The corollary is a variation of “the devil made me do it”. In the case of Castro, the received text is that the United States made him do it.
And that is yet another modern canard.
We’ve looked at the origins of Communist ideology in Latin America (see Protevangelium and prior posts) and demonstrated that such predated the Monroe Doctrine, not to mention 20th Century American foreign policy. This is not to argue that United States’ policies are without fault (they have much to answer for, especially since the mid-19th century, but that is another tale). Our point is simple: the America-drove-Fidel-and-Hugo-(not-to-mention-Ho)-to-Communism is a ridiculous assertion, albeit a dangerously misleading one.
When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, thereby breaking the Hitler-Stalin Pact (officially called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), Fidel Castro was a 15 year old high school student in the prestigious Colegio de Belén in Havana. The prior year, 1940, Fulgencio Batista had been elected president of Cuba and immediately set about to court Communist political support.
Batista legalized the Communist party and enabled the return of Fabio Grobart and Gustavo Machado, along with others from exile in Mexico. They had all been expelled (see here) from Cuba for their subversive activities seeking the overthrow of the Cuban government and the installation of a Communist regime. What possessed Batista to believe these men had shed their nefarious ideology and Comintern membership and would now play fair remains clouded in political, historical, and psychological mystery. Other than the average politician’s lust for power, further explanations need to be sought elsewhere. The fact remains that Batista enabled the Communists in Cuba.
Grobart’s and Machado’s mission was to serve as Soviet liaison in the Caribbean region and to support the development of Communist parties therein. Seeing Batista’s naiveté, Grobart moved the general quarters of the Latin American Comintern to Cuba from Mexico, wherefrom, as its director, he now had a free hand for his mission not only in Cuba, but in all of Latin America, a role which he and Machado undertook with great relish and effectiveness.
While Grobart and Machado did their thing establishing the Comintern in Havana, the Jesuits in the same city were doing theirs, indoctrinating their students, sons of well-to-do Cuban families, in the Colegio de Belén. The Jesuits had been expelled from all Spanish lands, including Cuba, in 1767, by decree of King Carlos III of Spain. That decree was lifted in the 19th Century and the Jesuits returned to Cuba in 1853, once the decree was overturned and Queen Isabella II founded the Colegio de Belén. For more on Jesuit expulsions in the 18th century see here.
Counterintuitively, Colegio de Belén was a hotbed of pro-Spanish Republic (Communist) sentiments. This can seem surprising because, as popularly conceived, Roman Catholics were supporters of Francisco Franco (see here). Nevertheless, as usual, the easy or superficial supposition is not always the correct one. A recent Jesuit history recounts a representative event: a Jesuit who served as something of a chaplain to Francisco Franco but who joined the Communist party after the war.
What is not disputed is the historically well-documented political involvement of the Jesuits throughout the order’s history. As its members focused on “helping the poor” while they educated the sons of the elites, their remedies tended towards Socialistic solutions with a patina of Scriptural justification. Of course, a thorough understanding of the Eighth Commandment, “Thou shalt not steal”, would have helped the order temper its Socialistic leanings. That Commandment formed the basis of the Fifth Amendment to the United States’ Constitution which, when properly applied, prohibits the taking of life or property “without due process of law….”
Neither the Commandment nor the Amendment are more than a glint in the pen or gun of hardened thieves’ or politicians’ intent on taking what is not theirs. And Castro’s high school career among the Jesuits did not create any meaningful deterrence against such takings.
One other characteristic Colegio de Belén strengthened and developed in Castro was a hatred against The United States, for their humiliation of Spain in the late Spanish American War. See War for more information on that event.
Both traits — lack of respect for others’ lives and property and hatred for America — were initially instilled in Castro by his father (see here) who was cruel to his workers, mostly from Haiti, and who hated the Americans although he became very rich working and doing business with them.
When Hitler broke the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the United States and Britain formally allied themselves with the Communists. The Soviets opened an embassy in Cuba with an ambassador who represented them in both Havana and Washington. Upon the opening of the embassy in Havana, Grobart and Machado went to work with alacrity and by the end of 1944 inaugurated a series of “cultural exchange” programs, to which Colegio de Belén sent a student delegation, among which was Fidel Castro.
(Note the year: 1944 — the war was not yet over, the Soviets and the Americans were “allies”, but the Soviets always had other plans besides survival, and they never lost sight of such.)
The dissertations were fulsome in their praise of the Communist revolution and its eventual worldwide triumph. Castro was especially impressed with Gustavo Machado’s oration relating his efforts to recreate a Latin America united under the Communist flag. He dwelt on the massive petroleum reserves in Venezuela, who at the time was the principal exporter of petroleum in the world and the third producer after the United States and the Soviet Union. According to Machado, Venezuela’s riches would be more than sufficient to finance a Latin America union allied to the Soviets.
Machado’s comments rang true. Fast forward to the late 50s and one finds Venezuela and Cuba among the richest countries in Latin America, both being major exporters of petroleum and sugar, respectively.
Upon conclusion of the Second World War and the outbreak of the Cold War, the Soviet Union continued, with renewed vigor, to work for control over Cuba and Venezuela. Meanwhile, Fidel Castro, having completed his tenure in Colegio de Belén, entered the University of Havana school of law and immediately linked up with extreme leftist gangs.
Readers will need to go to other sources for details on Castro’s violent acts during his student years, not only in Cuba but in the Dominican Republic and in Colombia (the “Bogotazo” in 1948). For our present purposes it is sufficient to know that he was no late bloomer. His North Star was taking power as a Communist, not only in Cuba, but in Venezuela and then all of Latin America. He saw himself as a mystical, Communist José Martí, Simón Bolivar, Francisco Miranda, and more; one who would embody and realize his understanding of the goals and dreams of those men.
He was engaged in many violent activities including his murderous attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953, for which many of his comrades were executed but he and his brother, Raul, were spared thanks to Roman Catholic intervention. Batista, ignorant that the definition of insanity is repeating the same action and expecting a different result, foolishly amnestied them in 1955 upon which they exiled themselves to Mexico only to return in 1956 and set up headquarters in the Sierra Maestra from whence the Communists eventually triumphed with no small military assistance from Venezuela.
In Venezuela, meanwhile, the era of coups interspersed with duly elected governments continued (see here). By the time Castro returned to Cuba in 1956, Venezuela was ruled by Marcos Pérez Jiménez (see here), and his links with Venezuela continued to strengthen.
