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The Real Fidel Castro

Amazon.com Price:  $19.72 (as of 19/04/2019 06:55 PST- Details)

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Description

Leycester Coltman, British ambassador to Cuba in the early 1990s, came as close to personal friendship with Castro as any foreigner was permitted. With frequent contact and regular conversations, Coltman was in a unique position to observe the dictator’s personality in both public and private situations. Here he presents a close-up view of the man who, for half a century, has been loved, admired, feared and hated, but seldom truly understood.
Coltman chronicles the events of Castro’s extraordinary life from the political activism of his university days in Havana to periods of exile, imprisonment and guerilla warfare alongside Che Guevera, to the uncertainties of his old age. The book illuminates Castro’s shift from rebel to national leader, from soldier to diplomat, and from nationalist to Communist, focusing particular attention on the period throughout and immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Drawing on his own observations of Castro’s moods, tactics and motivations, and on sources uncovered within Cuba and in British Foreign Office archives, Coltman offers a unique insight into the complicated man at the back of the consummate actor who continues to play a crucial role on the international stage.
Who is the real Fidel Castro? Some would characterize the longtime Cuban ruler as a ruthless dictator, crushing all opposition and starving his own people to feed his own hunger for power. Others point to a revolutionary leader who has adhered to Marxist-Leninist principles Even as being popular enough at home to outlast nine American presidents. Former British Ambassador to Cuba Leycester Coltman provides an exhaustively researched history of Castro and reveals a man constantly driven by passion, usually able to lead by force of personality, and possessed of a subtle ability to shift his politics in order to maintain an advantage. The Real Fidel Castro traces his middle-class upbringing and career as a student agitator who hastily gained notice both positive and negative for taking part in revolutionary politics right through Latin America. Later, Castro, having failed in initial attempts to overthrow General Fulgencio Batista, takes to the jungle in conjunction with Che Guevara to prepare for what would eventually be a successful coup. Once in power, then again, the revolutionary must learn to be a diplomat and a political strategist as he navigates a messy victory in the Bay of Pigs conflict and suffers an embarrassing defeat in the Cuban missile crisis. Even as he is ceaselessly characterized as having been a mere puppet of the old Soviet Union, Coltman’s portrayal indicates the relationship was much more complicated; Castro recognized the need for a strong ally who also opposed the United States but questioned the ideology of the Soviets and worried over what the proposed reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev would bring to the world’s largest Communist nation. Even if Coltman came to know Castro Even as serving in Havana, he doesn’t gloss over the swift executions given to those who defied “the revolution” or Castro’s penchant for imprisoning those thought to be politically dangerous. In the end, Coltman, who died shortly before this book’s publication, is nonjudgmental and shows Fidel Castro to be a man as complex as the world he lived in. –John Moe

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