ABSTRACT
Fidel Castro’s radical worldview and his penchant for actively pursuing social justice are not necessarily consistent with his middle-class background. Some of his social beliefs are responses to his boyhood environment. He recalls his early classmates as extremely poor, with average intelligence; they dropped out of school into “a bottomless, hopeless sea of ignorance and penury,” and he notes that “their children will follow in their footsteps, crushed under the burden of social fatalism. Fidel’s rebels, known as the Centennial Generation because the Monaca attack corresponded to the hundredth birthday of José Marti, were led by people with advanced political awareness. The unifying theme of the 26th of July Movement was not Marxism-Leninism, but armed struggle that would lead to radical political and social transformations. Fidel stressed the incompatibility between reform and revolution, and the majority of Cuba’s nonsocialist radicals began to agree with him and realized that socialism represented the more humane choice.
