O que é este blog?

Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida;

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Mostrando postagens com marcador book. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador book. Mostrar todas as postagens

terça-feira, 26 de dezembro de 2017

Russia: sempre autoritaria, frequentemente totalitaria - Masha Gessen

Uma recomendação de leitura (que faço a partir do Inside this book da Amazon), como observador que sou de todos os exemplos históricos de autoritarismo e cleptocracia (fenômenos aos quais não somos estranhos, não eu, mas certos personagens da história brasileira):

The Future is History: how totalitarianism reclaimed Russia

A autora já publicou um livro dentro da mesma perspectiva:
Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia after Communism

Estou  lendo as páginas disponíveis no site da Amazon, e já posso recomendar...


Eis a capa do livro:


  • Hardcover: 528 pages
  • Publisher: Riverhead Books; First Edition edition (October 3, 2017)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 159463453X
  • ISBN-13: 978-1594634536



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    E eis fotos do prólogo do livro:



     
    Editorial Reviews
    Review
    "Fascinating and deeply felt." -The New York Times Book Review

    “Forceful and eloquent on the history of her native country, Gessen is alarming and pessimistic about its future as it doubles down on totalitarianism.” -Los Angeles Times

    “A remarkable portrait of an ever-shifting era…Gessen weaves her characters’ stories into a seamless, poignant whole. Her analysis of Putin’s malevolent administration is just as effective…a harrowing, compassionate and important book.” -San Francisco Chronicle

    “Ambitious, timely, insightful and unsparing … By far Gessen’s best book, a sweeping intellectual history of Russia over the past four decades, told through a Tolstoyan gallery of characters. … What makes the book so worthwhile … are its keen observations about Russia from the point of view of those experiencing its return to a heavy-handed state. It helps that Gessen is a participant, and not just an observer, able to translate that world adeptly for Western readers. … You feel right there on the streets.” -Washington Post

    “[Gessen’s] essential reportage traces her homeland’s political devolution through the dramatic real stories of four citizens who now face ‘a new set of impossible choices.’” –O Magazine

    “Remarkable…Gessen’s deft blending of…stories gives us a fresh view of recent Russian history with from within, as it was experienced at the time by its people. It is a welcome perspective.” –New York Review of Books

    “Excellent…Gessen’s cast of characters tell a powerful story of their own, giving us an intimate look into the minds of a group crucial to understanding the country’s brief experience of democracy and of the authoritarian regime that follows.” –New Republic
     

    “One of Putin’s most fearless and dogged critics tracks the devastating descent of post-Soviet Russia into authoritarianism and kleptocracy through the lives of four disillusioned citizens.”  –Esquire

    “One of our most urgent and iconoclastic journalists...few...are better placed to understand the parallels between the two egomaniacs who now dominate world affairs.” –Out Magazine

    “Starting with the decline, if not the disintegration, of the Soviet regime, Masha Gessen’s The Future is History tracks totalitarianism through the lens of generation raised in post-Communist Russia.” -Vanity Fair"Hot Type"

    “Gessen, the sterling Russian-American journalist and activist, has been outspoken in recent press articles about the threat of totalitarianism in America. But in her latest book, Future Is History, she never mentions America’s problems. Here, instead, she examines what is wrong in her native country and lets readers, wide-eyed, draw the parallels." -Christian Science Monitor

    “Brilliant and sobering…writing in fluent English, with formidable powers of synthesis and a mordant wit, Gessen follows the misfortunes of four Russians who have lived most of their lives under Putin…Gessen vividly chronicles the story of a mortal struggle.” -Newsday

    “Gessen is an exemplary journalist who knows when to sit back and let facts speak for themselves…[and] The Future Is History just might be the culmination of [her] life’s work... If you’ve been confused by all the talk about “Russia stuff,” this might be the most important book you’ll read all year.” –Seattle Times

    “Impressive...The Future Is History warns us of what will become of the United States if we don’t push against our burgeoning authoritarian government and fight for democracy…A chilling read, but a necessary one.” –Bitch Media

    “A lively and intimate narrative of the USSR’s collapse and its aftershocks, through the eyes of seven individuals… A gifted writer, Gessen is at her best when she’s recounting her characters’ experiences.” -Bookforum

