Who is Fidel Castro?

On July 26th, 1953, in Oriente Province 125 youths attempted to storm the Moncada army post, manned by over 1,000 soldiers. Their leader, Fidel Castro, was counting upon the elements of surprise and timing to overwhelm the garrison, and later claimed that if a group of 45 men had not made a wrong turn on the outskirts of Moncada he would have succeeded.

Eighteen of the rebels, including Castro, fled to the unknown terrain of the hills and promptly got lost. Possibly 20 rebels were killed during the fighting. When they were brought to trial, the rebels numbered only 27, over 70 of the captured and wounded, with innocent townspeople, having been assasinated by the berserk soldiers.

"In the Centro Gallego they broke into the operating room at the very instant when two of our critically wounded were receiving blood transfusions," Castro said. "They yanked them off the tables and, as the wounded could not remain upright, they dragged them down to the basement where they arrived as corpses."

Several of the wounded had air and camphor injected into their veins. The morning after the futile revolt groups of men were taken out into the countryside, tied, gagged and disfigured by torture, and murdered in cold blood. Death warrants read, "Shot while attempting to escape." Many were compelled to dig their own graves, some buried alive, their hands bound behind them.

Five of the wounded survived. They were brought to trial with the others, who were surprised one morning in the hills. Castro was forced to call on his experience as a lawyer and his talent for oratory to defend his fellow prisoners, for no counsel was supplied.

That experience was gained while Fidel attended Havana University Law School beginning in 1945. One of his classmates said recently that others were in awe of his ability at oratory, his intensity and his idealistic dedication. He broke off his studies temporarily in 1947 to take part in an abortive attempt to overthrow Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, escaping capture by swimming across a shark-filled bay with a machine gun and ammunition on his back.

A year later in Bogota, Colombia, Castro was involved in a student congress which had a core of well-organized Communists. The congress issued a protest against American policies. There can be no doubt that Castro then had anti-American, if not Communist sentiments.

Havana University was saturated then, even more than today, with politics. Among the students I met it seemed that their central concern at the University was politics; studies were only incidental. One of the sponsoring organizations of Operacion Amistad, the Federacion Estudiantil Universidad (F.E.U.) has always played a significant political role in Cuba. In fact the F.E.U. held the balance of power in some of the Provisional governments after the fall of hated dictator Gerardo Machado in 1933.

When Castro graduated from Havana University in 1950, students were sharply split politically; the Leftists were Communist, the Rightists only radical. Undoubtedly he absorbed at the University some of the Communist ideas and phrases; many of his programs, as well as statements of his brother Raul and of revolutionary hero Ernesto Che Guevara, coincide with the Communist line today.

Unforutnately many of the Cubans lack the political sophistication to identify the ideas as communist. However, Americans fail to realize that in some cases, especially in the purely economic realm, communist ideas may coincide with the best interests of Cuba and of most Cubans.

After graduation from Havana University, Castro spent much of his time defending poverty stricken peasants caught in the snares of the intricate Cuban laws. Cuban law is derived from the Spanish, rather than Anglo-Saxon, tradition, which accounts for some of the misunderstanding incurred between Americans and Cubans, especially over the question of trials. The Latin American conception of justice includes not only objective considerations of evidence, but human factors, personality and prevailing emotion.

The judges at his trial permitted Castro to act as counsel for himself and the accused rebels. But after only the second session, two doctors showed up at Castro's cell one night and signed a certificate stating that he was sick and couldn't attend the court sessions. He was held in solitary confinement for 76 days, then brought to a secret trial at Civil Hospital, with neither the press nor counsel permitted.

The author visited Cuba this summer under the auspices of "Operacion Amistad," a program sponsored by the government and by Havana University. Planned tours took him to cooperatives and conferences, unplanned tours to the offices of journalists and government officials.

Castro made one of the most startlingly audacious speeches ever heard in a courtroom. Secretly printed and distributed throughout the island under the title La Historia Me Absolvera (History Will Absolve Me), it combined the tragic hopelessness of Daniel Webster debating the devil before a jury of condemned souls in Benet's short story, the irony of Marc Antony's appeal to the Roman mobs, and parts of the political theory of John of Salisbury, John Locke, Thomas Paine, and the Cuban national hero, Jose Marti. Had the Cuban island more significance in world affairs, Castro's 60,000 word speech would be a famous document.