Fidel Castro

Fidel Castro: The Defendant Who Kept the Verdict

In October 1953, sentenced to fifteen years for an attack that had killed most of the men who followed him, Fidel Castro acted as his own counsel and closed with a phrase that became the title of the pamphlet he smuggled out of prison: History Will Absolve Me. He was twenty-seven and had just failed comprehensively - six of his rebels dead, twenty-two captured and executed without trial. Five and a half years later he had the country, and he held it longer than any non-royal head of state of the twentieth or twenty-first centuries.

Biran

Castro was born on 13 August 1926 in Biran, in eastern Cuba, out of wedlock, to Angel Castro y Argiz, a Galician migrant who had prospered in sugar, and Lina Ruz Gonzalez, of Canarian descent. He had five brothers, among them Raul, and seven sisters. He was educated by Jesuits at La Salle and Dolores in Santiago and then at El Colegio de Belen in Havana from 1942, before reading law at the University of Havana from 1945, where student politics absorbed him entirely. He joined the Party of the Cuban People in 1947, took part in an attempted coup in the Dominican Republic that same year and in the fighting in Colombia in 1948, and graduated as a Doctor of Law in September 1950. He practised on behalf of poor clients and stood for Congress in 1952 - an election cancelled by Fulgencio Batista's military coup.

Moncada

On 26 July 1953 he led 165 revolutionaries against the Moncada barracks near Santiago. It was a disaster: six of his men killed, fifteen wounded, twenty-two captured and shot. He escaped into the Sierra Maestra with nineteen. Arrested and tried with 122 others that September, he named Jose Marti as the intellectual author of the attack, exposed the army's torture of suspects, and was sentenced on 16 October to fifteen years on the Isla de Pinos. In prison he read Marx, Lenin, Marti, Freud, Kant, Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky, renamed his group the 26th of July Movement after the date of his own defeat, and arranged publication of his defence speech. He was amnestied on 15 May 1955.

The Granma

In Mexico he met the Argentine physician Ernesto Guevara and the Spanish military instructor Alberto Bayo, and toured the United States raising money. On 25 November 1956 he sailed from Tuxpan aboard a decrepit yacht called Granma with eighty-one armed men, a nineteen-hundred-kilometre crossing that took seven days and ended aground in a mangrove swamp. Nineteen of the eighty-two reached the Sierra Maestra; the rest were killed or captured. From that remainder he built an army. By July 1957 he had over two hundred fighters in three columns; by spring 1958 the rebels controlled a hospital, schools, a printing press and a munitions factory. Batista's conscripts could not fight them, and Washington cut off his weapons. On 1 January 1959 Batista fled with more than 300 million dollars. Castro reached Havana on 9 January and appointed himself Prime Minister on 16 February.

What He Did With It

The agrarian reform of May 1959 capped landholdings at 993 acres and redistributed roughly 15 per cent of the national wealth inside a year. Sugar, oil refineries, banks and American-owned businesses were nationalised. More classrooms opened in the first thirty months than in the preceding thirty years; universal childhood vaccination was introduced and infant mortality fell sharply; a thousand kilometres of road went in during the first six months. In September 1960 he created the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution, a neighbourhood surveillance network that by 1970 involved 80 per cent of the population. On May Day 1960 he cancelled the elections he had promised, arguing that mass demonstrations were a purer form of democracy. In December 1961 he acknowledged that he had been a Marxist-Leninist for years.

The Americans

Eisenhower authorised covert CIA operations against him in March 1960 with a 13 million dollar budget; the embargo followed in October, and diplomatic relations were severed in January 1961. In April 1961 the CIA-trained Brigade 2506 landed at the Bay of Pigs. Castro directed the counterattack himself and forced a surrender within four days; 1,189 prisoners were interrogated on live television and eventually exchanged for 25 million dollars in medicine and food. The following year Khrushchev installed nuclear missiles on the island. During the crisis Castro urged the Soviet leader to launch a nuclear strike if Cuba were invaded; Khrushchev instead traded the missiles for an American pledge not to invade and the withdrawal of warheads from Turkey and Italy, without consulting him. Castro considered it a betrayal.

The Long Middle

He backed revolutionary movements almost everywhere - the Viet Cong, the Black Panthers, guerrillas across Latin America, troops to Algeria, the Congo and the Angolan civil war - and led the Non-Aligned Movement from 1979 to 1983. Guevara's death in Bolivia in 1967 devastated him. At home the economy declined steadily: rationing by the early 1960s, a Great Revolutionary Offensive in 1968 that closed the last private businesses and cut productivity further, and a steady drain of doctors and engineers to Florida. Protestant churches were persecuted from 1963 as "instruments of imperialism," and between 1965 and 1967 gay men were confined to military labour units. He was First Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party from 1965 to 2011, Prime Minister from 1959 to 1976 and President from 1976 to 2008.

Why Fidel Is Called a Genius

The faculty in question is political calculation joined to narrative control, and the evidence for it is specific. Moncada was a military catastrophe, and he converted his own trial into the founding scripture of a movement, then named the movement after the date of the defeat. The Granma landing lost sixty-two of eighty-two men within days; he built a state from the nineteen who survived. In July 1959 he announced his resignation, blaming President Urrutia's anti-communism, waited for the crowds to demand him back, and returned five days later with Urrutia replaced by a Marxist - a manoeuvre requiring an exact reading of what a population would do when told it was losing him. He denied communist convictions while installing communists in every senior post, and admitted the truth only once it could no longer be used against him.

The counter-case is that none of it transferred to governing. The intelligence that took power was largely useless at running an economy: steep decline by 1962 from mismanagement and low productivity, food rationing, the 1968 closure of small businesses that made things worse, and the emigration of the professional class. In the missile crisis, the sharpest strategist in the hemisphere urged a nuclear first strike and was then simply excluded from the negotiations. And the surveillance state, the executions, the labour units for gay men and the fifty-year absence of elections describe a leader who solved the problem of opposition by abolishing it. He wrote the limit himself, in June 1961: "Within the Revolution, everything goes; against the Revolution, nothing." Call it tactical genius, and be precise that it was genius at taking and holding power, not at using it.

The Long Ending

Ill health forced him to transfer his duties to Raul in June 2006; his brother was formally elected president in 2008. He died of natural causes on 25 November 2016, aged ninety, sixty years to the day after the Granma sailed. He collected the Lenin Peace Prize, the Order of Lenin and an honorary doctorate from Moscow State University. World opinion never settled: to supporters an anti-imperialist who delivered literacy and medicine to a country that had neither, to critics a dictator whose record includes mass emigration, hundreds of executions and decades of poverty. Both accounts are drawn from the same fifty years.