president in the making.68 They were right, of course, although Fulgencio Batista, the friend of his parents-in-law, made sure that he did not take the customary route to that office. At daybreak on March 10, 1952, the presidential candidate with the least chance of success staged a military coup that put an end to the election campaign and Cuba’s corrupt democracy. Proclaiming himself head of state, Batista went on to build a thoroughly corrupt dictatorship. It would not be long before the mafioso Meyer Lansky became his official adviser for casino reform, and not much longer than that before both men were raking in the millions.69
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