    “A thoroughly-reported history of a dismal sequence of events with a strong, engaging narrative and central set of characters.” –Forward

    “A brave and eloquent critic of the Putin regime … For anyone wondering how Russia ended up in the hands of Putin and his friends, and what it means for the rest of us, Gessen’s book give an alarming and convincing picture.” –The Times

    “Gessen makes a powerful case, arguing that Putin reconstituted the political and terror apparatus of the Soviet state and that ideology was the last block to fall into place.”  –Financial Times

    “Russia is more at the forefront of our minds now than it’s been in all the time since the Cold War, and who better to enlighten us on the evolution of this complicated nation than journalist and Putin biographer Masha Gessen? Through her profiles of various Russians including four born in the 1980s, Gessen crafts a narrative that deciphers the Soviet Union’s move toward – and retreat from – democracy.” -Signature Reads

    "A devastating, timely, and necessary reminder of the fragility and preciousness of all institutions of freedom." -Booklist (starred)

    "Brilliant...A worthwhile read that describes how Putin’s powerful grip on Russia developed, offering a dire warning of how other nations could fall under a similar spell of state control." -Library Journal

    "An intimate look at Russia in the post-Soviet period, when the public’s hopes for democracy devolved within a restricted society characterized by “a constant state of low-level dread"...a well-crafted, inventive narrative." -Publisher's Weekly

    “Masha Gessen is humbly erudite, deftly unconventional, and courageously honest.  At this particular historical moment, when we must understand Russia to understand ourselves, we are all very lucky to have her."
    - Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny

    ”A fine example of journalism approximating art. Necessary reading for anyone trying to understand the earthshaking events of our time: how in one country after another individual aspirations for wealth and power mutated into collective cravings for strongmen.”
    - Pankaj Mishra, author of An End to Suffering and Age of Anger

    The Future is History is a beautifully-written, sensitively-argued and cleverly-structured journey through Russia's failure to build democracy. The difficulty for any book about Russia is how to make the world’s biggest country human-sized, and she succeeds by building her story around the lives of a half-dozen people, whose fortunes wax and wane as the country opens up, then closes down once more. It is a story about hope and despair, trauma and treatment, ideals and betrayal, and above all about love and cynicism. If you want to truly understand why Vladimir Putin has been able to so dominate his country, this book will help you.’
    - Oliver Bullough, author of Let Our Fame Be Great and The Last Man in Russia
     
    Praise for The Man Without A Face:

    “Gessen has shown remarkable courage . . . [An] unflinching indictment of the most powerful man in Russia.” —The Wall Street Journal

    “[Gessen] shines a piercing light into every dark corner of Putin’s story. . . . Fascinating, hard-hitting reading.” —Foreign Affairs

    “Absorbing.” —The New Yorker

    “Powerful and gracefully written.” —San Francisco Chronicle
    About the Author
    Masha Gessen is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of several books, among them The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. The recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Carnegie Fellowship, Gessen teaches at Amherst College and lives in New York City.


    sábado, 12 de agosto de 2017

    The Rise of the East: and the perils of new conflicts - Gideon Rachman

    Novo livro, de acordo com o Zeitgeist:

    Easternisation

    War and Peace in the Asian Century

    Easternisation by Gideon Rachman
    Buy this eBook
    US$ 28.19
    Selected as a Book of the Year by Evening Standard

    The West’s domination of world politics is coming to a close. The flow of wealth and power is turning from West to East and a new era of global instability has begun.
    Easternisation is the defining trend of our age – the growing wealth of Asian nations is transforming the international balance of power. This shift to the East is shaping the lives of people all over the world, the fate of nations and the great questions of war and peace.
    A troubled but rising China is now challenging America’s supremacy, and the ambitions of other Asian powers – including Japan, North Korea, India and Pakistan – have the potential to shake the whole world. Meanwhile the West is struggling with economic malaise and political populism, the Arab world is in turmoil and Russia longs to reclaim its status as a great power.
    We are at a turning point in history: but Easternisation has many decades to run. Gideon Rachman offers a road map to the turbulent process that will define the international politics of the twenty-first century.
    Random House; August 2016
    320 pages; ISBN 9781473521162
    Read online, or download in secure EPUB
    Title: Easternisation
    Author: Gideon Rachman

    quarta-feira, 9 de novembro de 2016

    Brazil in the World: um livro de Sean Burges: apresentacao no Itamaraty em 14/11, as 16hs


