Download Fidel Castro: A Spoken Autobiography AudioBook Free
Fidel Castro could very well be the most charismatic and controversial head of state today. A dictatorial pariah for some, he has turned into a hero and inspiration for most of the world's poor, defiantly charting an independent and revolutionary path for Cuba over practically half of a century.
Numerous attempts have been made to get Castro to share his own story. But only now, in the twilight of his years, has he been prepared to set out the details of his exceptional biography for the entire world to read. This book is nothing less than his living testament. As he told reporters, his desire to complete checking its text was the one thing that kept him going right through his recent illness. He presented a copy of the book in its Spanish edition to his compadre President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.
In these pages, Castro narrates a compelling chronicle that spans the harshness of his elementary school teachers; the first failures of the revolution; his intense comradeship with Che Guevara and their astonishing, against-all-odds victory on the dictator Batista; the Cuban perspective on the Bay of Pigs and the ensuing missile crisis; the active role of Cuba in African self-reliance movements (especially its large military involvement in fighting apartheid South Africa in Angola); his relations with prominent public figures such as Boris Yeltsin, Pope John Paul II, and Saddam Hussein; and his dealings without less than ten successive American presidents, from Eisenhower to George W. Bush.
Castro talks proudly of increasing life span in Cuba (now longer than in the United States); of the half million students in Cuban universities; and of the training of seventy thousand Cuban doctors practically 50 % of whom work abroad, assisting the indegent in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He is confronted with lots of thorny issues, including democracy and human rights, discrimination toward homosexuals, and the continuing presence of the death penalty on Cuban statute books. On the way he shares intimacies about more personal things: the benevolent strictness of his daddy, his successful try to quit cigars, his love of Ernest Hemingway's novels, and his calculation that by not shaving he saves up to ten working days each year.
Drawing on several hundred hours of interviews with Ignacio Ramonet, a knowledgeable and trusted interlocutor, this spoken autobiography will stand as the definitive record of an extraordinary life lived in turbulent times.
