Priest recalls young Castro in Cuba

Posted on Sun, Apr. 30, 2006

Priest recalls young Castro in Cuba
BY BRIAN LATELL
iccas@miami.edu

There is probably no one alive today who knew the young Fidel Castro
better than Father Amando Llorente, his Jesuit confidant during the
mid-1940s. Llorente, whom I first interviewed in Miami in 1986, shared
penetrating insights with me about the teenage Castro he remembered
vividly. Recently, we met again.

Llorente is now a vigorous 87-year-old, as keen and articulate as I
remembered him. He wore a black beret as he greeted me and a mutual
friend in the courtyard of the retreat house where he lives.

He told me during our first meeting about the young Castro's strangely
distorted relationship with his father, Angel Castro. The priest could
not recall the elder Castro ever visiting Belen, the elite Jesuit
preparatory school in Havana, where Llorente taught and the young Castro
studied. The priest told me in 1986 that he could not understand Angel's
absence, and especially why he had failed to attend his son's graduation
in 1948.

'I would often say, `Fidel, let me meet your father. We are both
Spaniards. I am from Leon, and he is a gallego [from Galicia].' But he
would always change the subject.''

When Llorente and I had that first discussion, neither of us understood
why Angel treated his son with such indifference. But by the time of our
recent meeting, we had both come to appreciate the powerful emotional
disturbances that had strained the relationship between father and son.
What has become clear is that Fidel was not legally recognized by his
father until 1943, when he was 17 years old.

Fidel Ruz

Fidel's relationship with Angel was psychologically labyrinthine and
traumatic, one of the key factors that shaped his adult character and
personality. Growing up, he bitterly resented his father, sensing
rejection and abandonment. Those feelings were most painful during the
time he lived in a squalid foster home in Santiago de Cuba in the care
of a poor Haitian family where he has claimed he was abused.

During those formative years, Fidel was known by his mother's surname;
he was Fidel Ruz González. And as the illegitimate son of a barely
literate servant girl in Angel Castro's household, Fidel feared with
good reason that he might be condemned to an obscure life as a peasant
laborer.

Although his circumstances improved as Angel supported his education in
a succession of elite Catholic schools, first in Santiago and then
Havana, Fidel remained unsure of his prospects and had scant contact
with his father. It was at Belen where he found emotional solace.

Family problems

He told Llorente, ''I have no family other than you,'' meaning the
Jesuit priests. It was Llorente he drew closest to.

''I camped with him more than 55 times,'' the priest recently recalled.
It was during those group excursions into the Cuban countryside, when
they were alone at night, gazing at the stars, that Fidel was most
likely to reveal how tormented he was.

During our first meeting, Llorente told me that Fidel ``often spoke of
family problems, of not really having a family. He rarely spoke of his
parents, but suffered considerably as a child. . . . I gave him a lot of
reassurance, I counseled him about trauma.''

I doubt that Castro has acknowledged those psychological demons to
anyone else as he did 60 years ago with Llorente.

During our recent conversation, the priest also told me for the first
time of his trip to Castro's guerrilla camp in December 1958, when it
was evident that the Batista dictatorship could not survive much longer.

''I went because the Vatican needed to know what was happening. Was the
revolution Fidel was leading nationalist, or Marxist, or what?'' the
priest said.

At the time Llorente shared the fears of some of his superiors in Rome
that Castro might persecute the Catholic Church, because, as he told me,
``I recognized that he would want all power in his own hands.''

``So I went to the Sierra Maestra on horseback, disguised as a peasant.
I spent four days at Fidel's headquarters. I asked him about Cuba's
future, especially regarding the Catholic Church. He professed to have
no problem and said, for example, that he would need to keep the
Catholic Saint Thomas University so that it could train the engineers
that Cuba needed so badly.''

Lies and stories

Llorente concluded poignantly about the young Fidel Castro he remembers
so well: ``He used to always lie to me and make up elaborate stories to
get away with things.''

''It is my second nature,'' the priest remembered Castro telling him
without any hint of shame.

Brian Latell is a senior research associate at the Institute for Cuban
and Cuban American Studies at the University of Miami. He is the author
of the recently released After Fidel, the Inside Story of Castro's
Regime and Cuba's Next Leader.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/14455230.htm