    Sean Burges, professor titular de Relações Internacionais da Universidade Nacional da Austrália e Vice-coordenador do  Centro Nacional australiano para Estudos Latino-americanos encontra-se no Brasil, para participar de um encontro sobre cooperação ao desenvolvimento, envolvendo a Funag e Wilton Park.
    Ele é autor de um livro precedente sobre o Brasil após a Guerra Fria: “Brazilian Foreign Policy After the Cold War” (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009) e acaba de publicar  Brazil in the World: The International Relations of a South American Giant (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), sobre a política externa brasileira nas últimas décadas, tanto no plano multilateral quanto bilateral (China, EUA, América do Sul, Sul-Global). 


    Para falar um pouco de seu último livro e de suas pesquisas sobre a diplomacia brasileira, o presidente da Funag, embaixador Sérgio Eduardo Moreira Lima, e eu, em minha qualidade de Diretor do IPRI, tomamos a iniciativa de organizar uma apresentação-debate na próxima segunda-feira, 14 de novembro, a ser feita na sala D do Itamaraty, às 16:00hs.
    Creio que será uma excelente oportunidade para abordar com Sean Burges as grandes linhas da diplomacia e da política externa do Brasil nas últimas décadas.

     Sumário do livro:

    1 Thinking about Brazil in the world 1
    2 The domestic foreign policy context 25
    3 O jeito brasileiro … the Brazilian way 48
    4 Brazil’s multilateralist impulse 64
    5 Trade policy 86
    6 Brazil Inc. 110
    7 Security policy 134
    8 Brazil and Latin America 153
    9 Brazil and the Global South 174
    10 Brazil and the United States 197
    11 Brazil and China 222
    12 Conclusions and future possibilities 241

    Description:


    Drawing on over seventy interviews, fieldwork in five countries, and a comprehensive survey of government documents, media reports and scholarly literature, Burges examines a series of issue areas - multilateralism, trade, and security - as well as the pattern of bilateral relations in South America, the Global South and with China and the USA to trace how Brazil formulates its transformative foreign policy agenda and works to implement it regionally and globally.


                    Specific focus is given to tracing how and why Brazil has moved onto the global stage, leveraging its regional predominance in South America into a global leadership role and bridge between the North and South in international affairs. The analysis highlights the extent to which foreign policy making in Brazil is changing as a field of public policy and the degree to which sustained political attention is necessary for a dynamic and innovative international engagement approach. Of interest to students, scholars and policy makers, this book casts light not only how an emerging power rises in the international system, but also isolates the blind spots that existing analytical approaches have when it comes to thinking about what power means for the increasingly vocal rising states of the global South.



                    About the Author

                    Sean W. Burges is Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Deputy Director of the Australian National Centre for Latin American Studies at the Australian National University and a Senior Research Fellow with the Washington, DC-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs.

    sexta-feira, 23 de setembro de 2016

    Excertos da biografia de Alexander von Humboldt, por Andrea Wulf


    A invenção da natureza por Alexander von Humboldt,
    livro de Andrea Wulf

    Paulo Roberto de Almeida
     [Excertos de livro, divulgação]



    O livro de Andrea Wulf, jornalista alemã radicada na Grã-Bretanha, sobre o maior cientista ambientalista de todos os tempos, verdadeiro patrono dos ecologistas contemporâneos, é uma preciosidade bibliográfica: A invenção da natureza: as aventuras de Alexander von Humboldt (tradução de Renato Marques; 1a. edição; São Paulo: Planeta, 2016) é uma biografia perfeitamente reconstituída, com todo o aparato científico das citações e consultas a um volume impressionante de literatura secundária usada para a composição de um imenso painel cultural do mundo, em todas as partes, tal como existente do final do século 18 a meados do 19, mas remetendo igualmente aos modernos discípulos do sábio alemão.
    Realizei muitas anotações a partir do livro de Andrea Wulf, e coloco estes excertos, exclusivamente selecionados por interesse pessoal, nos parágrafos seguintes.

