Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Memoirs

YOUNG CASTRO

Jonathan M. Hansen

The Making of a Revolutionary

A nuanced, intimate portrait of a young liberal nationalist inspired by the dream of a free country: 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, anti-American hot-head. In its place, he provides a nuanced portrait of a liberal nationalist inspired by the dream of a free and independent Cuba and sympathetic to Roosevelt's New Deal. A man who, having grown up on an island that felt like a colonial cage, was compelled to lead his country to independence.

Jonathan M. Hansen is a senior lecturer at Harvard University. His writing has been published in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and The Guardian.

Available products
Book Published 2019-06-18 by Simon & Schuster
Book Published 2019-06-18 by Simon & Schuster

Comments

Hansen shows us how history and circumstances shaped the young Fidel Castro, revealing an opportunistic and evolving revolutionary long before Castro hardened into a polarizing ideological symbol. Cuba's revolution erupted in an era of global ideological ferment, and could have gone in any number of directions. Castro's path to authoritarian communism was not foreordained; Castro's personal history and choices, as well as American missteps, drove Cuban history in a tale that bears implications for us today. Free from smug hindsight, Young Castro takes us back to a time when independent revolutionaries imagined they would not have to choose sides between the United States of America and the Soviet Union.

"This is not just another account of Castro's well-reported life but a new, sometimes startling perspective that challenges some of my own long-held views."