174. The Cuban Revolution
58:59 Share

If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, ad-free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.empirepoduk.com.

Perfect summer subs are here from Jersey Mike's. Sliced in front of you and piled high with the coolest toppings. It's a Jersey Mike's thing. Planning a picnic or a beach day? Pick up the summer sub combo and consider adding the juice. A special blend of red wine vinegar and olive oil that makes any sub pop. Available for pickup or delivery through the app. Jersey Mike's, a sub above. Learn more at JerseyMike's.com.

Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durympour. Is it true to say we're a bit giddy? We are a bit giddy. We are because we've got a great friend of the podcast on who's a right old laugh and a wonderful, wonderful historian. The great Alex von Tunzelman is here. And the reason you're here, I mean, you could talk about so many different things. Indeed, you have spoken about the last viceroy before brilliantly on this podcast, if you haven't heard it. Go on.

back and listen because she's amazing. But we're talking about Cuba today. She was so good, in fact, that we decided to put her on the show months ago. We've been planning this for weeks to come. Some terrible slander is arising. She is an...

An honored and cherished guest. Shut your face, Darwin Paul. Anyway, look, you are here because you are the author of Red Heat, which is the critically acclaimed history of Cuba. And Cuba is just one part of the puzzle, Alex, we've been looking at when it comes to America's empire. The term itself is just so loaded and controversial because so many people say, what empire? We don't have an empire. And we have had Daniel Imavar on the program as well, who's

talked very compellingly about the hidden empire. And Cuba, you would contest as very much a piece of this jigsaw puzzle. Well, I think the whole Caribbean is a piece of this jigsaw puzzle, at least the independent countries in the Caribbean. So really, you're looking at Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, because of course, a lot of the other countries, places like Jamaica or Barbados were in the British orbit. Some of those countries still are, or in the French orbit or Dutch orbit or whatever else. But those independent countries are

certainly attracted from quite early on the attention of American politicians. And so, you know, I think when we're talking about empire, it's difficult. It depends what definition you go for. And of course, a lot of people would say it's not an empire unless you are occupying land.

But the United States did occupy parts of the Caribbean for significant portions of history. So it's a place where certainly, at least, shall we say, the question arises. I'd love just to read a paragraph, which I love this paragraph in your book, which gives a flavour of where we're heading with this. The secret war in the Caribbean destroyed any hope of freedom and democracy in Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. It

It toppled democracies. It supported dictators. It licensed those dictators' worst excesses. It financed terrorism. It set up death squads. It turned Cuba communist, and it kept it communist for half a century. It did massive and permanent damage to the international reputation of the United States. It nearly triggered...

a nuclear holocaust. That is our subject today, children. But other than that, it was fine. I mean, I was going to say, could you maybe for this podcast get off the fence? When a lot of us think of Cuba, I mean, the names that will come into our mind, because Cuban-Americans are

very present and prominent in popular culture. Absolutely, yes. Gloria Estefan. Let's do, should we do Cuban top trumps? Yes, start with Gloria Estefan. That's absolutely right. Andy Garcia. Cameron Diaz. Eva Mendes. The actress. Yeah, her dad. Her dad is from Cuba. Daisy Fuentes. Desi Arnaz, if you want to go right back in history. I love Lucy. Desi Arnaz. And you've got it in sort of popular books. Hemingway.

We're thinking of Hemingway loved a bit of Cuba. Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana. I remember that was one of the set texts that I was dragged through at school. So, you know, we have this idea of music and carefree. Well, are we allowed to make the famous Hemingway quote on this podcast? We probably are. Well, you're going to do it, aren't you? Hemingway famously said that Cuba was good for fishing and f***.

was his summary of what he liked best about Cuba. Can I just say, Mum, this is not one of the episodes you may want to be listening to all the way through, if you like. But, you know, there's that notion of Cuba. And we know that, you know, a lot of the names that I've mentioned are also very much in the political sphere. You know, Cuban-Americans are deeply politicised.

We also know that there are Cuban-Americans, then there is the politics of America towards Cuba and Cuba towards America. And that's what we're all going to unpack. One interesting thing you just said, the reach of the American empire, this notion of an American empire is an old one. And I found actually a Jefferson article.

quote. I don't know whether you know about this, where Jefferson was trying to lay out his vision. Even as he's founding a nation and fathering and founding, but he talks about having two different edges to America. One would be on top of Canada, the northern coastline of Canada. The other, he wanted to be the southern coastline of Cuba, that it would be all-encompassing. And that's because Cuba, the geography of it is really interesting, Alex, isn't it? Because just

For those who haven't been or don't know, haven't looked at a map recently, how close is it to America? It's very, very close indeed, to the point where, of course, there are still issues of people, you know, there can be issues of refugees sailing across on rafts or whatever. It really is very, very close and culturally very close as well. Of course, there's still an enormous Cuban community in Miami, some of whom are

are political refugees from Cuba, some of whom are economic refugees, some of whom have just turned up for all sorts of reasons. It's incredibly close. And it's just below, for those who haven't got a map in front of them, it's just below that finger that Florida makes pointing down into the Caribbean. I think it's very polite of you to call that a finger. Some people will say that's a finger.

But yes, it's very close. We'll take a more Hemingway approach to this. Indeed. I mean, so John F. Kennedy sometimes used to say, you know, less than 100 miles off our coast when he was talking about Cuba. It's actually slightly over 100 miles, but it is very, very close indeed. Now, let's talk about the history of the place. Because you said, I mean, you mentioned Haiti, then Saint-Domingue, and you mentioned the Dominican Republic. But the history of Cuba is...

