"An intimate, revisionist portrait of the early years of Fidel Castro, showing how an unlikely young Cuban led his country in revolution and transfixed the world. Castro got his toughness from a father who survived Spain's nasty class system and colonial wars to become one of the most successful independent plantation owners in Cuba. He grew up to be full of contradictions. in prison, he showed a passion for French literature, wrote flowery love letters,...

Young Everly Lederer and K.C. Stites come of age in Oriente Province, where the Americans tend their own fiefdom-three hundred thousand acres of United Fruit Company sugarcane that surround their gated enclave. If the rural tropics are a child's dreamworld, Everly and K.C. nevertheless have keen eyes for the indulgences and betrayals of the grown-ups around them-the mordant drinking and illicit loves, the race hierarchies and violence. In Havana,...

Quinn's epic journey carries him through the nightclubs and jungles of Cuba and into the newsrooms and racially charged streets of Albany on the day Robert F. Kennedy is fatally shot in 1968. The odyssey brings Quinn and his exotic but unpredictable Cuban wife, Renata, a debutante revolutionary, face-to-face with the darkest facets of human nature, and illuminates the power of love in the presence of death.

The Cuban dictator is profiled through interviews with relatives, loyalists, and enemies in Cuba and abroad.