Castro: The revolutionary beard

Ever wondered why Cuban leader Fidel Castro — now off the limelight after nearly 50 years at the helm of the Caribbean nation — has always sported a luxuriant beard?

It’s not just because it harks back to the anti-bourgeois ethos of the Cuban Revolution of 1959, but also because it is a practical expression of the old revolutionary’s workaholism.

By his own calculation, Castro saves up to 10 working days a year by not shaving.

“The story of our beards is very simple: It arose out of the difficult conditions we were living and fighting in as guerrillas. We didn’t have razor blades, or straight razors. When we found ourselves in the middle of the wilderness, up in the Sierra, everybody just let their beards and hair grow, and that turned into a kind of badge of identity,” the ailing 82-year-old former president reveals in his spoken autobiography: Fidel Castro: My Life, published by Scribner.

“For the campesinos [farmers] and everybody else, for the press, for the reporters, we were los barbudos — the bearded ones. It had its positive side: In order for a spy to infiltrate us, he had to start preparing months ahead — he’d have had to have a six-months’ growth of beard, you see. So the beards served as a badge of identity, and as protection, until it finally became a symbol of the guerrilla fighter. Later, with the triumph of the revolution, we kept our beards to preserve the symbolism,” Castro says.

“Besides that, a beard has a practical advantage: You don’t have to shave everyday. If you multiply the 15 minutes you spend shaving every day by the number of days in a year, you’ll see that you devote almost 5,500 minutes to shaving. An eight-hour day of work consists of 480 minutes, so if you don’t shave you gain about 10 days that you can devote to work, to reading, to sport, to whatever you like.”

Castro, commonly referred to as Comandante, adds: “Not to mention the money you save in razor blades, soap, after-shave lotion, hot water... So letting your beard grow has a practical advantage and is also more economical. The only disadvantage is that grey hairs show up first in your beard. Which is why some of the men who had let their beards grow, cut them the minute the grey hairs started to show, because you could hide your age better without a beard.”

In the autobiography — drawing on more than 100 hours of interviews with journalist and author Ignacio Ramonet — Castro narrates a compelling chronicle of his childhood, rebellion at home and school, the Revolution and meetings with prominent public figures (Nehru, Tito, Arafat, Jiang Zemin, Nelson Mandela, Noam Chomsky and others).

He also tells of his dealings with no less than 10 successive American presidents (from Eisenhower to Bush II).

The long conversations on capitalism, the World Trade Organisation, the death penalty and other contemporary global issues began in late January 2003 and would bring Ramonet back to Cuba several times over the succeeding months, through to December 2005.

Castro proudly talks of the achievements and challenges of the revolution.

He shares recollections about more personal matters, like his successful attempt to give up cigars.

He discusses the effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp on Cuba.

He concedes that corruption exists in the country.

And he reveals how he threatened to burn the family home if he was not sent back to school when he was in fifth grade; how he forged grades to buy comic books, sweets and go to the movies; how at the age of 21, he joined the Cayo Confites expedition to fight against the dictatorship of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic in July 1947 and his experiences in the Bogota Uprising in Colombia in 1948.