Fidel Castro once said he saved ten working days a year by not bothering to shave.
Abraham Lincoln had a famous beard. So did Walt Whitman and Karl Marx. Still, it’s hard to think of a more famous beard than the one Castro wore across seven decades. Like his fellow revolutionaries, he had little opportunity to shave while operating in the wilds of the Sierra Maestra mountains. The men’s grown-out beards became badges of honor.
That facial hair also acted as a filter for spies, who, as Castro noted in his autobiography, Fidel Castro: My Life, would have had to cultivate six months of growth before even attempting to infiltrate the 26th of July Movement. Long after his guerrilla days, Castro kept his beard as a symbol of the triumph of the revolution. His beard became such a potent symbol that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency hatched (but never carried out) a plan to make it fall out by planting in Castro’s shoes a soluble depilatory that could be readily absorbed through the skin. Pragmatically, Castro figured that skipping shaving saved him time that he could use more productively. By his calculation, “if you multiply the fifteen 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. 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.” (Actually, the math works out to about 11 days.)