The Fidel Castro Reader: Castro's Cuba, and What Comes Next

After Fidel: The Inside Story of Castro's Regime and Cuba's Next Leader

As Fidel Castro continues to show signs of his own mortality, questions about Cuba's future-and America's role in that future-naturally arise. As a longtime Cuba analyst for the CIA, Latell is in a unique position to offer insights into the psyche of Fidel's unquestioned successor: his enigmatic, underestimated brother, Raul, the world's longest-serving defense minister who has always stayed in the shadows, among his own countrymen and in the press. Even in their student days in Havana, Raul failed to impress as Fidel did: ""The Jesuits found Raul apathetic and disinterested. After Fidel's intensity and promise, he was a great disappointment ... Lacking in confidence and fearing he could not match his brother's accomplishments, he did not even try."" But just because Raul has allowed himself to be a cipher doesn't mean he lacks a certain initiative. Latell describes the many executions carried out by Raul's orders, and sometimes, by his own hand. Yet he also has a sensitive side, and, unlike Fidel, openly enjoys the company of friends and family. Who is the real Raul, and which one will lead a post-Fidel Cuba? Latell argues that the answer is vitally important to US-Cuba relations. Readers looking for a primer on the Cuban Revolution or a meaty biography of Fidel should start elsewhere; this book assumes prior knowledge of the Cuban situation. However, those hungry for a greater understanding of Fidel's character and the complicated relationship between the Castro brothers will find priceless nuggets here.

In the Pirate's Den: My Life as a Secret Agent for Castro

Masetti spins a tale of progressive disillusionment with communism. He followed in the footsteps of his father, a Communist guerrilla who was killed when the author was seven. Cuban-born Masetti traces his involvement, beginning as a teenager in Argentina (his mother's native land), followed by stints in Colombia, Angola, Nicaragua and other revolutionary hot spots of the 1970s and '80s. Though the story of growing disgust with a bankrupt ideology has been told with more passion and insight elsewhere, Masetti does hit an emotional crescendo in the book's final pages, when he tells of the execution of his father-in-law, which led to his final break with Castro's Cuba. The book's strength lies elsewhere, in its description of the world of Communist spying and intrigue that Masetti experienced firsthand. He brings the reader into his initial training in guerrilla warfare and his later revolutionary actions. Despite the occasional triumph (some of his former comrades were involved in the murder of Nicaragua's Somoza during the Sandinista takeover in 1979), Masetti and his revolutionaries bungle a lot of attempts. As the years pass, these activities become simply illegal rather than revolutionary (robbing banks, for instance), and Masetti's devotion to his cause wanes. In fact, as he shows, his ideals fell victim to authoritarian secrecy—for which he holds Castro responsible—and intrigue and internecine bickering. 

Castro's Final Hour: The Secret Story Behind the Coming Downfall of Communist Cuba

Drawing on his five trips to Cuba, Miami Herald foreign correspondent Oppenheimer presents a revelatory close-up of a Cuba few outsiders have glimpsed. Following the Soviet Union's massive withdrawal of subsidies, Castro imposed an austerity program, with bicycles and oxen replacing autos. The health care system has rapidly deteriorated, reports the author, who explains the Cuban masses' inertia as primarily due to fear of a repressive government apparatus. He portrays Castro as an increasingly paranoid megalomaniac who believes his own disinformation campaign. He found rampant discrimination against blacks and mulattos, who nevertheless, he claims, support Castro's tyranny lest the white Miami crowd return to power. He interviewed Castro's daughter Alina, who condemns the dictatorship; Che Guevara's grandson Canek, a heavy-metal rock musician; and scores of disaffected students, workers and government officials. Opening wth a long set piece on the 1989 execution of four military officers, the book also explores the covert ties Castro forged with Manuel Noriega and the Sandinistas.

The Cuba Wars: Fidel Castro, the United States, and the Next Revolution

Erikson, a senior associate at the think tank Inter-American Dialogue, approaches his analysis of the relationship between the U.S. and Cuba with the verve of a journalist, filling the book with interviews with dissident leaders and civilians in Cuba and the Cuban-American community. He demonstrates how policy and politics intersect, especially in a U.S. presidential election year, when the voice of Cuban exiles in Miami's Little Havana, a community that has been pushing to keep the U.S. embargo against Cuba in place, sounds especially loud and influential. Erikson turns his attention to the intriguing and unknown future for the Cuban polity; since Castro formally ceded power to his brother Raul Castro Ruz in February 2008, both Cubans and Americans are watching for what comes next. There is a “revolution of expectations” underway, and Erikson presents the looming political and economic uncertainties, exploring the possibility that since Raul has already allowed for increased consumption and real estate privatization, Cuba—like China—might be gradually opening up to capitalism.

Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution

Paterson (On Every Front: The Making of the Cold War) reviews the uneasy course of Cuban-American relations during the insurrection against Fulgencio Batista, the development of U.S. government and private-sector ties with the Cuban dictator, and the growing resentment of the Cuban people during the 1950s over Washington's support of the repressive, corrupt and violent regime in Havana. In his well-documented study, the author describes Washington's attempts to block Fidel Castro's assumption of power as Batista fled into exile in December 1958. He also reveals the tenuous relationships among the Cuban rebels during the insurrectionary period. Paterson shows how Batista failed to marshal popular support and Castro won the propaganda war with the help of Herbert L. Matthews's New York Times articles, which advanced the image of Castro as a Robin Hood figure in a noble cause.

The Americano: Fighting with Castro for Cuba's Freedom

William Morgan, an American who made his way to the front line of Castro's revolution in Cuba, gets thorough and entertaining treatment in this biography. Largely unknown in the U.S., his story is filled with the suspense of a blockbuster war movie, offering new and insightful perspective into the political climate of 1950s Cuba. From Morgan's Ohio beginnings, Shetterly quickly moves to his life in rebel camps in Cuba's mountains, which Shettterly describes exquisitely, and quite viscerally. Deftly weaving together a considerable amount of research to set the scene, he uses his findings to paint an intriguing and nuanced portrait of Morgan as well as the political tensions of the time. In fact, in addition to Morgan's story, there's a fascinating subplot about how Castro and the revolutionaries did not enter the revolution with a clear Communist platform, but slowly evolved that way from internal and external forces. Issues of nationalism and the role of journalism play a large role in the book, turning the intriguing story of one man into a thoughtful examination of 20th-century Cuban history.

Child of the Revolution: Growing Up in Castro's Cuba

Born in 1959, journalist Garcia spent his first 12 years in Cuba, plenty of time to pile up grievances against the Communist regime. His parents owned a small haberdashery whose business dried up with the gradual suppression of commerce after the revolution, until it was taken over by the state. When his parents applied to emigrate, his father was sent to a labor camp to cut sugar cane, and the family was meticulously divested of their belongings before being allowed to leave. Garcia's is an emblematic story of the dispossession and exile of Cuba's middle class, leavened with bittersweet reminiscences of his warmly convivial extended family, which comprised both Communist officials and disaffected partisans of the prerevolutionary past. As well, it's a study of the downside of Cuba's revolution—skimpy food rations, endless queues for shoddy goods, beady-eyed busybodies in the neighborhood Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, all justified by strident propaganda in the classroom and media. Garcia's rancorous score-settling with communism can be intrusive; "it's not a very revolutionary thing to do, but... even communists need toilet paper," he gloats about a common unauthorized use for the works of Lenin. But he does offer an intriguing corrective to romanticized accounts of socialist Cuba. 

Trading with the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro's Cuba

According to a joke making the rounds among Cubans during the author's six-month stay in 1990, the three great triumphs of the Cuban revolution are education, health and athletics; the three great failures are breakfast, lunch and dinner. But while the shortages were inescapable, Miller (The Panama Hat Trail) was impressed by the highly literate, lively people he met, the good libraries, the health care, the beauty of the landscape and the widespread devotion of the people to Castro, despite Cuba's increasing hardships. Miller's closest relations were with sophisticated intellectuals, but he joined the masses to stand on lines for diminishing goods, to ride the local buses, to tour the country and to listen to the gossip, complaints and jokes as well as the loyal defenses. (He loved the ice cream too.) In late 1991, Miller returned briefly to find his friends girding for the even greater sacrifices imposed by the loss of Russian aid and the continuing U.S. boycott.

The Domino Diaries: My Decade Boxing with Olympic Champions and Chasing Hemingway’s Ghost in the Last Days of Castro’s Cuba

In this striking memoir, writer and filmmaker Butler examines his bittersweet love affair with Cuba through the lens of boxing. Butler, a trained fighter himself, first visited the island to write about the national boxing team, which has grabbed 67 Olympic medals since 1968 (in a country with a smaller population than the New York metro area). As Butler pursues boxers, he finds himself immersed in the chaos and contradictions of Cuban society: shortages, sex work, police surveillance, desperate immigration, and the citizens’ sardonic patriotism, humor, and endless creativity. Shuttling between the stories of two of the greatest Cuban boxing champions—one who left (Guillermo Rigondeaux Ortiz) and one who stayed (Teófilo Stevenson—Butler delineates the costs of defying Uncle Sam for a half century. Cuba lies at the heart of the book, but Butler’s quest also leads him from his hometown of Vancouver to Mike Tyson’s Vegas mansion, an affair with a prostitute in Madrid, and a boxing match in Tijuana. More artist than journalist, Butler approaches his material slantwise, and much of his prose is fluid and searching. As he watches Havana’s labyrinth of jury-rigged 1950s cars and decaying mansions slowly succumb to the market economy, Butler makes clear that this is not an unmixed blessing. At times, Butler can lapse into abstraction and his hardboiled romanticism can become too familiar, but he has produced a book worthy of Cuba’s beauty and sorrow.