The Latell Report

Welcome to The Latell Report, the newest publication of 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 Report, analyzing Cuba's contemporary domestic and foreign policy, will be published monthly.

Dr. Brian Latell, distinguished Cuban 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.

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. Father Llorente, who I first interviewed in Miami in February, 1986, shared penetrating insights with me about the teenage Castro he had known so well. Recently, I visited Father Llorente again to discuss the favorite student he remembered so well.

Father Llorente is now a vigorous 87 year old. He is as keen and articulate as I remembered him from twenty years earlier. He stands and strides like a man many years younger, exuding a charming sense of humor. He wore a black beret as he greeted me and a mutual friend in the courtyard of the Agrupacion Catolica retreat house, on Biscayne Bay in north Miami. He has lived there, doing many types of pastoral work, for a number of years, although he still manages to visit his native Leon, in northern Spain, with some frequency.

I included a remark of Llorente’s about Leon in my new book, After Fidel. He told me during our first meeting about the young Castro’s strangely distorted relationship with his Father, Angel Castro. Llorente explained then that he was still puzzled about why he had never met Angel. He could not recall Fidel’s father ever visiting Belen, the elite Jesuit preparatory school in Havana, where Llorente taught and where the young Castro spent the four happiest years of his life. 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. But he would always change the subject.”

When Llorente and I had that first discussion twenty years ago, neither of us was able to understand why Angel treated his son with such indifference. But in our second meeting this past March 30, we had both come to appreciate the powerful emotional disturbances that had strained the relationship between father and son in the mid-1940s. What has become clear just in the last few years is that Fidel was not legally recognized by his father until 1947, when he was seventeen years old. Although Angel was by then generously supporting his son, officially he was still illegitimate.

The young Fidel’s relationship with his father was psychologically labyrinthine and traumatic, one of key factors that shaped his adult character and personality. Growing up as a boy and teenager he bitterly resented Angel, feeling rejected and even abandoned, most painfully so during the time he lived in a foster home in Santiago de Cuba in the care of a poor Haitian family. Fidel was taunted and bullied. During those early formative years he was known by his mother’s surname; he was Fidel Ruz Gonzalez. And as the illegitimate son of a servant girl in Angel Castro’s household, he feared, and with good reason, that he might be consigned to the life of 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 with scant contact with his father. It was at Belen that he first found emotional solace.

Father Llorente told me during our recent conversation that the fourteen or fifteen year old Castro told him:

“I have no family other than you,” meaning the Jesuit priests at Belen. But it was Llorente he drew closest to.

“I camped with him more than fifty-five times,” the priest remembered. 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 confide in the priest and to reveal how emotionally tormented he was.

In 1986 Llorente told me that the young Castro, “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 ever confided in anyone else as he did sixty years ago with Father Llorente, baring some of the psychological demons that he has otherwise always been at great pains to conceal. A search of the entire record of Castro’s oratory and interviews since 1959 may only reveal one acknowledgment that he suffered childhood traumas of the kind he described to Llorente. The lone exception was in a speech to students at the University of Havana last November.

During our second conversation, Father Llorente shared a story he had not felt free to discuss during our initial visit. He described his trip up into the Sierra Maestra in December 1958 to visit Castro, 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?”

At the time Llorente shared the fears of some of his superiors in Rome that Castro might persecute the Church, because, as he said of Castro, “I recognized that he would want all power in his own hands.”

“So I went to the Sierra Maestra on horseback, disguised as a guajiro (a Cuban 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 required so badly.”

With the sun low in the late afternoon on that recent day in Miami, casting long shadows in the courtyard where we sat around a simple metal table, Father Llorente concluded poignantly about the young Fidel:

“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.

And then Father Llorente added, “From childhood he needed to lie in order to survive.”

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.