Trego's Mountain Ear

I wasn’t yet ten, and Castro was cool. From 1953 on, he was a revolutionary, fighting to remove Fulgencio Batista from Cuba’s presidency. In 1938, speaking of Nicaragua’s president Somoza, FDR described the dictator with the phrase “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” President Roosevelt died before Batista took power in Cuba, so we don’t know how he would have evaluated Batista – but my bet is about the same.

I turned 9 after ‘los barbudos’ (the bearded ones) came from the mountains into Havana – so I was probably 7 when I started watching the news about the Cuban revolution. Castro was cool – he was a pitcher. At 7, the world was open – I too had pitching potential. By the time I was 10, like everyone who watched me, I knew better. But Fidel Castro had tried out for the Washington Senators (the story was he almost made the Yankees, but the truth was impressive enough for a 7-year-old).

Each weekend, ‘los barbudos’ would capture another town – after the newspapers with Sunday comics came to town. Like me, ‘los barbudos’ read Al Capp’s Little Abner comic strip. I could understand the need for a skirmish to get to Little Abner – as my family’s new reader, I got the comics section after Dad got his chance at it, and often after Mom.

And, naturally, ‘los barbudos’ were cool. The only revolutionaries I had heard of at that time were the American revolutionaries – and they were the good guys. In 1957, I had no idea that revolutionaries could be bad guys. I guess I had a lot left to learn.