ABSTRACT
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was the son of Angel Castro, a wealthy Spanishborn landowner and of a Cuban, Lina Ruz. Fidel was born in 1926 in the village of Birán, near the northern coast of eastern Cuba. He and his brother Raúl were sent to schools run by the Jesuit Fathers: first in Santiago, and later in Havana. According to a popular biographer, during his years at the Jesuit Colegio Belén, in Havana, Fidel read avidly works by contemporary political leaders, including Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and José Antonio Primo de Rivera. In 1945, he entered law school at the University of Havana, where he seemed more interested in political student organizations than in the study of law. In 1947 he became involved in an abortive expedition from Cuba’s Cayo Confites to the Dominican Republic, to overthrow dictator Rafael L. Trujillo. While at the University of Havana, he married Mirta Díaz-Balart, member of a wealthy family from eastern Cuba close to General Batista. Luis Aguilar, a school mate from Santiago, told Fidel biographer Georgie Ann Geyer that the future revolutionary leader was receptive to Gustavo Pittaluga’s Diálogos sobre el Destino, known in Cuba before its publication through and abridged version read in the radio program Universidad del Aire, while he, Aguilar, had doubted that Frenchspeaking Haiti or English-speaking Jamaica would ever accept Spanish Cuba as their leader.1 In 1952, Castro was running for congressman as a candidate of the Ortodoxo Party, when Batista’s coup d’état took place. He joined the opposition to Batista, and on July 26, 1953, he led the suicidal attack on the Moncada Army barracks, outside Santiago de Cuba, mentioned in the previous chapter. After being captured, he barely escaped being killed on the spot, thanks to the intercession of Enrique Pérez Serantes, the Archbishop of Santiago de Cuba, who arrived in the nick of time.2 Castro was tried and condemned to 15 years in prison for his responsibility in the Moncada Barracks attack, but in 1955 his sentence was commuted, and he left Cuba for Mexico. In Mexico, he joined his brother Raúl, and he met the Argentinean medical doctor and Marxist agitator Ernesto Guevara.
