[NYTr] Fidel Castro - The first rebellion (Ramonet Excerpt #2)

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Tim Murphy - activ-l


The Guardian - Oct 29, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/cuba/story/0,,2201088,00.html

[This is the 2nd 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
guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.]


Fidel Castro: 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 Birán, 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 Birán, 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 Birán, 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 Ramón Grau San Martín, 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
Birán, 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 Birán's
schoolteacher, Eufrasia Feliú. 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, Néstor, and his
other daughter, Belén, who supposedly taught the piano but didn't have
a single student. Later on, there was also a campesina, Esmérida, whom
they brought in as a maid. They never paid her a penny. The teacher
herself remained in Birán 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. Birán 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 Feliú and her family.

At least, it was at the beginning. After a while, my older brother
Ramón 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 Birán. 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 Birán'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.