I was going to say bittersweet, but that's a terrible pun because sugar is related and only the bitterness that comes with sugar plantations and slavery. So just tell us how that history is intertwined. And let's not forget, too, the other founding mortal sin of the whole New World colonialism, wiping out of the indigenous inhabitants, which is something that happened before.

almost immediately in Cuba and earlier than other places. Yes, incredibly quickly. One of the most efficient genocides in history, most probably, after Columbus landed. And Columbus lands in Cuba, not on the American mainland. That's the other crucial point, isn't it? Yes, absolutely. And it's one of the Caribbean islands he landed on specifically. But yes, I mean, all of these countries in the Caribbean had this history of slavery. Where that comes from, really, is that when Europeans first landed in

after initial contact, they did try to enslave the indigenous people. And that didn't work very well. Most people died off quite quickly in horrible ways. And I mean, you know, as I say, it was an incredibly efficient way of wiping people out. What were the tribes called? The Tejo? The Caribs and the Tainos. There are people today who will claim Carib and Taino ancestry, and there may be part of that, but there's certainly nobody left

who would have anything like kind of pure ancestry of those. The figures I've read somewhere were that when Columbus turns up, there's about 100,000 indigenous tribespeople. And within half a century, it's down to 5,000. Yes, that's about right.

So yeah, I mean, that really is an extraordinarily effective genocide. And the decision after that was that they'd found that this region was wonderful for growing sugar. Sugar at that time, you could only get from sugar cane. Sugar beet, which is the kind of sugar that replaced that, didn't come in so much later. So

This was a very profitable crop. It's the only way you could get sweetness into European and American diets. So that was an incredibly valuable commodity. And so the decision was we must ship in new people to do this. Right. And sort of not long after this, Haiti, which is a similar experience, Sainte-Dame, as it was called, was also doing the same thing, also having sort of wholesale slave laborer working on their own sugar plantations. And then

You have somebody like Toussaint L'Ouverture who comes up and overthrows the French, kicks them out, defeats them. And it is suddenly, you know, he has, or they have, Sandomak by suddenly getting its independence, has removed not only sugar cooperation, but also cut itself off from the economy of slavery. So that's why Cuba becomes very much in the sights of world trade because, you know, you can't do it in Haiti. That's

completely unreliable. You can't do it in Saint-Domingue. It's too troublesome. So Cuba benefits from that. Yeah, the figures are horrific. At a time when slavery is in the decline and you're beginning to get, in places like Saint-Domingue, the end of slavery, you get 270,000 enslaved Africans shipped to Cuba in just the 30-year period 1798.

to 1820. Yes, the numbers are absolutely huge. And late. I mean, it's at a time when other people are hoping to be liberated from slavery that these people get kidnapped, abducted and forced into labour.

in Cuba? Well, they keep going. I mean, the thing is the Haitian Revolution in a way is a unique event in world history. It's the only truly successful slave revolution. It was, as you say, led by Toussaint L'Avoueur, overthrew slavery, overthrew French rule and established Haiti as an independent country. But the French fought back. And what happened in the 1820s is that a new French regime under Charles X sent warships back

to Haiti to impose enormous indenture payments on Haiti. So where we talk about reparations at the end of slavery in that period, we are normally talking about compensation that was paid to slave owners by, say, the British government. What happened in Haiti is that former slaves themselves were forced to pay for their freedom from France. And that debt was not paid off until 1947.

So at times this became the overwhelming debt in Haiti's national economy. And so that kind of created this culture of plunder. But yes, you're right that what also happened then in Cuba was that, of course, Cuba still being then under imperial control, of course, the slave trade ramped up there.

Under the Spanish. That's, again, very crucial. It's still the Spanish colony. Absolutely. Well, I mean, the British had a 10-year flotation, but other than that, it's Spain and then America. Yeah. And of course, there were many slave revolts. There were many slave revolts in Cuba, but these are very tightly controlled. If you look at the history of slavery, there's a constant anxiety among the slave owners about the slaves revolting. This is a kind of constant concern.

And also Cubans, you know, Cubans who are not slaves, freed Cubans as well, were pretty unhappy living under Spanish imperial control. They did have an uprising against that as well, but again, got stomped back down again. So there are uprisings, they get put down, but then you've got the 1898 War of Independence, which we kind of touched on a little bit with Daniel. We did in that extraordinary moment when Teddy Roosevelt sort of declares war on his own while his boss is off having his back looked at him.

Yeah, he's visiting an osteopath and Teddy runs wild in his absence. However, I mean, the US deciding to intervene militarily to, and I'm putting this in inverted commas, help the Cubans. They do this at a point where the Cubans have almost beaten the Spanish on their own anyway. I mean, they've been fighting for decades, three decades. And then the Americans come in sort of almost at the last minute saying, well, we'll help you out. We're here to help. And they're there for the final crossing of the line.

Yes, and I think you have to see this in the context that really throughout the 19th century, successive US governments have had their eyes on Cuba. There were offers, explicit offers, to purchase it from Spain in 1848, 1854, 1859, 1860.

We should say at that period, more valuable economy than the whole US. Well, there you go. So, you know, very, very valuable economy. 1868, Andrew Johnson wanted to annex both the Dominican Republic and Haiti. So there are kind of constant American attempts to intervene in the Caribbean to take land, particularly in Cuba. So, you know, when they sort of, yes, intervene in the Cuban Civil War, quite unsurprisingly, some Cubans feel that that might not be a completely selfless act.

Yeah. And also there's an attitudinal thing that's going on in America. So I mentioned Jefferson just assuming that these will be the borders of the new United States, including Cuba. But you also had another president of the United States, John Adams, who I love, his son, John Quincy Adams, who goes on to become president of the United States, who describes Cuba as an apple ripening on a tree. And that when it is ripe enough and it falls, it's ripe enough.

it's up to the first man to basically pick it up and pocket it. So there's almost, even across the political divide, this assumption that Cuba somehow belongs to America or will belong to America. Yes, it's a really deeply ingrained assumption. And it gets even more extreme, if anything, at the beginning of the 20th century, when you've got William Howard Taft, the successor to Roosevelt, the US president, saying in 1912 that

The day is not far distant when three stars and stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory, one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal and the third at the South Pole. The whole hemisphere will be ours, in fact, as by virtue of our superiority of race, it is already ours morally.

