6 Interesting Facts About Fidel Castro

Before he was vilified by U.S. politicians and mainstream mass media, Castro was celebrated as a hero for having toppled the authoritarian regime of Fulgencio Batista. In the immediate afterglow of the triumphant Cuban Revolution, Ed Sullivan, host of American television’s most popular, “really big” variety show, flew to Cuba to tape an interview with Castro. In Matanzas at 2:00 AM on January 11, 1959, surrounded by about 100 armed men, Sullivan talked with Castro, whom he likened to George Washington. He called Castro a “fine young man,” employing the same adjectives he had used to describe Elvis Presley and would use to refer to the Beatles. Later that day, in Havana, Castro taped an appearance for the TV news program Face the Nation. He spoke in halting but assured English, as he would when he appeared as a guest on The Tonight Show hosted by Jack Paar, who traveled to Havana to interview “El Comandante.” The reporters who questioned him on Meet the Press (April 19, 1959) called him Dr. Castro, adopting the Cuban conventional honorific for a lawyer (doctor of jurisprudence). On that occasion, Castro, who had yet to declare himself a Marxist, said that he thought the American people were “nice.”

Abraham Lincoln had a famous beard. So did Walt Whitman and Karl Marx. Still, it’s hard to think of a more famous beard than the one Castro wore across seven decades. Like his fellow revolutionaries, he had little opportunity to shave while operating in the wilds of the Sierra Maestra mountains. The men’s grown-out beards became badges of honor. That facial hair also acted as a filter for spies, who, as Castro noted in his autobiography, Fidel Castro: My Life, would have had to cultivate six months of growth before even attempting to infiltrate the 26th of July Movement. Long after his guerrilla days, Castro kept his beard as a symbol of the triumph of the revolution. His beard became such a potent symbol that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency hatched (but never carried out) a plan to make it fall out by planting in Castro’s shoes a soluble depilatory that could be readily absorbed through the skin. Pragmatically, Castro figured that skipping shaving saved him time that he could use more productively. By his calculation, “if you multiply the fifteen minutes you spend shaving every day by the number of days in a year, you’ll see that you devote almost 5,500 minutes to shaving. An eight-hour day of work consists of 480 minutes, so if you don’t shave you gain about 10 days that you can devote to work, to reading, to sport, to whatever you like.” (Actually, the math works out to about 11 days.)

Character assassination was the aim of the plot to depilate Castro’s face, but, through the years, U.S. intelligence agencies also formulated many aborted or unsuccessful plots to actually take Castro’s life. Although it is questionable whether they undertook the 634 attempts to kill Castro that were claimed by Fabián Escalante, the former head of the Cuban Department of State Security, there is abundant evidence of U.S. government plots to assassinate Castro. Some of them were very strange indeed. Two of the oddest revolved around Castro’s passion for scuba diving: one called for an explosive seashell to be planted in an area where he liked to dive, and the other involved a wet suit tainted with a disease-causing fungus and a tuberculosis-laced breathing apparatus that were to be given to him. Other proposed instruments of death included a fountain pen that concealed a hypodermic needle so fine that being stabbed by it would be undetectable, botulism toxin pills to be administered to Castro by a former lover, and both poisoned and exploding cigars.

It isn’t surprising that cigars seemed like a good way to get to Castro. For decades, a cigar protruding from his mouth was nearly as much of a signature for him as were his fatigue uniform (another guerrilla vestige) and beard. Cuba, of course, is famous for the artistry of its cigar making, so it’s natural that Castro would celebrate that national achievement by making it part of his image. What is surprising is his role in the development of one of the island’s most famous brands of cigars. In the early 1960s, after learning that the especially aromatic cigar smoked by one of his bodyguards was made by the bodyguard’s friend, Castro set up the El Laguito factory to manufacture it. The resulting Cohiba Espléndidos became both a world-famous brand and Castro’s cigar of choice for more than 20 years. In 1985, though, his ubiquitous prop disappeared. Having become a cigar smoker at age 15, Castro gave up smoking at age 59 to support a health-oriented national campaign against smoking.

An avid reader and lover of literature, Castro had relationships with three Nobel Prize-winning writers. He cited American Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bells Tolls, about the Spanish Civil War, as an inspiration for his guerrilla tactics. The proliferation of photos of Castro with Hemingway, who famously had a home in Cuba, gave the impression of a close friendship between the two men. In truth, all the photos came from a single encounter in May 1960 when Castro attended a fishing contest held in Hemingway’s honor. Chilean poet Pablo Neruda had great respect for the Cuban Revolution and Castro, though he was taken aback by Castro’s rough treatment of a photographer who happened upon a secret meeting between the two men in Caracas. Later, Neruda became the object of scorn in a public letter by Cuban intellectuals, reputedly written at Castro’s behest, after the poet visited the United States in 1966. Castro’s relationship with Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez was of a wholly different quality. The two were truly close. In the early postrevolutionary era, the author worked for a Cuban government press bureau before it was taken over by communists. The men’s complex friendship blossomed out of Castro’s reverence for García Márquez’s magic realist classic One Hundred Years of Solitude. It went on to survive the novelist’s mixture of support for and condemnation of Castro’s regime. García Márquez considered Castro to have an especially refined and penetrating literary sensibility, and, for years, at the author’s request, Castro read and critiqued his manuscripts.

According to a long-perpetuated legend, Castro was a hard-throwing pitcher who caught the eye of Major League Baseball scouts. In one wholly fictitious version, concocted by Don Hoak, a journeyman major leaguer, Hoak was at bat in a Cuban League game that was interrupted by anti-Batista student protestors. Among them was Castro, who took the mound and delivered several wild but blistering fastballs that Hoak struggled to foul off. Another version of the legend revolves around Washington Senators scout Joe Cambria’s seeking out pitching prospect Castro but not being impressed enough to sign him. Had Castro’s “heater” had a little more oomph, the story goes, there may never have been a Cuban Revolution. In truth, Castro was an accomplished high-school athlete who was named Havana’s outstanding schoolboy sportsman in 1943–44. He excelled in track and field (in the high jump and middle-distance running), basketball (playing for the University of Havana’s freshman team), and table tennis. What’s more, he pitched for his high-school baseball team as a senior. He reportedly did appear, uninvited, at two of the tryouts held by Cambria but failed to distinguish himself. Castro later cemented the image of himself as a baseball player with a famous pitching appearance for the Cuban army team in an exhibition played before a minor-league game between the Rochester Red Wings and the Havana Sugar Kings in July 1959. Castro’s biggest connection with baseball, however, was as the number one fan of Cuba’s national sport and as a kind of behind-the-scenes general manager of the national team, which had great success internationally.