    A partir de sua viagem à América do Sul, entre 1799 e 1804, Humboldt elaborou um relato pessoal e uma narrativa científica, na qual ele relata os primeiros efeitos da destruição humana sobre as paisagens naturais:
    “Quando as florestas são destruídas, como o são em toda a parte na América por obra dos plantadores europeus, com uma precipitação imprudente, as fontes de água secam por completo ou se tornam menos abundantes. Os leitos dos rios, permanecendo (p. 97) secos durante parte do ano, são convertidos em torrentes toda vez que caem pesadas chuvas em suas cabeceiras. Desaparecendo a relva e o musgo juntamente com a vegetação rasteira nas encostas das montanhas, as águas das chuvas não sofrem obstrução em seu curso; em vez aumentarem lentamente o nível dos rios por meio de progressivas filtragens, durante as intensas chuvaradas as águas sulcam os declives das colina, empurram para baixo o solo solto e formam as súbitas inundações que devastam o país”. (p. 98)
    Alguns anos antes, na própria Alemanha, onde trabalhava como inspetor de minas, Humboldt já havia feito as mesmas observações com respeito ao excessivo desmatamento e o uso de madeira como combustível. Outros tinham feito as mesmas observações antes dele, mas com preocupações mais econômicas do que amnbientais.
    Texto de Andrea Wulf: “A madeira era o petróleo dos séculos XVII e XVIII, e qualquer escassez do produto criava ansiedades com relação a combustível, manufatura e transporte, semelhantes à comoção que as ameaças à produção de petróleo geram hoje em dia. Já em 1664m o jardineiro e autor inglês John Evelyn escrevera um livro sobre silvicultura que se tornou um sucesso de vendas – Sylva, a Discourse of Forest Trees, que tratava da escassez de madeira como crise nacional. ‘Seria melhor ficarmos sem ouro do que sem madeira’, Evelyn tinha declarado, porque sem árvores não haveria indústrias de ferro e vidro, lareiras ardentes para aquecer as casas durante as noites frias de inverno, tampouco uma marinha de guerra para proteger as costas da Inglaterra.” (p. 98). Colbert, na França, também proibiu o corte de árvores, e plantou árvores para uso exclusivo da Marinha. “A França perecerá pela falta de madeira”. (p. 99). Mais tarde, Benjamin Franklin inventou uma lareira eficiente no uso de combustível.
    Sobre um outro americano, Jefferson, o terceiro ou quarto presidente dos Estados Unidos: “Sofria do que chamava de ‘enfermidade da bibliomania’, constantemente comprando e estudando livros”. (p. 151)

    Joseph Banks, naturalista inglês do Kew Gardens, escreveu a Jacques Julien Houtton de la Billardière, em 9 de junho de 1796, no auge dos conflitos entre os dois países na sequência das guerras napoleônicas:
    “A ciência das duas nações pode ficar em paz, enquanto a Política está em guerra”, (p. 123), citando o livro de Joseph Banks: The Letters of Joseph Banks, A Selection, 1768-1820 (London: Imperial College Press, 2000, p. 171).
    Alexander von Humboldt se espantou com os abusos e o arbítrio da dominação autocrática da coroa espanhola nas Américas: “O rei espanhol detinha até mesmo o monopólio sobre a neve que caia em Quito, Lima e outras cidades coloniais, de modo que pudesse ser usada na fabricação de sorvete para as elites abastadas. Era um absurdo, afirmou Humboldt, que algo que ‘caia do céu’ pudesse pertencer à Coroa espanhola. A seu ver, a política e a economia de um governo colonial eram baseadas na ‘imoralidade.’” (p. 160), escreve Andrea Wulf com base no livro de AH, reproduzindo observações feitas em Quito, em fevereiro de 1802; Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent, fait en 1799, 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803 et 1804, em 34 volumes, ilustrados com 1.500 gravuras.
    Humboldt também produziu um livro inteiro de observações sociais, políticas e econômicas sobre a ilha de Cuba: Essai politique sur l’île de Cuba (1826), com severas críticas ao sistema da escravidão.
    Encontrei um único erro neste livro, não sei se da tradução por inadvertência, ou da edição original, por distração, quando aparece uma frase sobre “..a morte Bolívar no final de 1814” (p. 231, da edição brasileira), quando o libertador morreu em 1830.

