Family portrait with Fidel : a memoir. --

New York, N.Y., Estados Unidos : Random House, 1984.

xxiii, 262 p. ; 22 cm.

0394532600

Título original : Retrato de familia con Fidel

By far the most impressive and important firsthand account of Cuba after the taking of power by Fidel Castro in 1959, Family Portrait whit Fidel is a memory by Carlos Franqui, the archivist of The Cuban Revolution who, as one of Castro's intimate early on, was director of radio and press services throughout the Sierra Maestra campaing against Batista, and later editor of Revolution, the highly influential vanguard newspaper. Fiercely independent- an apologist neither for the left nor for the right- Franqui, in this brilliant work, gives us, with awesome grace and self-assurance, as keen a psychological and political portrait of Fidel Castro as we are ever likely to get ; a dramatic account of the intrigues of the various factions in the Cuban government that vied for Fidel's attention of new facts concerning Cuban domestic affairs and foreign policy vis-á-vis the United States, the Soviet Union, Latin America and Africa. And more: master of the telling anecdote that he is, Franqui enlarges our understanding of leading figures he has known through his involvement in the Cuban Revolution, including, in addition to Fidel: Che Guevara, Raúl Castro, Khrushchev, Mikoyan, Ben Bella, Nehru, Picasso, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Written in lucid and sometimes lyrical prose that has been elegantly translated, Family Portrait whit Fidel is perhaps the most valuable testimony we have to one of the signal events in the political history of the twentieth century, a book indispensable to the any appreciation of the fate of Latin America today.