An audacious “biography” of the ex-president of Cuba told in Castro’s own outrageous, bombastic voice.
Prize-winning author and journalist Norberto Fuentes was once a revolutionary: a writer with privileged access to Fidel Castro’s inner circle during some the most challenging years of the revolution. But in the late 1990s, as the regime began sending its oldest comrades t
An audacious “biography” of the ex-president of Cuba told in Castro’s own outrageous, bombastic voice.
Prize-winning author and journalist Norberto Fuentes was once a revolutionary: a writer with privileged access to Fidel Castro’s inner circle during some the most challenging years of the revolution. But in the late 1990s, as the regime began sending its oldest comrades to the firing squad, he became A Man Who Knew Too Much. Escaping a death sentence and now living in exile, Fuentes has written a brilliant, satirical, and utterly captivating “autobiography” of the Cuban leader—in Fidel’s own arrogant and seductive language—discussing everything from Castro’s early sexual experiences in Birán to his true feelings about Che Guevara and his philosophy on murder, legacy, and state secrets. Critics have long admired Fuentes’s writing; one U.S. article called him “Norman Mailer’s Cuban pen pal.” Akin to Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, or Edmund Morris’s
Dutch
, this wickedly entertaining, true-to-life masterpiece is as imaginative and outsized as Castro himself.
...more
Hardcover
,
567 pages
Published
December 7th 2009
by W. W. Norton & Company
(first published June 30th 2004)
why do the bad guys always dress better? JFK was alright in his saville row suit and brooks brothers shirt, but really - the fascists communists and tyrants are mean bastards but they look cool and iconic and iconoclastic. compare fidel and some of his american counterparts through the years:
badass. (check out che and camilo on the side)
gross.
aaaaaahhhhh!
the flight suit actually makes him look like an even bigger douchebag.
i must admit that obama looks pretty cool.
but that might be just because
why do the bad guys always dress better? JFK was alright in his saville row suit and brooks brothers shirt, but really - the fascists communists and tyrants are mean bastards but they look cool and iconic and iconoclastic. compare fidel and some of his american counterparts through the years:
badass. (check out che and camilo on the side)
gross.
aaaaaahhhhh!
the flight suit actually makes him look like an even bigger douchebag.
i must admit that obama looks pretty cool.
but that might be just because i'm a skinny whiteboy and he's a cool black guy.
anyway...
even more than neologisms, i love fauxgraphies (faux-biographies -- yes, you're welcome). borges is really the grandaddy of the form, telling fantastical tales about all sorts of readers writers thinkers and explorers in the form of the short fauxgraphy or faux-bibliography. i haven't read
alice b. toklas
, but that's a biggie. and you've gotta love
dutch
, edmond morris's courageous demented and thoroughly kaufmanesque take on the reagan presidency.
so charles slaps a bigass 570 pg ARC in my hands called
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF FIDEL CASTRO
by norberto fuentes and i crap my pants. check it: fuentes was a journalist in deep with castro and the inner circle and skips outta coo-ba in the 90s, settles in miami, writes a few books about hemingway, and now an 'autobiography' from castro's perspective.
about 12 years ago, running around manhattan all brash outrageous and free, shooting all kinda grungy & pretentious-as-hell 16 mm films (an all female western on the streets of queens! horrible! an adaptation of the flannery o'connor story 'good country people' in a small church in brooklyn. puke!) i wanted to figure a way to make a narrative film without characters. i was kinda obsessed with the ineffable beingness of objects (youth! more puke!) and was bowled over by the 'missed meeting' section of antonioni's
l'eclisse
... never could figure a way to do it because it could never be interesting in anything but the short or experimental form. narrative art, for the most part, is a lot of sound and fury obscuring or illuminating one thing: human behavior. and this is why i love biographies. they offer a history lesson through the eyes of a character. easier to identify with a character than a sequence of events.
but biography is a pile of bullshit. and this is why i love the fauxgraphy: it's all out on the table. all those annoying but kinda interesting modernist and pomo-ey questions about identity and fact and fiction and authorship and authenticity and (the impossibility of) truth are all over the fauxgraphy. and it doesn't even have to make the slightest effort! (in fact, it works best when played straight) all that junk is an intrinsic and inherent part of the whole mess and the 'faux' part is kinda giving it to you right there, eh? in plain words: no bullshit. they're serving you a steaming pile and they ain't rebranding.
well, i really loved this one. but i can't say most will. it's a strange strange bird. and it makes me wanna do a few things:
1. smoke a cuban cigar.
2. chop off the top of a pineapple (with a machete, naturally), scoop out the meat, fill it with rum, sit it in the freezer for a week, and then get stupidly drunk with a cuban senorita under a palm tree rimmed with moonlight.
3. start a revolution.
