Did he play baseball in the big leagues?
This is probably the most frequently asqued question about Fidel. Every week I get two-or three e-mails asking me this question. Here’s the answer:
In the late forties, while he was living in Queens, New York, he was for some time an aspiring ballplayer (pitcher) for the New York Giants, (not the New York Tankees as many people believe) and was even offered a contract and a $5,000 bonus to become a professional American baseball player. Unfortunately (for us, Cubans), for some still unknown reasons he turned down the contract. Soon after, however, he discovered his true vocation and decided to become a professional Cuban corrupt politician while passing as an anti-American revolutionary.
So, instead of making a mere few millions pitching for the Giants in the United States, he has made a few billions stealing money and property from the Cuban (and some American) people. And all the money he makes is tax free. Not a bad deal!
Did Castro inherit a fortune from his father?
Definitely no. He made his fortune the hard way: He stole it from the Cuban people!
Just a few years after Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, Ramón Grau San Martín, a former Cuban president with a reputation for wit and corruption, made a comment to a friend. “These honest kids,” said Grau referring to Castro and his associates, “will manage with their honesty to accomplish what we, the corrupt politicians, never were able to do: destroy this country.” In retrospective, it seems that Grau was right, but just in one count. Castro and his cronies have destroyed Cuba, but they have proved to be more corrupt than all of the old style politicians. Closely following the steps of his unscrupulous father, who made his fortune by stealing sugar and moving fences under the cover of the night, Fidel surrounded himself with a circle of cronies as corrupt as himself and, very early in his political career, began an accelerated process of stealing other people’s money and property.
Castro, who allegedly earns a modest salary in Cuban pesos as Cuban President, and has no other sources of income, has amassed an incredible personal fortune close to 1.4 billion. That is the information appeared in Forbes magazine. The July 28, 1997, issue of Forbes lists Fidel Castro as one of the richest people in the world, with a net worth of $1.4 billion. Forbes’ estimate of the funds that Castro actually controls may be low, however; it merely assigns to him 10 percent of an estimate of Cuba’s gross domestic product. In fact, in addition to controlling the Cuban economy, Castro possesses and personally controls international bank accounts and large amounts of gold and commodities, and has done so virtually from the start of the Revolution.
Castro claims that he doesn’t care for money, but has a stash of cash totalling more than a billion dollars hidden away in banks, mostly in Zürich. He has a private fleet of yachts and luxury cars, and keeps stately homes in each of Cuba’s 14 provinces. While the Cuban people contends with housing shortages, he reserves hundreds of houses in Havana’s Jaimanitas beach section for the use of his security guards and aides. While Castro demands austerity from the people, he and his close associates order and send home foreign luxury items and use government satellite dishes to tune in to U.S. televised movies and sport events.
Until very recently Castro managed himself to push forward his image as a socialist Mr. Clean contrasting with the image of widespread corruption in Latin American and during Cuba’s previous history. Now it seems that Mr. Clean has dirty hands. When Forbes published its estimate of Castro’s personal fortune, some foreign observes believed that the revelation placed him in a difficult position before the Cuban people, because it tarnished his image as a sworn enemy of capitalism, constantly asking the Cuban people for sacrifices and austerity in the name of socialism. But that is not the case. Perhaps Castro fooled some of his admirers in the U.S., but he never fooled the Cuban people. From the very beginning they changed the name of the political system Castro imposed in Cuba from socialismo to sociolismo. (from “socio,” Cuban slang for “buddy” or “crony”), a tropical version of crony capitalism.
In an effort to create in Cuba an egalitarian society, Castro seized country clubs, beach resorts, hotels, and other recreational facilities and made them available to the lower classes of the Cuban population. It also deprived the upper classes of most of their properties. Homes of the wealthy were used as housing for students, large tracts of land were divided and distributed among poor farmers. But it seems that these times are not only gone, but that there is a noticeable trend to concentrate wealth in Castro’s and a few of his cronies’ hands.
For an interesting analysis of how Castro destroyed the Cuban economy see Peter Brimelow, “The Cost of Castro,” Forbes, March 23, 1998, 80; on how Castro’s own mismanagement, not external agents like the U.S. embargo, has destroyed Cuba’s economy see Modesto Maidique, “Fidel’s Plantation,” The Stanford Magazine, Winter 1983, 27-32.
Mentions to “sociolismo” in General del Pino Speaks: An Insight into Elito Corruption and Military Dissention in Castro’s Cuba. Washington, D.C.:The Cuban American National Foundation, 1987, 20.
What will happen to the Cuban revolution after Castro’s death?
Many people have predicted what will happen to the Cuban revolution after the death of Fidel Castro. Let me add my own prediction: Nothing!
Nothing will happen to the Cuban revolution because, after Castro’s death, there will be no Cuban revolution any more. After the death of the Caribbean Pied Piper, the Cuban people will wake up from their long incantation with the feeling that they just have had a bad dream. Then, the Cuban revolution will simply extinguish itself and disappear without a sequel, and Cuba will return to normalcy–whatever that means. And fifty years from now Cuban history books will show a very short mention of Fidel Castro as “a corrupt politician who lived in the times of Celia Cruz.”