Very long books appear at intervals about Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Rarely do they contain anything both significant and new, and they get longer and longer. This one too is a long book, though it is mercifully an abridgement of the original Spanish edition, which ran to over 1,400 pages. Anything in it both significant and new has escaped me. Most of it is about Castro’s childhood, youth, the overthrow of Batista and the early years of the revolution: Castro gave up smoking many years ago, but here he is still puffing away. All the same, it provokes thoughts.
The first is that it confirms the view that history or biography is best written straight, and that funny business should always be avoided. Here Norberto Fuentes takes on himself the task of writing Castro’s memoirs for him, and throughout he writes as Castro. In that he goes a step further than the more sycophantic Ignacio Ramonet, who recently entitled his own interviews with the subject My Life, by Fidel Castro.
Apart from the obvious risk of Castro’s being among other things a tireless and long-winded egotist, not a writer to imitate lightly, this makes his account almost useless for any serious purpose: specialists may find it from time to time suggestive, but despite the author’s assertion that he can back anything up with some source or other, the reader has no means of evaluating the claim.
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