Castro’s Secrets: The CIA and Cuba’s Intelligence Machine

Latell (After Fidel), senior research associate at the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies, draws on his nearly four decades of tracking Castro for the CIA for this authoritative exposé of “the mysteries and crimes of Cuban intelligence over the last half century.” To augment his extensive knowledge of Castro’s Cuba, the author conducted extensive interviews with defectors from Cuba’s elite intelligence and security services, interviewed CIA officers, and read thousands of pages of declassified CIA documents. Much of what he reports confirms existing knowledge: the details of Kennedy’s “bloody covert war against Fidel”; the CIA’s efforts to assassinate Castro; and Castro’s support for guerrilla movements in Latin America. Latell also uncovers some occasionally shocking new information: that Castro quickly developed an elite spy agency and managed to keep the CIA “ignorant of Cuban capabilities” for decades; that Castro himself was Cuba’s “supreme spymaster”; and that Castro knew about Lee Harvey Oswald’s plan to assassinate Kennedy. Despite his best efforts to link Castro to the assassination, however, Latell manages only to show that the dictator knew more about Oswald than he has admitted. While he documents Kennedy’s obsession with Castro, he fails to ask why. Even so, Latell provides a lively and revealing account of the long intelligence war between the U.S. and Cuba. Agent: Sterling Lord, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Apr.)