So at this stage, the Americans have expanded their ambitions from just Canada to Cuba to the entire hemisphere. And what we haven't said explicitly is that when the Spanish-American civil war ends and when the Spanish are defeated, the flag raised in Havana at the end of that war is not the Cuban flag, but the Star-Spangled Banner. There you go. And I mean, you know, it is...

taken over and administered by the Americans under the Platt Amendment. And what that is really is an amendment that amended the Cuban constitution, giving the US the right in perpetuity to interfere in Cuban policy, including active participation in finances, domestic policy, foreign policy, and sovereignty, and also gave the US the land of its choices for naval bases. So this is where this happened in 1903. This is when the US took Guantanamo Bay, which of course they still have

today very much. I've always been confused about how, I mean, this man, Orville Platt, who manages to get this amendment to the Cuban constitution, sort of just amended without any kind of change to the wording that would best suit America. How he manages to do this so close on the back of another really important piece of legislation, just a couple of years before that, the Teller Amendment amendment.

So there's a fairly decent guy called Teller who says, actually, there's going to be a rule that America, this new America should live by, which is that we don't take over countries. He puts it in writing. He pushes it through. And yet just, you know, a handful of years later, you've got Platt saying the exact opposite and putting what many believe to be a time bomb in the Cuban constitution. In the meantime, you actually have America taking control of the Philippines. Yes.

Guam, and Puerto Rico. These all get added into the basket immediately after the Spanish-American War. Yeah. Was there any time after the Americans sort of raised their star-spangled banner that they think, okay, we'll let the Cubans run this for themselves? Or is there always going to be an American that's going to be in charge of this for their interests?

So it sort of ebbs and flows. It is a bit back and forth. The Americans occupied various Caribbean territories, including the Dominican Republic. So, I mean, if you want to know the sort of extent of these occupations, these American interventions, between 1898, so the Spanish-American War, and 1934, US Marines were sent to Cuba and the Dominican Republic.

four times each, to Haiti twice, Guatemala once, Panama twice, Mexico three times, Colombia four times, Nicaragua five times, and Honduras seven times. So there are a lot of these interventions going on. I mean, that's happening all the time. But the nature in writing, at least, of the Cuban intervention is we need to pacify the island.

until you're in a position to run it yourself. But whatever the Cubans do, it's never enough to show that they can run their own country themselves. It's never outright colonialism, but it's always something very close to it. And it's very close to it because also, again, if we look at the kind of question of does an empire involve land? Well, by 1920, American companies owned two thirds of Cuban land. So there may not have been the American government

But it was certainly, as far as Cubans saw it, Americans who owned an awful lot of the island. And what were they doing there? Making sugar? Fruit as well? United Fruit? Are they there? Yes. I mean, tobacco, of course, is a very important crop. And sugar continues to be important in the Caribbean because of the rum trade as well. So there's a lot of those kind of activities going on. And of course, you're producing rum and tobacco.

then they're also beginning to kind of think about having a good time there. They start to be the building of casinos and resorts in Havana and around there. Well, yes. Okay. So whenever there are casinos and resorts, not far behind...

is the mob. Well, it's pretty much in front of it. Right. Okay. So this is hand in hand. You get this sort of presence of, well, mafia. It's just mafia, isn't it? Yes, very straightforwardly. I mean, really, the mafia are incredibly involved in Havana. And you can see that, again, if you look at the cultural history. If you go and watch Guys and Dolls, for instance, it's all about this kind of Havana that is run by these mobsters. This was

This was the place they were running. I mean, actually, the fact that Las Vegas exists is really because of Fidel Castro, because when Fidel Castro came to power and threw the mob out of Havana, you know, Bugsy Siegel had bought this land in the Nevadan desert and created Las Vegas really as an alternative place that Americans could go and gamble.

It was literally an alternative to Cuba. It was. Because Cuba was the big place you went. If you were going for a lovely gambling weekend, I mean, it's incredibly close to the US. You could just take a little flight or a little boat from Miami and you could just go and gamble. I mean, this was it. So it became a kind of playground for Americans. But of course, there was a cost to Cubans of that happening.

Yeah, and I'm wondering about that because on the one hand, you've got rich folk coming in who supposedly, you know, you've managed to throw out one imperial oppressor, but you're not getting any richer. You're not getting any better off, but you're seeing a lot more wealth around you. You're seeing it around you in Havana and perhaps picking up the crumbs from the table. But you've also seen Haiti really throw out their imperial oppressors. So what is the state of young people, youth, students? Is there a...

a volatile student movement developing at the same time? Certainly. Well, I mean, the US wouldn't have had to send Marines back so often if there wasn't dissent to quell. I mean, fundamentally, what you found is the people rose up against this stuff the entire time. There was a great deal of dissatisfaction with it and it required more or less kind of constant military and police interventions to stop constant rebellions against American power in that region.

So, you know, a lot of this anger and this ire is directed towards not merely the Americans, but the puppets that they put in

in power, particularly in 1925, there's an industrialist who is president of this new Cuba, President Mercado. He's an industrialist. He's fought in the War of Independence, but then he modifies the constitution so he can become a despot who just goes on and on and on. And the students and the workers dislike him to the point that they basically managed to make

the whole situation impossible for him. I think, you know, the first revolution against Mercado is by 1933. Don't they call it the sergeant's revolt? Yeah, I mean, there's kind of a constant cycle of rebellion and uprising against these people who are seen really as American puppets, you know. So it's a very unstable situation. I mean, effectively, you know, there is a kind of sort of imperial structure that is, of course, not...

direct occupation or points, it is often done through puppets. But those puppets are not respected really by the general people and they have to be kept in place with enormous force. So what you also find is that there's a huge amount of violence, like an astonishing amount of state violence, political violence in the Caribbean and in Cuba as well. Because really, you can only keep these people in power with incredible amounts of oppression.

