2007-08-09. ctp.iccas.miami.edu
Dr. Brian Latell*
Last year on August 13, Fidel Castro was convalescing after botched
intestinal surgery as his condition and prognosis, though clearly grave,
remained shrouded in secrecy. It was his birthday, and two weeks earlier
he had surrendered power to his brother Raul. His withdrawal, nearly
coinciding with the birthday, generated a torrent of international media
attention.
Soon the regime revealed that birthday observances would be postponed
for four months, until December 2, Cuba's revolutionary armed forces
day. Expectations were high that he would reemerge, deliver a speech,
watch a military parade with a phalanx of officials, and possibly
announce he was returning to power. Camera crews, television and radio
personalities, a host of reporters, and not a few celebrities and
acolytes flocked to Havana hoping for a glimpse of the venerable Fidel.
Many were cheering for his recovery and return.
Cuban officials hinted that he would be present, that there would be
surprises that day. The official media were flooded with features
lionizing the stricken leader, letters from well wishers around the
world, and other unusually reverential treatment. The eightieth birthday
had come to symbolize his longevity, durability in power, and possibly
even his recovery. But on the morning of December 2, as crowds of Cubans
and international media gathered, it was not until Raul rose to deliver
the keynote address that it became clear Fidel would not be personally
accepting birthday greetings.
None among the few of us who knew better were inclined to spoil all the
fun. Fidel had not in fact turned eighty last year. On August 13, 2006
he marked his seventy-ninth birthday. His actual eightieth is now upon him.
That he has been lying about his age through most of his adult life has
been known outside of Cuba to some of his biographers and other astute
students of his life. Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence that he was
born on August 13, 1927 in Biran, Oriente province, he has clung to the
birth date, exactly one year earlier in 1926, that is inscribed in his
birth certificate.
In my study of the Castro brothers, After Fidel, I revealed some
previously undiscovered evidence that supports the later birth date. On
different occasions in the late 1950's Fidel's mother Lina Ruz and three
of his sisters publicly confirmed the 1927 date.
In April, 1957 his sisters Emma and Lidia were interviewed by a reporter
for the New York Spanish language newspaper El Diario de Nueva York.
They said Fidel had been born in 1927. Later, in January 1959, Lina and
Fidel's older sister Angela confirmed this to Gerardo Rodriguez Morejon,
Fidel's first Cuban biographer. In a letter to him they confirmed the
accuracy of his study, based in part on information they had provided.
On the first page of his book Rodriguez Morejon gives the 1927 birth date.
Fidel's two known surviving brothers have no illusions about this
either. Older brother Ramon informed one biographer that he is
twenty-two months older than Fidel. Ramon is known to have been born in
October, 1925. And, according to another of Fidel's biographers, at the
time of Fidel's ostensible fiftieth birthday in 1976, Raul reminded him
that it was actually his forty-ninth. Fidel is said to have responded,
"I am the age that the documents indicate. If they say I am fifty, I am
fifty."
He said much the same on the one occasion when to my knowledge he was
asked to comment on the record about his true age. During an extended
interview in 1977 with broadcast journalist Barbara Walters, he was
pressed on the matter, but was vague, refusing to insist on the earlier
birth date. "I take the less favorable date," he told Walters. It seemed
like an implicit acknowledgment of the truth.
Through the decades he spent in power Fidel almost invariably was able
to quickly calculate, even as he was delivering speeches or granting
interviews, the age he supposedly was at some juncture in the past that
he was describing. For example, he claimed to be thirty-two in January
1959 when his revolution triumphed, not his actual thirty-one. It has
been rare for him to slip up when counting backwards. But he did that in
January 1979 when he told another American interviewer that he had been
eighteen when he began his studies at the University of Havana. That was
correct, but on other occasions he does the retrospective math better to
suit the false age, claiming he was nineteen at that time.
Several of his biographers, discounting Fidel's and the official Cuban
line, have described his actual age correctly. In addition to Rodriguez
Morejon, Peter Bourne, Leycester Coltman, and Claudia Furiati express no
doubts, arguing for the 1927 date. Others, Robert Quirk and Tad Szulc,
for example, were reluctant to choose definitively between 1926 and
1927. Still others, the German Volker Skierka, French biographer Serge
Raffy, and the much maligned Herbert Matthews, accept the erroneous 1926
date without comment.
But what has remained even more in doubt, and until now unresolved among
Fidel's multiple biographers, is precisely why and when his birth date
was falsified. Some biographers have alleged that Angel bribed a local
official to produce a falsified birth certificate. But if so, was that
done, as I asserted in After Fidel, and quoting Coltman, at the time the
young Fidel was seeking admission to Belen, the elite Jesuit prep school
in Havana and needed to be a year older? Although that interpretation
has been accepted by many, I now believe it is wrong.
Recently I have been persuaded by Mario L. Beira, a Miami psychologist
and astute student of Fidel Castro, that the date change occurred in
January, 1935 when the seven and a half year old Fidel was first
baptized. He was a student at LaSalle, the Christian Brothers school in
Santiago he attended before moving on to the Jesuit Dolores school. Dr.
Beira concludes, I believe accurately, that this baptismal certificate,
with the 1926 date, is the first official document that records Fidel's
age. It may have simply been a clerical error, or more likely
orchestrated to make it possible for Fidel to skip a grade at La Salle.
It was not long after the baptism that he advanced from the third to the
fifth grade, which required that he be ten years of age.
So in a few days, Fidel Castro finally and truly will become on
octogenarian. Perhaps this is the time for him --in one of his
reflections?-- to finally admit the truth.
_______________________________
*Dr. Brian Latell, distinguished Cuba analyst and recent author of the
book, After Fidel: The Inside Story of Castro's Regime and Cuba's Next
Leader, is a Senior Research Associate at ICCAS. He has informed
American and foreign presidents, cabinet members, and legislators about
Cuba and Fidel Castro in a number of capacities. He served in the early
1990s as National Intelligence Officer for Latin America at the Central
Intelligence Agency and taught at Georgetown University for a quarter
century. Dr. Latell has written, lectured, and consulted extensively.
________________________________
The Latell Report July-August 2007
Welcome to The Latell Report. The Report, analyzing Cuba's contemporary
domestic and foreign policy, is published monthly except August and
December and distributed by the electronic information service of the
Cuba Transition Project (CTP) at the University of Miami's Institute for
Cuban and Cuban-American Studies (ICCAS).
The Latell Report is a publication of ICCAS and no government funding
has been used in its publication. The opinions expressed herein are
those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ICCAS
and/or the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
The CTP, funded by a grant from the U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID), can be contacted at P.O. Box 248174, Coral Gables,
Florida 33124-3010, Tel: 305-284-CUBA (2822), Fax: 305-284-4875, and by
email at ctp.iccas@miami.edu.
http://www.miscelaneasdecuba.net/web/article.asp?artID=11107
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