Título: FIDEL: A CRITICAL PORTRAIT
Autor: SZULC, TAD
Año: 1986
Género: BIOGRAFÍAS Y MEMORIAS
Formato: EPUB
On December 2, 1956, Fidel Castro, a young lawyer with an extraordinary vocation for revolution, landed at the foothills of the Sierra Maestra with eighty-one companions to launch a guerrilla war and liberate Cuba from a military dictatorship. Twenty-five months later, Castro was the island's victorious leader, setting in motion a radical social and ideological revolution in his country that still has a profound impact on the postwar history of the world.
After more than a quarter of a century, Fidel Castro remains one of the most influential and controversial figures of our time. He has created a Marxist-Leninist society in his own country in defiance of the United States, allied himself with the Soviet Union, defeated American-sponsored attempts to oust him through the Bay of Pigs invasion and assassination plots, nearly caused a nuclear confrontation between the superpowers, and dispatched his armies to Africa to fight political wars there.
Nearing the age of sixty, Fidel Castro has allowed a biographer to take a close look at his astounding life through personal conversations and full access to his closest associates and companions in arms as well as to written materials gathered by the regime's historians. To paint Castro's “Critical Portrait” from his observations and the wealth of his exclusive information, Tad Szulc spent nearly a year in Cuba, interviewing scores of personages and listening to Fidel Castro in different surroundings, including on one occasion Szulc's temporary Havana home.
What emerges from this canvas is a unique study of Castro's life and revolutionary career, the first true insight into his immensely complex personality and intellect. It is the story of Fidel's childhood and youth, the birth of his revolutionary impulses, his evolution toward Marxism-Leninism, his talent as a great orator, and the inside account of his conspiracies, battles, defeats, and victories as never told before. It is also the story of Castro's normally concealed personal life, his touching relationship with his son, Fidelito, the unfolding of his views on everything from philosophy and culture to guerrilla warfare, basketball strategy, and haute cuisine. We see in the “Portrait” the private Fidel, happy or angry, relaxing and working, and always secretly planning his next move on the chessboard of Cuba and the world. Filtered through the piercing intelligence and objectivity of one of the foremost experts on Latin America is the image of Fidel Castro as an outstanding military strategist, a leader with a rare sense of history, but also a man of ruthlessness, dark moods, and powerful gifts of political manipulation. Tad Szulc was free to retain his absolute independence in his approach to his portrait, and Castro chose to tell him in faithful detail the real “inside truth” about the Cuban missile crisis, his strange relationship with Nikita Khrushchev, and his deepest sentiments about John F. Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs. It is the first time that such accounts have been published.
Tad Szulc was the New York Times reporter who broke the Bay of Pigs story. He is the author of numerous books, among them «The Illusion of Peace: A Diplomatic History of the Nixon Years», «The Winds of Revolution», and «The Twilight of the Tyrants».
Szulc first met Castro in 1959, the year of the Cuban Revolution, and toured with him the swamps and beaches of the Bay of Pigs to hear his personal story of the battle. To write this biography, he returned to Cuba three times. Szulc lives in Washington, D.C.
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