The Fidel Castro Bookclub: Chapter One Fidelito, The Littlest Rebel

Earlier this year, Fidel Castro published for the first time in the United States an autobiography interview entitled, Fidel Castro: My Life co-authored by interviewer Ignacio Ramonet. After finally making it through the many pornographic comic books that surround our bedroom, we got around to cracking Fidel’s memoirs. And hence was born the Fidel Castro Book Club. Of course, the only book in Fidel Castro’s book club is Fidel Castro’s book. Join us, won’t you, as we explore the lifetime influences of the masterminded revolutionary on everyone’s lips and our deathwatch.

In the first chapter of Fidel Castro: My Life entitled, “The Childhood of a Leader,” we learn that Fidel’s dictatorial leanings were acquired very young:

Ignacio Ramonet: So as a youngster you were a rebel?

Fidel Castro: I had several reasons for being one. Faced with a certain Spanish authoritarianism, and even more so the particular Spaniard [my father] giving the orders…so it was authority, respect in general…I didn’t like authority, because at that time there was a also a lot of corporal punishment, a slap on the head or a belt taken to you-we always ran that risk, although we gradually learned to defend ourselves against it.

IR: You father was authoritarian?

FC: He had a little temper. He couldn’t have done what he did, build himself up –so young, first during the war, far from his family and his country, and later from nothing, without a cent, without family, the first in his family to read and write, by his own efforts and no one else’s-[couldn’t have built] a latifundio, [accumulated] wealth, without strong character.

IR: So you’re the son of a millionaire?

FC: Well, not of a millionaire. No one would have ever said that my father was a millionaire. In those days, being a millionaire was a colossal thing-a millionaire was somebody who really, really had a lot of money. A millionaire, for example-at that time, when a dollar was worth something and a worker would earn an average of a dollar a day-was a man who had a million times what a person earned in a day. My father’s properties couldn’t have been assessed at that high a price. My father can’t be said to have been a millionaire, although hew as very well-to-do and had a solid financial position. Although in that poor, suffering society we children were treated like the children of rich people.

There you have it folks. Fidel Castro is the abused son of a new-monied Spaniard who played nice in front of others but was a total dickhead at home. This could have gone one of two ways: obnoxious trust-fund baby living in SoHo (the Wiliamsburg of Castro’s day) making (and selling!) his “art” by drinking loads of cranberry juice and vodka then jerking off red spew onto a canvas or Communist revolutionary. Looks like SoHo won.