But of course, what that does is provoke more and more response and revolt. So you've got families mourning their young and beautiful dead. And then you've also got this turning point that takes place in 1933, because you can only be a despot ruler if you've got the army on your side. If you lose the army, or the army decides they're not going to back you,

you're in big, big trouble and that is ultimately what happens to Mercado. I think it's August 1933 when Mercado's forced to flee because the army says, right, we're withdrawing support from you and if you withdraw support, what is he going to do? He's just surrounded by a sea of very angry people and so he sort of

buzzes off. He goes to the Bahamas where the American ambassador sends a telegram saying, ex-president Mercado arrived here at daylight this morning and he's just fled a hail of bullets. Which is the first they've heard that he's been deposed, by the way, when that one communicates because he's an ex-president. I mean, this sort of story is incredibly common in the Caribbean in the early 20th century. This sort of thing just happened all the time.

these regimes were often highly unstable. I mean, actually, in some ways, the most stable in that period was Rafael Trujillo's in the Dominican Republic, which was astonishingly brutal, just because he was so vicious that he managed to keep himself in power, you know, whether or not he had, he often did have, I'm afraid, American support, but whether or not he did, he still managed to prop himself up through his own extraordinary violence. But, you know, this is what it took to stay in power. It was a pretty vicious place.

Yeah, and it's interesting. When Mercado didn't have that, not until, you know, he has it for a while. When he doesn't have it, he's on his outs. And it's interesting because in America, they would call this a coup. But in Cuba itself, they call this the first revolution. They've got rid of this despotic man. And they're in for a bright new future. Join us after the break where we find out how things really turn out.

Perfect summer subs are here from Jersey Mike's. Sliced in front of you and piled high with the coolest toppings. It's a Jersey Mike's thing. Planning a picnic or a beach day? Pick up the summer sub combo and consider adding the juice. A special blend of red wine vinegar and olive oil that makes any sub pop. Available for pickup or delivery through the app. Jersey Mike's, a sub above. Learn more at JerseyMike's.com.

So we start with someone who I think appeals very much to my co-host's sense of manhood. Oh, you really are ridiculous, honestly. Isn't he your kind of boy? Just looking at this picture. Listen, this suggests I have a proclivity for corrupt, bloodthirsty monsters. It's not that, but he's got very good cheekbones. He does. Alex, does he or does he not have extraordinary cheekbones? Yeah, I mean, you know, good looks were not his issue. There are some other issues. No.

Yes, okay. We'll come to those in a minute. But I'll tell you, his ancestry is really interesting to me because that's sort of the look that he has. I sort of try to get to the bottom of it like every good historian should. But he was a mix of Spanish, Chinese, African and indigenous ancestry, which gives him this rather unique look. I mean, in some ways, that's the whole story of the Caribbean.

You know, there's all these different influences coming in. He is very much the sort of peaked cap wearing military dictator in his look. He looks like any Latin dictator you've ever seen in any movie. He's all medals and braid and peaked cap, exactly. Well, so would Alex if you put her in that uniform. So would we all in that get up. But he's educated in an American Quaker school. That's right. He worked as a labourer until 1921. Then he joins the army. Then he rises up the

Well, I mean, it's quite complicated. I mean, first of all, he had risen very high up the ranks. I mean, it's the sergeant's revolt that he led in 1933. He was only a sergeant, which actually isn't that high up, really. And he was a sergeant, which actually isn't that high up, really.

And in a sense, that was sort of important that these were young officers. They weren't kind of, you know, the generals taking over. It was a complicated story. You're quite right. When the sergeants say, right, we're not going to back you, Mercado, anymore, that is game over for Mercado's government. And it feels to the people that the army is on their side. And so, you know, for somebody who wears a uniform to say, well,

I might as well fill in the gap. It's not a bad thing. To America, though, he must have seemed like quite a conundrum. He's been educated at an American Quaker school, but one of the first things he does, Sergeant Batista, when he takes power in what they call a coup, but what the Cubans call a revolution, he decides that he's going to tell the United States to abolish the Platt Amendment. What the hell are the Americans telling us about how to run our country? The Platt Amendment means that they can come in at any time if they think our governance is not good enough.

We already gave them Guantanamo Bay. Not sure we can get that back, but at least we have the stability of our government. So to the Cubans, initially, he might have looked like a good thing. To the Americans, initially, he might have looked like a dangerous thing. He also does this

extraordinary thing where he says, you know what, my military is not going to train with the American military anymore. Historically, they have done, but they're not. They're going to train with the Mexican military instead, which is going to send shutters down America because they have a real problem with Mexico on their border and also communist cells and growing communist ideology in Mexico. So he's a conundrum for everybody at the beginning. But he's basically after himself, isn't he? He's el hombre. He's the strong man.

Well, he's on a journey as well. I mean, I think, you know, when he first kind of comes onto the national scene in 1933 and leaves the national scene, we'll get to eventually in 1959. That's quite a long time.

So, you know, when he came in and he... 30 years. Yeah. I mean, it's a very long period that he is on the scene. And actually, initially, for instance, you know, when in 1940, there was actually a presidential election, he won it under a new Cuban constitution and, you know, served a four-year term democratically as president of Cuba.

And, you know, he was endorsed at that time by the Democratic Socialist Coalition in Cuba and by what was then called the Cuban Communist Party, even though they were basically sort of four people that had actioned. You know, I mean, they really were a very tiny, tiny force.