4. go to cuba before the castros kick off.
i priced jetblue flights from l.a. to the dominican republic. CHEAP AS HELL. i figure from the DR i can skip into haiti for a bit than hook a flight (a boat?) to cuba. gotta get there before the castros die. that day comes and: MTV SPRING BREAK HAVANA BAYBEEEEEE!!!!!
ever since reading these damn ellroy books, my watchwords have been "let's kill communists!" strange for a young man with a CPUSA poster on his walls, but there you go. let's ride this wave while it's heavy, and learn more about a part of the world i've never really studied.
Well, it wasn't a book I had intended to read and just happened to fall upon it recently. I was only given two weeks to check out the book, since it was new to the library (and it had a hold so I couldn't renew it). So I didn't get to finish the almost 550 pages. And it wasn't holding my attention enough to easily read 100 pages or so in one sitting. Needless to say, I gave it only two stars based on how far I got (first two sections - not chapters). It was an intriguing read with the arrogant,
Well, it wasn't a book I had intended to read and just happened to fall upon it recently. I was only given two weeks to check out the book, since it was new to the library (and it had a hold so I couldn't renew it). So I didn't get to finish the almost 550 pages. And it wasn't holding my attention enough to easily read 100 pages or so in one sitting. Needless to say, I gave it only two stars based on how far I got (first two sections - not chapters). It was an intriguing read with the arrogant, matter-of-fact personality brought to it (even if it wasn't really Fidel's writing), during the moments when I was able to focus. Well-written, but I don't know if my occasional lack of concentration while reading was due to things on the brain taking over, or if the "story" simply wasn't keeping a strong enough hold on me. It tended to jump around in stories/incidents and threw me off a bit at times where I'd have to read the part over. I'm gonna give it another shot, but not sure when. I have a list of other "to-reads" I'm eager to hit...
...more
In this "deliciously wicked" (
San Francisco Chronicle
) infusion of history and satire, Fuentes truly captures the spirit of Fidel Castro--monumentally proud, manipulative, and cynical. He skillfully imitates the Cuban leader's voice, though the
New York Times
declared that Fuentes's Castro sometimes sinks into the realm of caricature, and the
San Francisco Chronicle
complained that he is devoid of all positive human emotions--something his most virulent enemies do not even assert. Despite his sl
In this "deliciously wicked" (
San Francisco Chronicle
) infusion of history and satire, Fuentes truly captures the spirit of Fidel Castro--monumentally proud, manipulative, and cynical. He skillfully imitates the Cuban leader's voice, though the
New York Times
declared that Fuentes's Castro sometimes sinks into the realm of caricature, and the
San Francisco Chronicle
complained that he is devoid of all positive human emotions--something his most virulent enemies do not even assert. Despite his slight tendency toward exaggeration, critics praised Fuentes's ability to bring the curmudgeonly, eccentric leader vividly and humorously to life. They also applauded Anna Kushner's careful revisions and elegant translation. This enlightening and entertaining "part story, part pedagogy" is likely to be the best account of Castro for many years to come. This is an excerpt from a review published in
Bookmarks magazine
.
...more
I don't know what to make of this one. It's fiction cast as an autobiography of Fidel Castro--a long, rambling chronicle that, on the one hand, reads so much like nonfiction that it's hard to take seriously as a literary effort but that, on the other hand, has such an anti-Castro polemic intent that it's hard to take seriously as history. The point is that, for Castro, the revolution had nothing to do with ideology; he himself was the revolution, and whatever strategy put & kept him in power
I don't know what to make of this one. It's fiction cast as an autobiography of Fidel Castro--a long, rambling chronicle that, on the one hand, reads so much like nonfiction that it's hard to take seriously as a literary effort but that, on the other hand, has such an anti-Castro polemic intent that it's hard to take seriously as history. The point is that, for Castro, the revolution had nothing to do with ideology; he himself was the revolution, and whatever strategy put & kept him in power was justified, while anything that opposed him was counterrevolutionary. The author's obsession with naming all the names involved in every action got pretty tedious at times. It represents yet another failed opportunity to do for the Cuban Revolution what so many fine writers have done for the Chinese Revolution and its aftermath.
...more
Honestly if someone has never been a reader and wanted to take up the habit of reading: he/she should not read this as his/her first book. Honestly this book doesnt have to be read at all. Its boring, most of it just seem like a fairy tale, its not captivating, its actually the worst book I've read and I think its a waste of time and money.
As with all books about this personality, there is going to be some controversy and some things that are just plain unbelievable. This source however served as Fidel's number 2 for several years and probably has the most accurate first-person voice. And it's well written too!
A best-seller to pneumoniaphiles and 20th century clones of Third Reich head of propaganda Heinz Heini. The book is a blueprint of how to censor opposition and murder originators. A 'must-read' for internet censors and anti-establishment currmugions.
Journalist, award-winning fiction author, and former member of the Cuban revolution, Norberto Fuentes has written ten books, including
Hemingway in Cuba
. His work has been praised by writers such as Italo Calvino, William Kennedy, and Gabriel García Márquez. He left Cuba in 1994 and now lives in exile in Florida.