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Castro has the Cuban moralistic streak in spades, showing no apparent affection for money or soft living. He considers himself a Roman Catholic but is also impressed by Patriot José Marti's anticlerical tomes. He has to be cajoled into changing his filthy fatigue jacket. His only luxury is 50¢ Montecristo cigars.
He is full of soaring, vaguely leftist hopes for Cuba's future but has no clear program. Other Latin American leaders trust his democratic professions, hope that his shortcomings will not bring on disorder and another dictatorship.
Symbol on a Hill. Castro has confidence, physical courage, shrewdness, generosity and luck—qualities that will one day plant his statue in some Havana plaza. He won his long war not by fighting but by perching in sublime self-confidence on the highest mountain range in Cuba for more than two years, proving that Batista could be flouted. He became the symbol of his rebellious country, pulled quarreling rebel factions together and inspired them to face down a modern army.
"I was born in Oriente province. That's like Texas for Americans," says Fidel Castro, in explanation of his feats. "It is the biggest province in Cuba. We do the most work, we make the most rum and sugar, we make the most money too. We hate dictators."
The Planter's Son. Castro's father, Angel Castro, a penniless immigrant from the Spanish region of Galicia, had already worked hard and made plenty of money by the time Fidel was born in 1926. Fidel Castro grew up as the planter's son on a $500,000 sugar plantation at Mayari, 50 miles from Santiago. He was in love with guns from the time he fired his first .22, hunting in the mountains where he would one day return, an outlaw. From the age of eight he spent most of his time at a Roman Catholic boarding school in Santiago ; his younger brother Raul, a quarrelsome, envious youngster of five, tagged along. "For the next eleven years," a priest recalls, "we Jesuits had Fidel."
Moving to Havana, Castro enrolled at the Jesuits' Belen College, got interested in politics. Like many another Cuban student, he kept a revolver or two around the dormitory. He worked his way up through student politics at Belen and Havana University (1945-50), got hauled in twice for questioning about political murders.
In 1947, when the vanguard of 1,100 hot-eyed Caribbean revolutionaries set out in a ship from Cuba's eastern coast, bound east to invade Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo's Dominican Republic, idealistic Fidel Castro was aboard. Cuban gunboats intercepted the rebels and Castro swam three miles to shore, his Tommy gun still on his back. He turned to law, defended a few friends in political trouble, a few farmers evicted from their plots; he honeymooned in New York with his bride Mirtha. fathered a son named Fidel, settled down in Havana. At 2:43 on the morning of March 10, 1952. Fulgencio Batista—who had been Cuba's behind-the-scenes ruler for some ten years—seized Cuba by army coup. Castro, a candidate for Congress in the elections that Batista canceled, at once found his cause.