Biran is the name of a village in Cuba. Fidel Castro, the ruler of Cuba from 1959-2006, was born in Biran located Holguin Province on 13 August 1926 and he died on 25 November 2016. Biran, Birán in Spanish, is where the house in which Fidel Castro was born stands to this day. The house and the plantation of 23,000 acres was owned by Fidel Castro’s father but after the Revolutionary government it was appropriated to the Republic of Cuba.
Located in the foothills of Sierra de Nipe or Nipe Mountains, Biran is 30 km from Mayari and 9 km from Cueto and relatively unvisited place by tourists.
“A headstrong child, Castro was sent to Catholic boarding school at the age of six by his parents in the hope that it would his rebellious nature. He was a brilliant but lazy student. Nor did he socialize well: he often ended up in fistfights with other students and, on one occasion, with a priest. One former friend said that the young Castro was cruelly teased on two counts—having been born out of wedlock and having a gallego father who was said to have fought for Spain, as a cavalry quartermaster, in the War of Independence.” –CUBA Confidential: The Extraordinary Tragedy of Cuba, its Revolution and its Exiles by Anna Louise Bardach
Fidel Castro father was a Spanish immigrant who migrated to Cuba for a better livelihood and he established himself as the wealthy landlord in Cuba in the early decades of the twentieth century.
‘HISTORY WILL ABSOLVE ME’
Born in 1926 to immigrant Spanish father, who migrated from Spain to colonial Cuba for a better life and to become wealthy, Fidel Castro stood for trial for the assault on the Moncada Barracks during the Batista regime. Fidel Castro studied law, and he defended himself in the trial and the speech at the trial was his most famous speech: History Will Absolve Me.
“I know that imprisonment will be harder for me than it has ever been for anyone, filled with cowardly threats and hideous cruelty. But I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives of seventy of my comrades. Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.” –Fidel Castro
HERITAGE OF CASTRO:
Fidel Castro relinquished the power to rule Cuba and handed the reins of power to his brother Raul Castro in 2006. Raul Castro handed over the power to Miguel Diaz-Canel in 2018. The Castros are part of the Cuban political history who ruled Cuba from its soil after the country saw the intervention of Spain, the USA and the USSR (Russia).
‘Fidel Castro thinks he’s Jewish. Or at least part Jewish, buried in his past. “Castro” is among the more common names of Marranos, Spanish Jews who took on Christian identity during the Inquisitions to avoid certain death at the stake. Fidel mentioned his heritage in private to Ricardo Subirana y Lobo, a chemical engineer and financial backer of the Revolution to whom he gave a diplomatic post in Israel in 1960. Castro, historian Maurice Halpernia has written, “apparently was convinced that some of his ancestors were Marranos.”’ -Tom Miller in the chapter Havana’s Jewish identity in THE CUBAN READER: HISTORY, POLITICS, CULTURE.