Word: castros
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bloodthirsty lass who tried to kidnap a Spanish officer, but no matter. The Journal had her smuggled out of prison disguised as a sailor and exhibited her triumphantly at an open-air reception in Madison Square. A half-century later came Fidel ("I am not a Communist") Castro, briefly a hero of U.S. journalism during the black-and-white-television era. He was, he said, fighting for a Cuba where "everyone could assemble, associate, speak and write with complete freedom." Now in his 13th year of power, "the Horse" (as Cubans call Castro) has already found it necessary...
...construct engrossing narrative even from the balance sheets of 19th century sugar mills. To prepare his 1,696 pages of history, politics and anecdote, he has visited Cuba repeatedly. He seems to have talked to everybody not dead or in jail, and read everything, even all of Fidel Castro's speeches. As in his 1961 study of the Spanish Civil War, he seems scrupulously fair. The book furnishes the raw material for any number of interpretations at variance with...
...often the case in Latin America, the reasons for Cuba's melancholy failure at democracy go back a long way. In the first half of his book Thomas deals with everything from 1762, when the British captured Havana, to Castro's 1959 takeover. He cites the peculiar vulnerability of a rich single crop (sugar), which made the island a major prize for colonial exploitation and left it with an economy still cruelly dependent on the whims of foreign buyers. Partly as a result, Cuba never developed a coherent, stratified society. In colonial times, unscrupulous slave traders could...
...snuffed out constitutional democracy, he had student and labor leaders thrown to the sharks off Morro Castle. After ex-Army Sergeant Fulgencio Batista took over in 1934, he remained, both in and out of office, the dominant figure in Cuban political life until the advent of Fidel Castro...
During Batista's reign, deadly groups of political gangsters flourished under the control of local bosses. Curiously enough, Fidel Castro ran with the roughest of these gangs while he was a law student at the University of Havana in the 1940s. As a result of this underworld experience, Thomas writes, "the future leader of the Cuban socialist revolution learned much about the nature of Cuban political institutions, their susceptibility to violence and their corruption...