Fidel and Che
The Revolutionary Friendship Between Fidel Castro and Che Guevara
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
'As exciting and readable as a Cold War thriller' The Times
'Brings back the danger and intense emotions of that revolutionary period...it reads like adventure fiction' Independent
The story of the remarkable and revolutionary friendship between two of the most iconic figures in twentieth century history - Fidel Castro and Ernesto 'Che' Guevara.
Not yet thirty, Fidel Castro and Ernesto Guevara met in 1955 while both in exile in Mexico City. Guevara, the Argentine doctor plagued by asthma, had reached the end of the travels he began by motorcycle several years before. Fidel Castro, peasant's son, scholar and rebel, had just fled Cuba, fearing for his life. Over the next twelve years, until Guevara's death in 1967, their journey together would take them from the safe houses of Mexico's political underground, to war in the Cuban mountains and ultimately into the heart of the Cold War.
Drawing on extensive research, including declassified material and interviews with key figures in Havana, Moscow and Washington, Simon Reid-Henry uncovers, for the first time, the full story behind the central relationship of the Cuban revolution: their shared revolutionary ambitions, their conflicting personalities, the wilfulness that bound them together and the pressures that would tear them apart.
Fidel and Che is the story of two men who shared a common dream; who became friends, comrades and brothers-in-arms; and who, finally, would make an epic choice between their friendship and their beliefs.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this elegiac study of the revolution's iconic leader, Reid-Henry makes the relationship between Fidel Castro and Che Guevara the central dynamic of each man's life and of the revolution itself. On the one hand, the driven, domineering, strategically minded Castro galvanized the dreamy Guevara to discover his talent as a guerrilla commander and political executioner. On the other hand, Reid-Henry works hard to demonstrate that Guevara's poetic soul and quixotic Marxist purism made its mark on Castro's calculating mind. In his most revisionist claim, the author insists, not very convincingly, that Guevara's ill-starred insurrectionary expeditions to the Congo and Bolivia were not merely convenient ways for Castro to rid himself of his difficult comrade but wholehearted collaborations intended to spread their joint revolutionary vision to the world. Reid-Henry's portrait of the Che-Fidel dynamic makes the Cuban revolution as much a romantic adventure as an authoritarian bureaucracy, but Castro's obvious dominance of the partnership renders that picture unpersuasive. 30 b&w photos.
