Young Castro: The Making of a Cuban Revolutionary

FAIN: FZ-230646-15

Jonathan M. Hansen
President and Fellows of Harvard College (Cambridge, MA 02138-3800)

A study of the childhood, education, and development of Cuban leader Fidel Castro against the backdrop of reforms in Cuba and unfolding U.S.-Cuba relations.

This project provides the first-ever rigorous historical examination of the childhood, education, and development of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. It taps human, archival, and cultural resources in Havana and elsewhere to recreate Castro's youth as he actually lived it rather than as an anachronistic projection of the man we know today. The historical record reveals a subject of surprising depth and complexity, an intellectual polymath as familiar with and sympathetic to the romantic and liberal traditions as to Marxism and Communism. The project advances NEH's mission of promoting collaboration and public engagement by reexamining Castro's life against the backdrop of reforms in Cuba and unfolding U.S.-Cuban relations. By recapturing the contingency and complexity of the early Cuban Revolution, the project suggests grounds for cooperation and reciprocity today. Though first and foremost a work of scholarship, I see Young Castro as a modest contribution to U.S.-Cuban diplomacy. [Edited by staff.]

Associated Products

Portrait of a young Castro, drawn from his personal archive (Article)
Title: Portrait of a young Castro, drawn from his personal archive
Author: Jonathan Hansen
Abstract: How many biographies of a person are too many? Type “Fidel Castro” into a library database, and hundreds of books about Cuba’s long-omnipresent leader pop up. For American readers, the accounts of Tad Szulc, Georgie Anne Geyer and Robert Quirk from the 1980s and ’90s may be most familiar. But many other character assessments — fulsome and denunciatory — appeared in the years immediately following Castro’s improbable ascent to power in 1959.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/portrait-of-a-young-castro-drawn-from-his-personal-archive/2019/07/05/400ee354-75b9-11e9-b7ae-390de4259661_story.html?utm_term=.da0dc95c2b59
Format: Newspaper
Publisher: The Washington Post

Young Castro: The Making of a Revolutionary (Book)
Title: Young Castro: The Making of a Revolutionary
Author: Jonathan M. Hansen
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=1476732477
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry (1476732477)
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 1476732477

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