But he was seen as somebody who very much supported labour, supported unions, was for the workers, was into social reform. So, you know, he was seen as quite a liberator at that point. But of course, things don't stay completely the same. So when does it start becoming apparent that actually he is, as Willie said...

just only in it for himself? Well, he left power for a while. So I mean, he nominated a successor in 1944, who was defeated in the election. So effectively, you know, he wasn't standing, but he says people lost the election. He actually left and moved to the US. He then lived basically dividing his time between New York City and Daytona Beach in Florida for the next eight years. You know, he sort of kept his hand in Cuban politics, but he was

sort of outside Cuba. He really lost that sort of sense of being a leader of the people of Cuba at that point. I think, you know, over that time, he is becoming something quite different, shall we say, during his years in the US. And, you know, not to be too simplistic about it, but yeah, things are becoming a lot more corrupt. And then he does a second coup. 1952, he comes back to power. Yes.

Cuba at this point had had democratic governments, Ramon Grau, Carlos Prio, which were, however, very, very much characterized by kind of gangsterism and corruption that was still going on. So when Batista returned in 1952, he was obviously already a figure who had this reputation in Cuba, who was a very recognizable figure by that point, even though he'd been away

for all these years. He basically turned up, went into Camp Columbia, the military headquarters, with a pistol in his hand. This is three months before there were supposed to be elections. And it took 77 minutes for him just to put himself in charge. And he called his new regime disciplined democracy. This is what he called it. And cancelled the elections. Yes. So,

So you can see this is sort of a rather new thing. Now, of course, he had done a coup before, so this wasn't completely out of character. But this time there's kind of no talk of labour rights. There's no talk of popular leadership or liberation or anything like this. It's obviously quite a different thing. Now, while unrest against Batista is growing, there is a student leader who is coming to prominence at this time. Tell us about this man.

Well, I assume you're talking about Fidel Castro. I am. You would assume correctly. Because there are a number, to be fair, but the one who's going to really matter is, of course, Fidel Castro. Yes. Tell us about the origin story of Fidel Castro. Well, so Fidel was of Spanish descent. He came from Mayari, which is in Oriente in Cuba. It's quite a rural place. Yeah.

And his family were quite well off. His father was a conscript in the 1898 war, later worked on railroads for United Fruit Company in Cuba. In 1898, did he fight? He was Spanish. Did he fight for the Spanish or did he fight for the Cubans?

Well, he fought for the Spanish. He was conscripted, so he had to... So was this an issue in Castro's time, that he came from this fact-detained colonial background or not? I suppose lots of people would have been forced, wouldn't they, conscripted to fight for Spain? Yeah, lots of people had very complicated backgrounds. But he was quite well off when Fidel was born, but he was a landowner by then. His father was married to a schoolteacher, but he had a long affair with the family cook,

Lina Ruz, with whom he had seven children. That's a long affair. A very long affair. Well, after the first Mrs. Castro died, they got married. And so their sons among those were Ramon, Fidel and Raul. So was Fidel initially illegitimate? I don't know exactly what date he was born versus the marriage, so I can't quite answer that. But he always admitted that he'd been brought up in quite a wealthy family and he was quite badly behaved.

from childhood. Oh, tell me more about that. What kind of thing? Ruffian? Well, he was known to be extremely difficult and very lippy child and got into quite a lot of fights. He once bit a priest that made him a hero in his school.

That's always very popular in Catholic countries. And the parents decided to split up their three sons. So they sent their son Ramon, the oldest, into practical training. They sent Raul to military school and Fidel said he would set fire to his parents' house if he wasn't allowed to continue academic study. So they let him do that and they sent him to a Jesuit school in Santiago de Cuba. Can I just say that's fascinating because I always in my head-

I've got Fidel and Raul always together, hand in glove, but they weren't. Gosh. I know later on that becomes a thing, a tricky relationship. But I thought at the beginning, I thought that was so okay. They were separated. They were separated. And I think actually what's really crucial and I really want to underline is that

That Jesuit school made a huge impact on Fidel Castro. And I actually think one of the best ways to understand him when you read his writing and so on is to understand that Fidel basically became a Jesuit and continued to be a Jesuit, much as he, of course, renounced Christianity and became a good atheist later in life.

So in what sense do you mean he continued as a Jesuit? I think he was incredibly intense, a massive believer in the kind of deep principles, you know, which come from that very Christian identity, a very universalist, globalist identity, very kind of, you know, invested in

humanity. And I think he was far more of a Cuban nationalist and with a very strong Jesuitical streak, very into a kind of disciplined commitment to what you believe is right. I think those values really, really went deep in him. And in your book, you say that he was not really a committed communist, at least initially.

No, certainly not. Very far from it. Quite the opposite, you might even say. But yes, I mean, at this time, you know, I mean, this is when he's still incredibly young before any of this became an issue. He also became an amazing athlete. So it's also quite important that he was really an immense man by the sense of the time, six foot two, huge guy.

He was actually said to be the best school athlete in the whole of Cuba. And there are stories that American baseball teams tried to buy him at some point, although these are quite unsubstantiated. But there could have been perhaps a very different history had that happened. But yes, he continued to be this kind of

quite sort of full of bluster, lots of machismo, big swaggering guy. But also, he started to become very political. And start studying the law. I mean, he starts getting sort of serious. He starts becoming a grown up. Oh, very much. I mean, you know, look, and he was a hugely intelligent guy. I mean, he was very much into that. But he was also somebody who was very much up

for a fight. So for instance, in 1947, he joined in an attempt to sail to Dominican Republic and oust Rafael Trujillo, the dictator there. And this failed. Trujillo was far too well defended and found out what was going on. And basically, all of these young Cubans who'd sailed over to try and oust him were taken prisoner. But Fidel refused to be taken prisoner. He strapped his machine gun to his back

leapt over the ship's rail and swam to the mainland. He was the only Cuban to escape from that legion. So this gives you a bit of an idea of the sort of guy he was. And then in 1953...

