A REVOLUTIONARY FRIENDSHIP

It is quite a task to make your first book a lucid, pulsating study of not one but two huge figures, but Simon Reid-Henry pulls it off. He interleaves the lives of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in a “dual biography”, as their paths gradually converge, culminating in the Cuban revolution of 1959, and then diverge. This is the story of a very human, and thus flawed, friendship.

The two men’s early lives are skilfully drawn, with playground anecdotes showing a precocious, impatient Che (heading a letter “already March of 1954”) and Castro impressing his mates with a stark letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Send me a ten-dollar bill, American?” (The president did not reply.) This was always a more visceral meeting of minds than, say, Lenin and Trotsky, and the prose does it justice. By 1963, Che began to feel snubbed by his comrades and exasperated by Fidel’s sugar deal with Russia, seeing only a capitalist betrayal of the spirit of ’59. But Che’s execution in Bolivia in 1967 hit Castro hard: while refusing to speak openly about it, he admitted that Che haunted his dreams.

Subtly deploying his own extensive travel and recently declassified sources, Reid-Henry produces a taut history of two men who brought out the best in each other and came to embody the very notion of modern-day protest.

"Fidel & Che: A Revolutionary Friendship", Sceptre

See The Economist's special report on the Cuban revolution at 50. Also, the Guardian has created a nice multimedia feature about the book, setting Reid-Henry's observations against a compelling slide-show of the two revolutionaries. ~ JAKUB FIGURSKI