The teacher’s home had a porch with a beautiful view of the Sierra Maestra mountain range and the Bay of Santiago nearby. But the interior was narrow, dark and damp; just a little living room with a piano, two bedrooms and a bathroom.
The roof would leak when it rained and everything would get wet; it seemed to rain more inside than out. This was home to me and Angelita, the teacher’s father, Néstor, and his other daughter, Belén, who supposedly taught the piano but didn’t have a single student. Later on, there was also a campesina, Esmérida, whom they brought in as a maid...
I had gone to Santiago for my education, but once I was in the teacher’s house I was never given a single lesson. I was just there, without even a radio to pass the time. The only thing I ever heard was the piano: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, bang, bang, bang. Can you imagine, a couple of hours every day listening to that piano? It is amazing I didn’t turn out to be a musician.
The teacher’s sister, the pianist, was meant to give me my first-grade classes, elementary school, but it never happened. Instead, I taught myself to add, multiply, subtract and divide from a school notebook, whose back was printed with the basic tables.
But that was all I learned, except perhaps ‘French manners’. The family, who I think had Haitian roots, spoke French perfectly, and they had a very good formal education. And all those rules, all those rules of etiquette, they taught them to me from the very beginning. You had to speak very politely, you couldn't raise your voice, you couldn't say a single improper word. Once in a while they would spank you, to keep you in line.
I soon tired of that life, that house, that family, those rules. It was the instinctive reaction of a small, mistreated animal. Worst of all, though, was the hunger. Birán was like a paradise of abundance, and my parents had to scold us to make us eat: “Eat this soup, eat that meat, eat this, eat that.” In Santiago, they would serve just a little bit of food, and what arrived for lunch was also supposed to do us for dinner.
The food came from the house of one of the teacher’s cousins, whom they called Cosita— ‘Little Thing’. She was a very fat lady, and apparently she was the one who ate all the food. The cooking would be done at her house, and another cousin would bring over the cantinita, a stack of round metal containers holding a little rice, some beans, sweet potato and plantains. I remember using the edge of my fork to pick up the last grain of rice on my plate. And rice was cheap!
Of course, there were mitigating circumstances: the teacher’s family was poor. They lived on her salary; that was all they had. And the government often didn’t pay teachers their salary. Sometimes they would have to wait three months or more for their money. That created uncertainty and self-centredness. Every centavo, the way it was spent, was a question of life and death for Eufrasia Feliú and her family.
At least, it was at the beginning. After a while, my older brother Ramón came to join us, which meant three sets of fees coming in. As the household became richer, the teacher saved up money, bought some furniture and even went on a trip to the Niagara Falls.
She brought back some little flags as souvenirs. What misery! You can’t imagine the hours I spent listening to her talk about her journey. It was Niagara this and Niagara that, the same stories over and over. And all of this was paid for with our hunger!
My sister recently told me that she tried to write to our parents to tell them what we were going through, but our hosts intercepted her letters.
Eventually, however, my mother visited Santiago and discovered that all three of us were skinny and half starving to death. That day she took us out of there and carried us to the best cafe in town; I think we devoured every bit of ice cream in the place. It was also mango season, so she bought a sack of delicious little Toledo mangoes. That sack didn’t last 10 minutes.
The next day Mother took us home to Birán. By now, we three children were sworn enemies of that teacher, who would come to our house to have lunch and always pick the best pieces of chicken out of the rice. Perhaps what came next was my first act of rebellion; it was definitely vengeance.
During term-time, the teacher lived in Birán’s schoolhouse, which had a roof of corrugated metal, and one evening, as it got dark, we armed ourselves with slingshots we had made from forked branches from a guava tree and some strips of rubber.
There was a bakery nearby, and we took all the firewood for the oven and made ourselves a fort, and we set up a bombardment that seemed to last half an hour. It was wonderful! The rocks landing on that zinc roof above the teacher’s head! By the time two or three were hitting the roof, there would be two or three more in the air. You couldn’t even hear the yells and screams that we imagined the teacher was making for the noise of the rocks hitting that roof. Oh, we were vengeful little devils.
The Guardian
· This is an edited extract from My Life by Fidel Castro with Ignacio Ramonet, published by Allen Lane on November 1 at £25. © Ignacio Ramonet and Random House Mondadori, 2006, 2007. Translation © Andrew Hurley 2007. To order a copy for £23 with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.
