Fidel Castro - The Silver Spoon Bastard (Part IV)

Fidel Castro (age 17) hunting at Las Manacas

Fidel Castro, Age 18

As I have noted in prior posts, Fidel Castro's childhood was the classic recipe for disaster.

In Part III of my discussion on Fidel I concentrated on his early childhood, a childhood that served as the foundation for Castro's inferiority complex, his growing hatred for the social elite, and his never ending, underlying desire to please a cold, distant father.

Part IV will continue my journey through Castro's past by examining his teenage years, which only served to shore up the dysfunctional foundation that was set in place from his earlier childhood.

People familiar with Fidel Castro as a teenager have described him as a lying, manipulative young man. For example, while at the Colegio de Dolores, Fidel reportedly went to his school's administration office and claimed to have lost his report card. He hadn't really lost the card but was concerned about what his mother and father would say when they saw his bad grades. He was given a replacement and then promptly changed the grades on the first card to hide the actual grades from his parents.

Because Castro's father Angel was very miserly with money, Fidel devoted a lot of his time to schemes that would loosen up his father's purse strings. Books were supposedly stolen, things were unexplainably lost, and thus money was always needed to replace items or to obtain things that seemed necessary.

When the time came for Fidel to transition to high school, Angel's mentor urged the elder Castro to send Fidel to Cuba's most exclusive high school, the Colegio de Belen in Havana. This Jesuit preparatory high school served the children of Cuba's highest echelon of society with some 200 students who boarded alongside the almost 800 other students who lived in Havana. It was exorbitantly expensive but when it came to education, Castro's father always eased his tight fisted money ways to ensure that his offspring received only the best education.

Colegio de Belen

But the zeal to provide Fidel with a quality education placed him in a setting that was akin to placing a fish out of water. Fidel was a very small fish in a very large pond and it rankled him no end.

Fidel came from what is known in Cuba as "el recreo", a disparaging term used to describe the rural portions of Cuba, home to mostly uneducated, simple farm laborers. Known as "guajiros", people from this part of Cuba were thought of by their city neighbors as uncouth, socially undesirable hicks - white trash, if you will.

Still known as an illegitimate bastard, Castro now faced additional disparagement at Belen for lacking social status, speaking with a rural inflection, and wearing clothes that screamed "redneck" to class-conscious classmates.

The mocking only became worse compared to what Castro had endured as a child. The nicknames "el Guajiro" (the redneck) and "el Loco" (the lunatic) were added to "el Bastardo". Castro fought back as he always had, with his fists, and he found himself in one fight after another.

The mocking galvanized Castro's hatred for Cuba's upper class society, a hatred he carried with him in his quest for ultimate power. Once Castro realized his goal of seizing power, he destroyed anything and everything that he associated with those who had made his life so utterly miserable.

Using a deceitful tact that he cunningly devised, Castro managed to convince an entire population that he would reform Cuba and return it to a democratic nation free form the corruption of the Batista dictatorship. This was Fidel the chameleon at his best. It was all a facade. Castro yearned for approval and power and once he obtained it he would never let it go.

After seizing power, guided by a longstanding hatred for the United States that was infused into his psyche by an angry, bitter father, Castro turned to the Soviet Union for much needed financing of his plan to turn Cuba into a communist dictatorship. Russia was only too willing to feed into Castro's unquenchable need for self importance and Nikita Kruschev played Castro like a fiddle, paying him false tribute in order to guarantee that communist Russia would finally have a firm foothold in the Western Hemisphere.

Kruschev had no idea that the monster he had decided to entrench in power was a monster with dangerous personality disorders who harbored a reckless disregard for human life.

In Part I of my discussion of Fidel Castro I described how Castro pleaded with Kruschev to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. With a mind that was warped from childhood and filled with hatred for many of his own people, it is easy to understand how Fidel Castro could so easily accept the annihilation of his country and millions around the world in a nuclear holocaust.

He simply did not care about anyone but himself. And it shocked Kruschev so much so that he had to castigate Castro for even suggesting such lunacy.

In hindsight, it would not strain my imagination to believe that a big part of Kruschev's decision to remove the nuclear missiles from Cuba at the conclusion of the Cuban Missile Crisis was because Kruschev feared leaving the missiles in a country run by a man he came to believe was a psychopath.

That brings my discussion about Fidel Castro to a conclusion insofar as his past is concerned. In a future post I will delve into Castro's hypocrisy after gaining power, i.e. his love of wealth and all the trappings that come from it. As you will see, Castro was not the man of the people he claimed to be and instead lived a life of luxury until the day he died.