He actually takes up arms in Cuba and attacks the Moncada army base. Tell us about that. Let's go to 1953, to the Moncada barracks. This is down in sort of just outside, actually, the colonial centre of Santiago de Cuba, which is right down at the southern end of the island. And this was a plan that was cooked up, really, by Fidel and his brother Raul. They were going to stage this coup there, take over the barracks, and this was going to sort of begin...

the fall of the Batista regime in Cuba. This was the idea that they had. So they began this with a group of friends and they had sort of two cars driving up to it and they had groups and this included men and women, their revolutionary group at this point. It's important to say there were women involved as well. It was kind of an interesting young group and basically they staged this attack on the Moncada barracks and immediately sort of they think that they've got it. It's incredibly ridiculous and bold. There's a whole lot of shooting that goes on

unsurprisingly doesn't really come to anything. They get captured. And this time he's not able to jump overboard. No, this time there's no escape to be done. Well, actually Raul Castro did flee initially and kind of fled into the bush, but they were captured quite quickly after that.

And you know what? It's lucky that he survived that because some of the peoples, the rebels, as Batista's lot would call them, had some horrible things happen to them. More than 50 of the rebels were killed after having taken them prisoner. And authorities presented one woman, we're told, with a tray holding her brother's eyes and her

I mean, this is a just if we needed to understand the brutality of the regime, there it is in one punishment of one family. Yes, I mean, there were incredible instances of political violence are just sort of off the scale. And it's kind of impossible to understate how extreme a lot of that was and how heavy this vengeance was.

Hundreds of people were arrested after this attempted coup. A lot of people were tortured. A lot of people were indeed extrajudicially killed. All of this, you know, it was...

Pretty horrific stuff. And I mean, Fidel Castro was at that point condemned to 15 years imprisonment on the Isle of Pines. Well, just before we get to the prison sentence, can I tell you a tiny thing about the trial? You certainly can. Which really tickles me. So he's a qualified lawyer, as we've established. He decides to fight his own defence. And he does this really quite theatrical act.

thing of when he is asking questions, he wears the robes of court. And as soon as he's the defendant, he takes them off and jumps back in the box. So it is real theater. And this adds to this mystique of who is this madman who is so brave and so good and true. And his name starts getting out there. This guy Fidel, this guy Castro. Have you seen what he's done in court? Have you seen him thumbing his nose at Batista? And you start getting this beginning of a mythology that will

surround him for the rest of his life. But it's also quite a formative time for him in prison, isn't it, Alex, that he is reading a lot. This is when he really reads Marx as well as Dostoevsky, Freud and Kant.

Yeah, he doesn't like Marx at this point at all. He read Das Kapital and he said it made him laugh and he couldn't finish it. So, you know, this did not convert him to some kind of Marxist. He actually much preferred reading Julius Caesar, who he called a true revolutionary. He was obsessed with Napoleon. He actually admired Franklin D. Roosevelt a great deal as well. So,

Actually, the person who really influenced him was a Cuban poet and patriot, José Martí, who was a 19th century figure. So, you know, he was reading all of these stories at the time, lots of French, Russian, English literature, the works of Freud.

So he was really trying to educate himself. And yes, he was kept in this prison. And it was this very kind of imposing panopticon prison with cell blocks. But he had slightly nicer room, actually, in the isolation block or the infirmary. He and Raoul were kept in a sort of separate place, not in the panopticon. Together? Yeah.

Yeah, basically together. And the reason he was able to be kept in these nicer rooms was that his family had good connections. So actually his brother-in-law was one of Batista's ministers. And the reason they kept him in an isolation block is because he constantly caused trouble among his fellow prisoners. So at one point, Batista visited the prison and Fidel organized the prisoners into a choir to sing a rebel anthem until Batista went away hearing this song in his ears. So that's why they had to isolate him.

And we should also say this is a period when Hemingway is very much around in Cuba. Hemingway's there during this attack writing The Old Man and the Sea. Yes. Which will go on to win him the Nobel Prize. Drinking daiquiris. Drinking daiquiris, popularizing daiquiris. Yeah.

In the Floridita in central Havana, which still has, if you want to go there, a lovely statue of Hemingway at the bar, sort of life-sized and shaped. There's barely a bar that you can go into these days that hasn't got some plaque with Hemingway or a photograph of him. Hemingway drank here and here. And probably they're all telling the truth, if you said. To be honest. So when he's released from prison, do you know how many years he did it ultimately serve? So he took this...

principled view that he wouldn't ask for an amnesty from prison, but he did get one, whether he wanted it or not, May 1955. So this is when Batista was trying to sanitise, whitewash his own reputation. So he released a lot of political prisoners and Fidel said he would accept no clemency, but he did, I'm afraid, get kicked out of prison. They weren't going to keep him there just because he wanted to be there. So he got booted out. Having a nice reading break. Yes, exactly. It was

He was doing all right. Went back to Havana, but he decided to leave Cuba. He wasn't sure where he was going initially, but he did end up in Mexico City as an awful lot of Latin American dissidents did. And one of the most notable people who he meets in Mexico. A young man on a motorbike.

Well, the young man on a motorbike, the face that launched a thousand t-shirts, Che Guevara himself. So what do you know of their first meeting and what was it like? Well, it was a house party in Mexico City in November 1955. So...

Che Guevara was one of the hosts of this party. It was full of young people talking about politics. In fact, so many of them, they had to sit on the floor. Che, we should say, Argentinian originally. That's right. Ernesto Guevara, who's an Argentine doctor. Middle class, from a fairly well-off background, well-educated. Partly Irish ancestry. Anita is just very taken with that. You missed this moment of a swoon. What? Who? Let's not ask.

You're shouting me on a podcast. No one needs to know. He is notably handsome. I've also sent you both a notably handsome picture of young Fidel Castro. I think it looks surprisingly like Sheila Buff. Yes, I know, but a slightly better looking. You know they want to look in this episode, Anita. But yes, let me tell you what the South Party was like. So it was full of

Cigar smoke, sweat, all of this very noisy. Everyone was chatting. And anyway, Che Guevara was there and said, let's go into the kitchen. It's the only place we can talk. In the kitchen, there was Fidel Castro boiling a vata spaghetti. I thought you were about to say oiling a gun.

