title: Fidel Castro: My Life: A Spoken Autobiography
author: Fidel Castro
description: This stunning autobiography of the controversial Cuban dictator is replete with stories spanning Castro's entire lifetime, everything from his relationship with Che Guevara to the Bay of Pigs invasion. Todd McLaren and Patrick Lawlor share narration duties, but fail to capture the essence of Castro or Ramonet and the sheer power and importance of their lengthy conversations. Though clearly read and well-pronounced, the interviews are so forced and crafted that the tales lose their poignancy and resonance. Listeners will be hard pressed to accept these performers as the aforementioned individuals, without so much as a Cuban dialect employed by the readers. <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: FIDEL
  my early years 
  
  4 
  
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  “This is the Fidel Castro I believe I know... A man of austere ways and 
  insatiable dreams, with an old-fashioned formal education, of cautious 
  words and simple manners and incapable of conceiving any idea which 
  is not out of the ordinary... 
  “He has the nearly mystical conviction that the greatest achievement 
  of the human being is the proper formation of consciousness and that 
  moral incentives, rather than material ones, are capable of changing 
  the world and moving history forward. 
  “I believe he is one of the greatest idealists of our time and perhaps 
  this may be his greatest virtue, though it has also been his greatest 
  danger.” 
  —Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
  “Though his father was a wealthy landowner during Fidel’s childhood, 
  he had left Spain poor, and in Cuba had sold homemade lemonade 
  from a cart. His mother, about whom one hears little, except that she 
  was originally his father’s cook and was*very religious and that Fidel 
  adored her, proba