    Paulo Roberto de Almeida 
    Brasília, 3042: 23 setembro 2016

    quinta-feira, 4 de fevereiro de 2016

    Um companion book ao pensamento de Raymond Aron, por mais de 100 dolares!!??

    Books and Culture

    Daniel DiSalvo
    The Savior of French Liberalism
    Raymond Aron’s work holds lessons for the future of Islam and the West.
    February 3, 2016
    Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
    The Companion to Raymond Aron, edited by José Cohen and Elisabeth Dutartre-Michaut (Palgrave Macmillan, 304 pp., $110)

    Liberalism—defined broadly as a democratically elected regime with a limited government and a market economy that protects individual rights—remains a hotly contested political persuasion in France. Today, libéralisme is associated with “savage capitalism” and the “Anglo-Saxon model.” If someone calls you a liberal in a Left Bank café, he likely means it as an insult.
    Such attitudes have deep roots. Over the course of the twentieth century, liberalism had few defenders in Paris and was overshadowed by seductive varieties of nationalism, existentialism, structuralism, surrealism, and Marxism. It wasn’t until the end of the century that the non-liberal alternatives were spent and interest in liberalism was renewed—at least among scholars.
    It would be nearly impossible to speak about French liberalism today if Raymond Aron had not kept the flame alight while other philosophical fashions tried to blow it out. Therefore, The Companion to Raymond Aron, edited by José Cohen and Elisabeth Dutartre-Michaut, is a welcome new addition to the work on Aron available in English. It brings to light Aron’s characteristic mode of political reflection, which remained close to political actors’ realistic options and the concerns of citizens—rather than elaborating the sort of high-minded theoretical schemas that often typify French thinking.
    Aron’s life tracked the “short” twentieth century. He was born in 1905 just prior to the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution. He died in 1983 just prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. In between, his political judgment was extraordinary. Calling him the “Thucydides of the twentieth century” isn’t an overstatement.
    After studying in Germany just prior to the rise of Hitler, Aron adopted the position that Nazism had to be unequivocally opposed. After Paris fell to the Wehrmacht, Aron went into exile in London to join General Charles de Gaulle and the French Resistance. After the war, he consistently championed Western democracy over Soviet totalitarianism. He endorsed the Cold War strategy of undermining and outlasting the Soviet Union. He favored decolonization of French North Africa. During the events of May 1968, he rejected the students’ fantastical utopianism. Throughout his career he championed the basic liberal values of Western civilization. Compared with Jean-Paul Sartre, who got almost all of these questions wrong, Aron looks prophetic.
    Of course, no good deed goes unpunished. Aron paid for his good judgment with isolation from French intellectual circles. The Left regularly derided him as a “Cold Warrior,” especially after his most famous book, The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955), exploded the cherished myths of the Left, the proletariat, and the revolution. Soon thereafter, the French Right abandoned him because he favored Algerian independence. Aron’s caustic analysis of the “psychodrama” of May 1968 once again placed him firmly outside the fashionable trends of his time.
    Sartre—a former schoolmate and friend, whom he had introduced to German existentialism—quipped that Aron was “unworthy to teach.” Others censured Aron for the “icy clarity” of his analyses, which supposedly lacked compassion. It became a commonplace in French intellectual circles that “it is better to be wrong with Sartre than to be right with Aron.” In that light, Aron’s intellectual fortitude and independent-mindedness were truly remarkable. It was only near the end of his life, in the late 1970s, with publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s work on the Soviet gulag and the revelation of the horrors of Communism in Cambodia and Vietnam, that French opinion shifted in Aron’s favor. He now appeared to have been right all along about the nature of Communism—and much else. Claude Lévi-Strauss called Aron a “teacher of intellectual hygiene.”
    The Companion to Raymond Aron is an excellent introduction to the main events of his life and the core themes of his work. The various authors reveal how and why Aron became recognized as one of the world’s most thoughtful analysts of the moral, political, economic, military, and sociological dimensions of modern democracy. His interests ranged from nuclear strategy to Tocqueville.
    Primarily known outside France as an analyst of international relations, Aron was one of the first to develop the idea of totalitarianism. He argued that the Nazi and Stalinist regimes were without precedent in human history because they were based on “secular religions.” Each expressed a notion of providential destiny: for the Nazis, the victory of a race; for the Soviets, the victory of a class. These totalizing ideologies were what made these regimes so dangerous. Aron concluded that Marxist-Leninism “as an ideology is the root of all (in the Soviet regime), the source of falsehood, the principle of evil.” Ultimately, the Soviet regime’s attempt to make man into an angel in fact “create a beast,” while the Nazi’s experience showed that “man should not try to resemble a beast of prey because, when he does so, he is only too successful.”
    The lessons that Aron drew from the twentieth century were that history is tragic, human freedom fragile, and theories of historical determinism pernicious. In his defense of liberal principles, Aron described himself as an adherent of “democratic conservatism.” Compared with the totalitarian regimes, “we are all the more conservatives because we are liberals who want to preserve something of personal dignity and autonomy.”
    Aron sought to distinguish politics as a prosaic activity from the quest for salvation. “Modern society is a democratic society that must be observed without transports of enthusiasm or indignation,” he once remarked. “It is not the ultimate fulfillment of human destiny.” Aron’s outlook was characterized by modesty about what politics could achieve and what one should thereby expect from it. His liberalism fits into the French historical tradition more than the classical liberalism of England or the United States. For instance, Aron did not stress ideas of natural rights, which are the root of American liberal principals.
    The recent terrorist attacks in Paris raise profound questions for both France and the Western democracies. How can the West develop a foreign policy that addresses the threats of Islamic terrorism and the reality of evil in the world but doesn’t get trapped trying to transform other regimes through nation-building and social engineering? Aron’s hostility to philosophies of history—such as recent claims about the “end of history” and the democratization of the world—is a powerful reminder that a hard-headed realism about what needs to be done can be combined with a balanced notion of how much can be achieved through political action. The presence in Europe of large numbers of Muslims citizens along with immigrants from the Middle East and Africa means that domestic and foreign policy are closely intertwined. How can France, which has the largest Muslim population in Europe, simultaneously preserve its own traditions and values and address increasing cultural and religious diversity? How can France integrate its Muslim population while simultaneously taking military action in the very regions from which its immigrant population hails?
    These are enormous questions, but Aron provides some helpful guideposts. His skepticism about historical determinism casts doubt on the reigning “secularization” thesis—or dogma. This thesis holds that, as society modernizes, citizens will slowly lose their religious convictions, and those that cling to them will agree to do so exclusively in private. Reading Aron helps to break such spells. A broad understanding of his work would temper optimism about what laïcité (or secularism) can do to transform Europe’s Muslims. Europeans in general—and the French in particular—need to come to terms with the fact that Islam is not likely to follow Christianity’s historical trajectory in Europe. Only then can realistic approaches to religious diversity begin to be developed.