No, no boiling spaghetti. No, there was no gun. This was just a party. And even Fidel had to eat. There they were over this boiling vat of pasta, basically with Fidel explaining to Che in his first conversation that he wanted to go back and invade Cuba and Alcabatista.

And just a bit of context here, Che is a much more committed communist, much more ideologically fixated and in a sense better educated in his reading of the revolutionary world than anything that Castro has come across yet. Fidel Castro is not a communist at this point at all. The person who is...

is Raúl Castro, his brother. Raúl has started reading this stuff and has decided that ideologically he's a communist. And actually Fidel really isn't. He's more a nationalist? He's a Cuban nationalist, a very, very strong Cuban nationalist. He's got a very strong feeling against American intervention or something. But that's not from a communist ideological point of view at all. It's very nationalistic. You make the case in your book that it's America in a sense that pushes him towards communism.

both communism and specifically the USSR later in his career. Very much so. And there's no reason, you know, like at this point Fidel was 29, Che was 27, Raul was 24. They're very young. By far the strongest personality really. They're all very strong personalities, but Fidel really was. It's quite a party. I mean, an incredible party. Do they bring out something in each other that then means that Castro goes back to Cuba and takes...

Jay along with him. Well, I think Fidel's point of view at this point was that I'm kind of going to take anyone who's going to join in for Cuban nationalism. Don't particularly care about ideology. That's not of a great deal of interest. My brother's a commie. More commies, fine. He's not in favour of it. He's just not very interested in it, quite honestly. He's more anti-Batista than anything else. He's sick of Batista. He actually is, interestingly, quite prepared to work with the Americans, actually, as long as they're not backing Batista.

And he goes on honeymoon in New York even at one point. Yes, absolutely. I mean, he also at this point had legally obtained an American visa. He went on a fundraising tour in the US to Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Florida. He was briefly detained by the FBI, but basically didn't really have any trouble. They decided he wasn't a very big problem and raised $9,000, which basically allowed the Cuban rebels to train in Mexico to get a ranch and train.

Had Shave picked up a machine gun in earnest at this point, or was he also basically an intellectual? The story that you get in the Motorcycle Diaries is this idealistic young surgeon and doctor who travels on his motorbike through the poverty of Latin America and wants to save the people from their backward ways. Is that...

a real picture or is that just fiction? You know, it's not a million miles from the truth. I think it's pretty close. What politically happens to the rebirth of both of these and how do they end up in Cuba again? Well, basically all of this was Fidel's plan to go back and invade Cuba. He wanted to go back and overturn the Batista regime. So this is why they start training and they start training with a Spanish officer from the opposition to Franco called Alberto Bello. And

Actually, Che is the star pupil. Incredibly tough, incredibly committed to all of this. Che actually had asthma, but he was so committed to being such a tough military guy that he just effectively overcame that as much as he could. Also a great speaker, isn't he? There are speeches that he's making at this period that I've heard, which are rather extraordinary. It's pretty amazing, but he's pretty theoretical though. He's quite heavy on the old Marxism, which not everybody loves, you know, and again, isn't the central focus of the Cuban revolutionaries. And also there's a little bit

of antagonism in the group about the fact that it's being led by you know Beo who is Spanish Che who is Argentine these aren't Cubans they're along for the ride and that's okay but there's you know it's not 100% easy that situation there's a lot of testosterone in one room when do they finally go back to Cuba and what is the immediate effect of having Castro back on Cuban soil

So as part of Fidel Castro's fundraising for his triumphal re-entry into Cuba, he went and met Carlos Prio, former president, and he met him actually...

in McAllen, Texas. And what had happened is that Fidel had not risked applying for a visa at that time. He'd gone to the Mexican border, stripped naked, plunged into the Rio Grande and swam to the US and went to meet Carlos Prio, who was then sort of an ex-son in the US, who gave him 50,000 US dollars. And Fidel had been a big critic of Prio, said he was corrupt.

And some people said afterwards, you know, like, why did you do this? Why did you take this money from Prio, who was like an American puppet and very corrupt? And Fidel said, pinching $50,000 from a son of a bitch is not theft. It's a good deed. So later on, a KGB official alleged that even though Fidel didn't know it, the reason Prio had that money is that the CIA had given Prio that money to fund Fidel. What? Wait, what? Here's where it gets complicated. So at this point...

You know, it would make some sense because Prio would have had access to that cash largely if the CIA had given it to him. At this point, it was completely possible that Batista's regime was incredibly corrupt, very frail. The CIA quite possibly saw Fidel Castro, a Cuban nationalist, as a very good alternative. Something presumably that both would deny very...

volubly in years to come. In no doubt. However, if it was from the CIA, to be fair, Fidel probably didn't know that the money came from the CIA. However, this is what funded the voyage of the grandma, which is the famous re-entry to Cuba. So the grandma, which literally means grandma, the boat was named after its previous owner's grandmother, was...

bought by Fidel and it's basically a 14-man yacht and they crammed all the Cuban revolutionaries onto it with all their machine guns, ammo, maps, food, all of this kind of stuff. But it was a pretty knackered old boat and they had 82 people on this boat for 14 minutes. So

It was pretty awful. They actually had 50 more who couldn't get on and had to stay behind because the boat was just too full. So this really rickety old boat full of revolutionaries chugged its way through various storms. You know, the worst weather the Caribbean could throw at you. They had an absolutely horrible time sailing back to Cuba. But they did amazingly make it to Cuba. Just, I mean, they ran aground miles from where they were supposed to.

and had to kind of load up dinghies with all their ammo, most of which, of course, immediately sank straight into the water and managed to kind of struggle aboard in Cuba. And then immediately as they managed to land off this stricken boat, a plane flew over because Batista's Air Force was kind of really aware that there might be people coming to try and invade. So the plane opened fire with machine guns. They all tried to hide. The plane flew off.

