Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz

… is 85 today. He took control of Cuba in 1959.

Castro wrote a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. (He says he was 12, but should have been 13 or 14.) “If you like, give me a ten dollars bill green american in the letter [back] because never have I not seen a ten dollars bill green american and I would like to have one of them.” Castro went on to say, “I don’t know very English but I know very much Spanish and I suppose you [FDR] don’t know very Spanish but you know very English because you are American but I am not American.”

Perhaps if FDR had given him the $10 history might have been different.

I saw Castro give a speech outside the Hotel Nacional in Havana in 1993.

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