Castro and His Youth

Oftentimes, when learning about, reading about, or watching a movie about, a huge historical figure whose name almost everyone in the world knows, the most interesting part of that person's life to me is his or her childhood. It was no different with the film about Fidel Castro that we just watched . It's always interesting, I think, to see if someone's youth mirrors at all what he or she did, or who he or she became in latter years. More often than not, the childhood does not fully reflect the adult years of people because no matter who they are, childhood generally remains a largely innocent time. There are elements of Fidel Castro's youth that do reflect who he was to become in later years, both in real life and in myth. There was an event in his childhood where Castro showed two different aspects of who he would become, both real and myth-based. As a child, after coming home from school once, his parents said they would not be able to send him back to the school he attended. Castro took exception to this and threatened that he would burn the house down if he was not allowed to go back to his school. He got what he wanted. This would happen in his later life as well, Castro would often get things he wanted, and was not averse to force or other such methods to get what he wanted. The other aspect of who he became that this speaks to was a myth-based one, propagated by the United States' opinion of Castro. Castro attained a status of being almost evil and his threat to his mother to burn the house down if he was not allowed to go back to the school he liked, is almost evil as well, or at least very dark and twisted especially when one considers that he was still quite young when he said it. His childhood was, interestingly enough, much more of a mirror into who he would become than is the case with most people.