Content area
Full text
Brian Latell, Castro's Secrets: The CIA and Cuba's Intelligence Machine (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) hb 288pp, ISBN: 9780230621237
Reviewed by Domingo Amuchastegui
There needs to be an antidote book to this with the title something like Castro's Secrets: Remaking History and Manipulation for readers to be able to judge the pros and cons of this, Brian Latell's second book on Cuba, published by Palgrave Macmillan. His first book, After Fidel, although essentially based on Miami's second- and third-hand versions and gossip, had a final chapter discussing Raúl Castro's role, a chapter that, being much more balanced than all the other chapters, made many in Miami not very pleased about Latell's perceptions on the matter.
Now Castro's Secrets revisits a number of episodes connected, one way or another, to the CIA and Cuba's Intelligence services (DGI) under the direct orders and supervision of Fidel Castro, with minor roles attributed to comandates Ramiro Valdés and Manuel Piñeiro (Redbeard). The sources on which the book is based are exclusively secondary, including a huge amount of public documents, books, and testimonies. No primary sources from either the CIA or the DGI are quoted to support the alleged 'secrets'. No new facts are provided to substantiate any of the so-called revelations.
Well-known episodes of the Cold War, and in particular of US hostility and assassination plans against the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro together with some of the major intelligence operations conducted by Cuba, are the object of various reinterpretations and hypothetical 'Ifs', entirely based on recent testimonies given to the author by Cuban agents who defected mostly between the 1960s and the 1980s. The crux of these testimonies is aimed at proving one issue: that Fidel Castro knew, in advance, about the plot...