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.” The only disadvantage is that grey hairs show up first in your beard. So letting your beard grow has a practical advantage and is also more economical. 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.” AdvertisementĬastro, commonly referred to as Comandante, adds: “Not to mention the money you save in razor blades, soap, after-shave lotion, hot water. 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. “Besides that, a beard has a practical advantage: You don’t have to shave everyday. Later, with the triumph of the revolution, we kept our beards to preserve the symbolism,” Castro says. So the beards served as a badge of identity, and as protection, until it finally became a symbol of the guerrilla fighter. 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. “For the campesinos and everybody else, for the press, for the reporters, we were los barbudos - the bearded ones. 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. We didn’t have razor blades, or straight razors. “The story of our beards is very simple: It arose out of the difficult conditions we were living and fighting in as guerrillas. 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.īy his own calculation, Castro saves up to 10 working days a year by not shaving. 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?

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