There can't be much room to hide if there's 80 of them in a 14-man boat. Well, I mean, but they are on the shoreline. They basically were in a mangrove swamp, which if you've ever been in one is also really not a great place to hide. Very thorny, very difficult territory. And so basically, you know, this kind of completely disheveled group of men managed to get to Cuba itself. Many were killed en route. So when you had sort of 82 men initially get on the boat...

After these various attacks by Batista's Air Force, but after these shipwrecks, these disasters, there were about 15 to 22 men who survived that. That's quite a high attrition rate. Very high attrition rate. But it's a very small number of people who managed to do what they do next, which is... Which is take Cuba. Which is take Cuba. You had a wonderful phrase, you know, he did a coup, where they did a revolution, didn't they? Yeah. I mean, just a handful of men. And how did they do that?

Well, I mean, it's a really complicated way, but there's some really extraordinary stories from how they did it. And really, it's a kind of amazing PR effort. I mean, I think it's worth understanding that the Cuban Revolution wasn't some kind of fight between these men. And in Cuba, then, it was Los Doce, the 12, right? As I say, we don't know the exact number, but of course, there's a little bit of, you know, Cuba, a very Catholic country, a little bit of a biblical resonance to the idea of there being 12 of them and all of this.

They had this incredible will to fight. Certainly, Batista was pretty keen to kill them. I'm not saying there weren't military actions and so forth going on, but there was also extraordinary levels of public relations and media manipulation. Possibly, one of the points that can really show you this is that in 1957, when they still have really low numbers, they try to start attracting local recruits onto their group.

But actually, the kind of coup Fidel pulls off is that he invited an American journalist, Herbert Matthews from the New York Times, to his camp to see them. Now, Batista at this point said, the Castros are dead. I shot them from the Air Force, right? These guys living in the mountains are just some nonsense people. So,

So Fidel was like, I'm going to prove that we're not dead, that we're still going, that we have this huge force in the mountains. Now, Fidel at this point had about 18 men in his entire force. Fidel spent three hours talking to Herbert Matthews. And what they did at that time is Che and Raoul paraded by with column and column of lean, smart troops

And at one point, a soldier ran up saying, the second column's just sent a message. Anyway, Matthews filed this piece with the New York Times saying there's this huge number of rebels living in the Cuban hills. It's absolutely extraordinary. Of course, they just marched the same 18 men round and round again past him. And there was no second column. I mean, this was public relations. And Batista more or less fled at this point.

Batista believed it. He absolutely terrified this talk of this huge group of rebels. Yeah, but there's also, I mean, public relations-wise, you're absolutely right. I mean, that article made an enormous difference to his confidence, but also this genuine enthusiasm for somebody who wants to take Cuba back for Cubans. So, you know, as

Astro is leaving the mountains and walking among men. You've got members of the old regular army standing to attention and saluting these bearded ragtag people who are walking past them. You've got young people slapping on red and black armbands or red t-shirts as a sign of their support. And it's a movement that starts to swell because they like the story. The story's a good story, exactly. And these are these young, as I need to keep saying, very handsome men

You keep saying on my behalf, but I'm not arguing. They were handsome. They grow their beards. They become barbudos, the bearded men. And this is because they're not going to shave till Cuba is free. Although, as it turns out, they're just not going to shave. They lighted beards and kept them. But anyway, you know, the idea was that this is what we'll do, a visual representation. So yeah, really, really good storytelling.

And at this point, Fidel is incredibly keen to make sure that they don't get painted as a communist movement. And he knows he has to really watch Raul and Che, who are communists about this. So at one point, Raul wrote a letter to Che, the Batista regime found it and read it out on the radio show, saying, look, these commies are talking to each other.

And Fidel started shouting about Raul, when he gets here, I'll shoot him. I don't care a fuck if he's my brother, I'm going to shoot him. Anyway, they managed to talk him down, didn't shoot him, but they did have a huge fight. And Fidel said, you are never writing to Che about communists again. So he was really stamping down on this kind of thing. Okay, he might have stamped it down, but he does rely on his two linchpins as well. You know, he may want to punch Raul in the nose quite a lot of the time, but...

He sends Shay to Havana and doesn't he say to Raul, you go from Havana to Guantanamo. He's just making the presence of this small band of men known. So it makes it impossible. Batista thinks he can't hang on. And how does Batista finally leave? What happens? Where does he go? How does he leave?

Well, it's very much that way around. I mean, the Cuban revolutionaries were fighting, kind of constantly capturing towns from Batista's forces. Che's front was moving up the island at that point, heading for Santa Clara, the last major, major city before Havana. And this very much was happening in December 1958. There is a real revolution happening. At this point, the Cuban revolutionary forces are much larger. They're fighting their way up the island. Che Guevara is leading them, capturing towns from Batista's forces,

heading up for Santa Clara, which is kind of the last major, major city on the central highway before you get to Havana. So it's quite, you know, this is all going, it's quite thrilling. The forces are massing and all of this. And on 28th of December, Che launched his attack on Santa Clara. It's very dramatic and this is all sort of, you know, happening. It's clearly coalescing. But what happens is on New Year's Eve, 31st of December, 1958,

Batista, knowing that these rebels are heading for Havana, ate his last Cuban meal, chicken and rice usually is. They had coffee after dinner, this very sort of heavy atmosphere. And an hour later, Batista resigned, boarded a plane with his wife and a few other officials, allegedly also with some rather large suitcases full of cash.

And got on the plane and flew to the Dominican Republic to the safety, so he hoped, of Rafael Trujillo. So he left. Batista wasn't actually defeated in battle. He didn't wait for the revolutionaries to get there. He did a runner.

Which is a thing that dictators often do. Listen, join us in the next episode of Empire when we talk about Castro's Cuba. Alex Antonsen will be with us again, I'm delighted to say. Till the next time we meet, and if you're a member of the club, you can go to it right away. It's goodbye from me, Anita Arnon. And goodbye from me, William Durrenpool.