    segunda-feira, 27 de julho de 2015

    Fidel Castro: uma vida dupla, de mentira, de luxuria, de roubos, e de ditadura - livro

    The Double Life of Fidel Castro: My 17 Years as Personal Bodyguard to El Lider Maximo

    The Double Life of Fidel Castro: My 17 Years as Personal Bodyguard to El Lider Maximo

    In The Double Life of Fidel Castro, one of Castro's soldiers of 17 years breaks his silence and shares his memoir of years of service, and eventual imprisonment and torture for displeasing the notorious dictator, and his dramatic escape from Cuba.
    Responsible for protecting the Lider maximo for two decades, Juan Reinaldo Sánchez was party to his secret life - because everything around Castro was hidden. From the ghost town in which guerrillas from several continents were trained, to his immense personal fortune - including a huge property portfolio, a secret paradise island, and seizure of public money - as well as his relationship with his family and his nine children from five different partners.
    Sanchez's tell-all expose reveals countless state secrets and the many sides of the Cuban monarch: genius war leader in Nicaragua and Angola, paranoid autocrat at home, master spy, Machiavellian diplomat, and accomplice to drug traffickers. This extraordinary testimony makes us re-examine everything we thought we knew about the Cuban story and Fidel Castro Ruz.
    (less)
    Hardcover, 288 pages
    Published May 12th 2015 by St. Martin's Press (first published May 22nd 2014)
    Get a copy:

    Friend Reviews (1)