Throughout Latin America, millions of students have held in their hands a book with a green cover and a man wearing a turban. Baldor’s celebrated Algebra textbook is, without a doubt, one of the best-selling mathematics books in the history of Latin America.
Yet very few people know who the man behind that book was, what his story was, or how an authoritarian regime that called itself a defender of “the people” took away, in just a matter of months, the fruits of a life devoted to working, helping others, saving, and investing in human capital. Everything he had built over the course of decades vanished under the grip of the dictatorship.
Aurelio Ángel Baldor de la Vega, Cuban by birth, was born in Havana on October 22, 1906. A mathematician and lawyer by profession, he decided to dedicate his life to something that socialism has never been able to produce efficiently: quality education, sustained not by decree, but by the voluntary choice of thousands of Cuban families willing to pay for it.
The lawyer founded Colegio Baldor on the island, in a grand house in El Vedado, which eventually served around 3,500 students and operated its own fleet of buses. None of this was a gift from the state. It was the result of decades of personal effort, hard work, and entrepreneurial skill by a man who understood that knowledge is a scarce and transferable good, and that those who produce it should be able to benefit from their work while benefiting their community and students.
Aurelio was a man deeply concerned about his surroundings, as demonstrated by the scholarships he offered at the school and the financial assistance he provided to cancer patients in his community. In 1941, the Cuban author published his renowned book, “Algebra,” followed by Arithmetic, Plane and Solid Geometry, and Trigonometry—books written with academic rigor for generations of students who, decades later, would continue using them throughout Spanish America.
Then came 1959, and with it, the threat of imprisonment. For the new regime led by dictator Fidel Castro, a successful educator who owned his own school and operated independently of state indoctrination was not an ally, but a class enemy. According to some accounts, it was Raúl Castro, the dictator’s brother, who ordered his arrest, viewing his independence and success outside the revolutionary system as incompatible with the new order.
Only the personal intervention of Cienfuegos—a commander of the Revolution and one of Baldor’s former students—managed to keep him out of prison. But that protection would not last. In October 1959, Cienfuegos disappeared during a flight that never reached its destination, under circumstances the regime never clarified. Baldor understood that his arrest was only a matter of time. In July 1960, he left for Mexico with his wife and their seven children, carrying little more than what they could carry by hand.
What came next is a textbook case of what happens when a socialist state decides that private property and fundamental rights are negotiable. Colegio Baldor was seized by the state; his house on the beach at Tarará was confiscated; his bank accounts were frozen. A man who had built his wealth through hard work, effort, and discipline was left overnight without a school, without a home, and without his savings—all at the hands of a coercive, authoritarian, and armed minority that never subjected its policies to a single free vote.
But the dispossession did not end there. Castro’s authoritarian regime also appropriated more than a decade of intellectual labor. According to various sources and biographers, the Cuban government massively reprinted Baldor’s books for use in the dictatorship’s education system—without paying a single royalty to his family.
It is important, however, to clarify what the grievance really consisted of. To reduce the Baldor case to the unauthorized reprinting of his books—and to the royalties that were never paid—is to describe only the surface of the dispossession and brutality. What was truly grave was not that the regime “stole” an intangible asset reducible to a mere idea floating in his head, but that, through that fraud, it denied him the right to be publicly recognized as the author of his own work and, with it, the ability to capitalize on the prestige and experience he had built over decades. By appropriating his authorship—omitting his name and presenting his texts as the product of “the Revolution”—the socialist state did not merely lie: it committed a fraud that prevented him from giving lectures, offering consulting services, founding new institutions, or simply making a living from his reputation as one of the great educators of his time. Added to this usurpation of his identity and his ability to generate income was, of course, the physical, real, and tangible confiscation already mentioned above: his school, his home, and his bank accounts; a material dispossession that the regime carried out without the slightest ambiguity. The harm, then, was twofold: they took his business from him while, at the same time, preventing him from practicing, under his own name and in freedom, the profession he himself had created. That—and nothing else—is what Castroism did: a coercive, brutal, and totalitarian dictatorship that, in the name of the people, did not hesitate to lie, steal, and silence anyone who dared to prosper.
It is important to note that Baldor had already transferred the commercial rights to his works to a Mexican publisher more than a decade before the Cuban Revolution and the expropriation of his assets. While the Castro regime expropriated his property and sought to erase his authorship within the island, the private publishing market beyond its control preserved his name, sustained the circulation of his work, and allowed his legacy to transcend Cuba’s borders and endure throughout Latin America and the world.
While the Cuban educational apparatus printed copies of his Algebra and paraded them as an achievement of “the Revolution,” Baldor—heir to the liberal ideals of José Martí—could not endure the treatment he had suffered. He took his family to New York, where he began again with virtually nothing. He first found lodging on the second floor of an Italian immigrant’s property in Brooklyn; later, he settled in a modest apartment in New Jersey. There, he gave private lessons and taught at Saint Peter’s College in Jersey City and Stevens Academy in Hoboken.
That is the brutal asymmetry that real-world socialism so often conceals: capital, whether physical or intellectual, does not disappear when the state confiscates it; it simply changes hands through force. The assets remained. What changed was that they had been taken and transferred to a new owner by force.
For the Austrian School of economics, this is not merely a tragic anecdote, but an illustration of why private property is a precondition for prosperity, not its byproduct. Mises explained that, without private ownership of the means of production, there can be no market prices capable of guiding the allocation of resources, and rational economic calculation becomes impossible. When the state can arbitrarily seize the fruits of such efforts, it undermines the incentives that make the creation of wealth possible in the first place. Cuba stands as a historical laboratory for that thesis: an island that, in the 1950s, ranked among Latin America’s most prosperous economies and that, nearly seven decades later, cannot even guarantee an adequate supply of milk for its children.
The Baldor case reveals a deeper dimension of socialism: a dictatorship like the Cuban regime does not merely confiscate factories and land; it can also appropriate intellectual work, legacies, and reputations while denying individuals recognition for the fruits of their labor. What is most appalling is not merely what the regime did, but the willingness and spinelessness of certain Western leaders to look the other way—or even pay homage to it.
When Fidel Castro died in November 2016, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called him a “remarkable leader,” also stating, “It was also a real honor to meet his three sons and his brother, Raúl Castro, during my recent visit to Cuba,” while Barack Obama offered similar diplomatic ambiguity, saying only that “history will record and judge” Castro’s impact and adding, “Today, we offer condolences to Fidel Castro’s family, and our thoughts and prayers are with the Cuban people.”
That is precisely why stories like Baldor’s must continue to be told. Baldor did not need Cuba’s Ministry of Education to educate thousands of students; he needed the freedom to build a business, make a living from his work, invest, and protect what he had built. Exile slowly consumed him, like a great ship run aground beneath an implacable tide. He died far from Cuba, clinging to the hope, until the very end, that he might one day return to the land he would never see again.
The regime that stripped him of his wealth, his school, and his homeland still rules an impoverished and authoritarian island. His work, by contrast, endures: a legacy that no decree could erase. Entire generations have learned from his books without ever knowing what it cost their author to write them in freedom. For as long as stories like these continue to be told, those who lived them will not have been completely erased by oblivion.
