A Peasant from Biran

Pacing with restless energy at his home in Mayaguez, a verdant university town on Puerto Rico's southwestern coast, Fidel Pino Martinez reminisced with me about the Castro clan. Bougainvillea trees flashed their iridescent magenta blooms that mild winter morning, the last day of February 1986. I had taken a year-long sabbatical from the CIA to do research on Cuba and Mexico at Stanford University. I sought out people who had known the Castro brothers, wanting to learn more about their dynamic relationship.

Pino was seventy-eight, retired from a construction business he had operated with his son. Tall and taciturn, he spoke of Cuba only when coaxed, but he was not an angry or bitter exile. He was content living in Puerto Rico, the nearby island that the Cuban poet and patriot Jose Marti had memorably paired with Cuba as "two wings of the same bird." Its green hills and sugar cane fields, and especially its vibrant, garrulous people, reminded Pino of the homeland he had forever left behind a quarter of a century earlier. All of his family—his wife, siblings and their spouses and every one of the twenty-eight children they had among them—also chose exile. Many of them retained vivid memories of the Castros because the two families had been so closely linked in Oriente and Havana across the span of three generations.

Fidel Pino's youngest brother, Raul Pino Martinez—after whom Raul Castro was named—served during the late 1940s and 1950s in Santiago as attorney for the Castro brothers' parents, first for their father Angel, and later for his widow Lina Ruz and some of the Castro siblings. Raul Pino Martinez's son, also named Raul, has generously shared with me copies of intimate documents and correspondence related to the Castro family that were originally in the possession of his father and are now preserved in the Pino family collection.

In Mayaguez, Fidel Pino had vivid memories of the Castros. His knowledge of the immigrant patriarch Angel, his sons, and Biran, the remote community where the brothers grew up on a sprawling plantation, was fortified by the trick of fate that connected him to Fidel Castro. Both men were named after Pino's father, Fidel Pino Santos. The elder Pino, born in 1884, would be a lifelong friend of Angel Castro. The two had started out dirt poor in the early years of the twentieth century in the municipalities surrounding the Bay of Nipe on Cuba's northeastern coast.

Mayari, where Biran is one of fifteen barrios, or districts, and the neighboring municipalities of Banes and Antilla were at the cusp of spectacular economic and demographic expansion, as workers from all over Cuba sought opportunities in the booming local economy. American sugar and fruit interests were building large mills while clearing vast tracts for sugar cane plantations. Bananas were grown for a while, and later, valuable nickel deposits would be developed. A few towns in the area, notably Banes, became comfortable expatriate centers where American workers and managers enjoyed nearly all the amenities of home.

During the first three decades of the century, Mayari alone burgeoned from about twenty-one thousand to nearly one hundred thousand people. For industrious, shrewd, strong, and eager young men like Angel Castro and Fidel Pino Santos, fortunes could be made. There was enough cheap land so that they could assemble large tracts of their own and then profitably sell cane to the American mills close by.

With each man helping the other, the emerging potentates would become two of the richest entrepreneurs in eastern Cuba. They collaborated on many deals, Angel frequently borrowing money from the wealthier and politically more influential Pino Santos. In Mayaguez, the latter's son, Fidel Pino, told me of a huge diamond—four or five carats, he thought—that Angel had once given to his father as collateral on a loan. The diamond resided for a long time in a small vault in the Pino family home in Havana.

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Outsiders, certainly the few who came from the cities to visit Biran would not easily forget the frontier settlement the Castro compound dominated. One found it barbaric "beyond belief," like "something out of Dostoevski." It was rough and isolated when Fidel and Raul were young. Outlaws roamed the hills, and it was wise to always have firearms close at hand and to know how to use them swiftly.

As many as a thousand people, nearly all of them somehow indentured to the Castros, were drawn to this rustic melting pot. They came from all over the island, from Haiti and Spain, and probably other countries as well, seeking work and little plots of their own where they could throw together a simple hut, maybe grow some sugar cane, and stake out a claim. Sexual mores were casual, unencumbered. Documented marriages were a luxury few bothered with, just as government authority of any kind rarely intruded.

Disputes were generally settled on the spot, often with sudden lunges and slashes of the ubiquitous machete. Eye-for-an-eye forms of justice and retribution were meted out. To be weak was not just disgraceful on the Cuban frontier, but dangerous. None of Angel's children has ever reported witnessing maimings or other bloody confrontations at Biran. But there can be little doubt that they occurred, most predictably when the rum flowed and the game cocks fought.

Children at Biran did not remain innocent very long. Fidel and Raul's sangfroid in later years—when ordering or presiding over executions and engaging in many forms of lethal violence—was ingrained at an early age. Most of their Cuban contemporaries, raised in more refined settings, would never be able to understand this. The brothers may even have learned to rationalize murder by observing their father Angel, who was rumored to have coldly killed men himself.

The busiest time was during the sugar harvesting season, the zafra, when Biran throbbed with frenetic labor as the merciless heat of the late spring and summer descended. Brigades of macheteros, cane cutters, sweating in long-sleeved garments and rhythmically swinging their machetes, sliced their way through the fields. First the leaves had to be stripped, then the stalks cut close to the ground, donde canta el sapo—where the toad sings—so that the best juices nearest the roots could be captured. The most skillful macheteros fairly danced through the cane rows, gracefully arching their backs, smoothly reaching high and low. There was a constant crisp metallic echo as the men...