THE MYTH
The story Havana told for decades was of a poor peasant boy who rose from nothing to lead a revolution for the people. Castro himself cultivated this image — the barefoot campesino turned liberator, radicalized purely by the injustice he saw around him.
THE MOTIVE
The reality complicates the legend, which is exactly why it mattered so much to shape it. Castro was born into a wealthy farming family in eastern Cuba, on a plantation that spanned 11,000 hectares producing wood, sugarcane, and cattle. He wasn't a child of poverty — he was the son of a prosperous landowner. He was also born illegitimate, the son of his father's mistress, a household servant, and was given his mother's surname rather than his father's because of the stigma attached to that status. A revolutionary who emerged from privilege, not deprivation, needed a different story to tell the workers and peasants he claimed to represent — so the plantation gave way, in the retelling, to something closer to their own experience.
THE FACTS
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born August 13, 1926, in Birán, in Cuba's Oriente Province, the third of six children. His father was a Spanish immigrant who'd made his fortune building the rail systems that moved sugarcane, and Fidel was educated at Roman Catholic boarding schools before turning to revolutionary politics as a student. By 1959 he'd overthrown Fulgencio Batista and installed the first communist government in the Western Hemisphere — a position he held as Cuba's political leader from 1959 until 2008, when he formally handed off power. He died in 2016 at 90, having outlasted ten U.S. presidents and a trade embargo that outlived the Cold War itself.