鈥榊oung Castro鈥� captures a revolutionary鈥檚 shining dreams
The opening of Jonathan M. Hansen鈥檚 鈥淵oung Castro: The Making of a Revolutionary鈥� is tropical and dramatic, shot in Technicolor: our intrepid author, acting on a tip from a friend, travels to a stately building in Old Havana to talk with a reclusive, venerable woman named Natalia (鈥淣aty鈥�) Revuelta.聽
He鈥檚 come to interview her about the love of her life, Fidel Castro. Her commitment to the project wavers back and forth. At one point she refuses to cooperate, but when Hansen shows her an old letter from her lover, her eyes fill up with tears. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 so Fidel,鈥� she murmurs, 鈥渢hat鈥檚 so Fidel.鈥� Abruptly, her mind changes: 鈥淪he then stood up, entered her library, and returned with a thick stack of paper which she plopped down on my lap, punctuating the moment with a single, unceremonious word: 鈥楬ERE.鈥欌�� Hansen leaves with the precious bundle, and the rest is history.
Once he鈥檚 finished collecting the long-secret documents from Revuelta in the mansion on the hill, he gets down to business: He shapes his account to create as full a portrait as possible of Castro before he became a political icon of the late 20th century.聽
Hansen鈥檚 book is about Castro before he became a revolutionary icon with a bushy beard, dressed in military fatigues, who always seemed to be shouting. We recognize him as the defiant leader of Communist Cuba, frequent object of U.S. assassination plots, bane of the Kennedy administration, arch villain of the Cuban Missile Crisis. This figure looms over Hansen鈥檚 account and consistently heightens its fascination.
Hansen鈥檚 story starts well before Castro鈥檚 birth in August of 1926 and follows him through his relatively privileged childhood and his student experiences at the hands of the Jesuits. Castro becomes a voracious political reader and speaker during his time as a law student at the University of Havana, deeply involving himself in the protests and counter-protests that roiled the campus in the late 1940s. It was in these years that Castro became a committed revolutionary. All he needed was a revolution.聽
By the time he was arrested in 1953 for organizing an attack on one of General Fulgencio Batista鈥檚 Cuban military garrisons, he had found that revolution. In 鈥淵oung Castro,鈥� those two years in prison read like a deep personal transformation, when Castro鈥檚 already omnivorous reading expanded to authors like W. Somerset Maugham, A. J. Cronin, and Romain Rolland, and when, as Hansen puts it, he came to the 鈥済rowing conviction that life was meaningless unless devoted to some higher purpose. He came to identify that purpose in Cuba鈥檚 unrequited dream of Cuba Libre.鈥澛�
General Batista released Castro from prison in 1955, mistakenly believing that he and his cohorts posed no threat. By 1959, Batista was overthrown and Castro was prime minister of Cuba. The account of that remarkable insurgency in 鈥淵oung Castro鈥� makes for gripping reading.聽
In many ways, the most memorable impression is of a serious, passionate, constantly evolving man; even in his formative years, Hansen鈥檚 Castro is an impressive combination of revolutionary zeal and common-folk compassion. In his famous partnership with the Argentine Che Guevara, he鈥檚 the deeper, more contemplative one.聽
Likewise Hansen gives his readers a global thinker, someone who realized, from early in the consolidation of power on his tiny island, that he would need to step warily onto the world stage. 鈥淚f Cuba鈥檚 alliance with the Soviet Union troubled U.S. officials, it unsettled Castro, too,鈥� Hansen writes. 鈥淗owever much Cuba needed money and protection, it was never his intention to trade dependence on one imperial juggernaut for dependence on another, and [he] soon learned that condescension and a lack of reciprocity were not the province of Americans alone.鈥澛�
In other words, in addition to being exhaustively thorough and gripping, 鈥淵oung Castro鈥� is also remorselessly sympathetic, far more so than Robert E. Quirk鈥檚 1995 biography or Georgie Anne Geyer鈥檚 1991 鈥淕uerrilla Prince.鈥� Nowhere in Hansen鈥檚 pages is the impulsive, autocratic oaf seen by many of Castro鈥檚 critics. The serial womanizer is largely absent from these pages as well. 鈥淵oung Castro鈥� gives no hint of the dictator who would run his country into the ground and make it a pariah state. Here we get the newly minted revolutionary, with the future unwritten before him.
