Publisher: Simon & Schuster (June 2019)
Length: 496 pages
ISBN13: 9781476732473
Young Castro is an outstanding book. Readers will come away not only enlightened but challenged. Jonathan Hansen has combined rigorous research into the early life of Fidel Castro with exceptional writing. This is a book about the early formative years of one of the world’s most attractive and controversial personalities. It unearths information that will help experts and the general reader have a more profound understanding of the Cuban Revolution and its historical leader.
Ambassador Carlos Alzugaray TretoFor several decades now, most books about Cuba—and pretty much all of them about Castro—have been judged along sharply partisan lines. This has come at an analytic, affective, and stylistic cost. Historian Jonathan Hansen breaks free of enduring strictures in this deeply affecting account of Castro’s early years. Hansen’s work is a bustling, wholly new, and vivid account of Castro’s family of origin, the circumstances of his rural youth, the making of the man, and the outlines of the philosophies he later pursued. But the reader is aware of the psychological depth of this carefully researched biography before Castro even appears in the narrative.
Before its end, we know the impetuous and high-handed young man, but have also learned a great deal about Cuba—and about the struggles of a world in which colonialism was dying an overdue and protracted death. In Young Castro, Hansen transcends the romanticism and demonization of previous accounts. But this beautiful account of Castro’s youth provides a template for assessment and perhaps even judgement. It’s high time we had this momentous and intimate book.
Paul FarmerAs an old friend of Fidel and participant in the Cuban Revolution, I never thought I’d see a book like this published on either side of the Florida Straits. Young Castro is a new thing under the sun: fair, accurate, original, discerning. Fidel would recognize himself in Jonathan Hansen’s penetrating portrait.
Journalist Max LesniKYoung Castro
The Making of a Revolutionary
An intimate, revisionist portrait of the early years of Fidel Castro, showing how an unlikely young Cuban led his country in revolution and transfixed the world.
The son of an illiterate father with an entrepreneurial bent in flight from the ravages of Spain’s class system; a young schoolboy who prefers the company of local peasant children to his tony classmates at elite boarding schools; a confident teenager who reaches out to a US president and receives a cordial reply; a strapping youth home for school vacation who likes nothing better than to saddle his horse, pack a sandwich and head off into the mountains alone; a budding politician attentive to strangers but often indifferent to the needs of his own family; a fearless dissident who, dismayed over his nation’s political passivity, leads a quixotic attack on its second largest military barracks; a restless prisoner who writes passionate love letters while organizing a guerrilla movement and contemplating the meaning of life. This book will change what you think you know about Fidel Castro.
The first American historian in a generation to gain access to the Castro archives in Havana, as well as interviews with those who knew him best, Jonathan Hansen challenges readers to put aside the caricature of Fidel Castro as a bearded, bombastic, anti-American hot-head. In its place, he provides a nuanced and penetrating portrait of a liberal nationalist inspired by the dream of a free and independent Cuba and sympathetic to FDR’s New Deal. A man who, having grown up on an island that felt like a colonial cage, simply refused to submit to US imperialism.
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