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By KAREN BRANCH-BRIOSO | The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 11, 2008

"Fidel Castro: My Life — A Spoken Autobiography," by Fidel Castro and Ignacio Ramonet (Scribner, $40)

The first chapter of Fidel Castro's autobiography implies that readers may finally get a deeper look into what personally motivates the Cuban leader.

The man whose private life has been something of a state secret offers clues from childhood as to what turned him into a rebel. We learn he grew up in a wealthy household to parents who overcame poverty and illiteracy. That he was surrounded by poor children at school and impoverished workers at home. That an illiterate cook on his father's estate — desperate for news of the Spanish Civil War back home — relied on a 10-year-old Fidel to read him newspaper accounts of the conflict.

It shows a chasm between Fidel and his father: "Home represented authority and that got my dander up, and the rebel spirit in me began to emerge."

In 600-plus pages of "Fidel Castro: My Life — A Spoken Autobiography," that's about as close as the reader gets.

At times riveting, often tedious, the book offers many things. But it is practically devoid of the type of personal insight that readers long for in an autobiography.

Of course, the approach to this "autobiography" is as unusual as Castro himself.

After a lifetime of rebuffing requests to pen his memoirs, Castro agreed to a request from Ignacio Ramonet, editor of the left-wing French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique. Ramonet proposed the idea while in Havana for a book fair. Castro complimented Ramonet on a book he had just published of his conversations with Subcomandante Marcos, leader of the Zapatista rebels based in the jungles of southern Mexico.

Ramonet suggested something similar: a question-and-answer look at Castro's life in his own words. A year later, Castro said yes. And so began 100 hours of conversations. They started in early 2003, when Castro was 76, and ended in December 2005, months before he fell gravely ill after botched intestinal surgery that prompted him to give provisional control of Cuba to his younger brother, Raul.

Castro edited the pages himself — before, during and after falling ill. He added words. He removed some quotes. For this latest English-language version, he added more details in the first chapter on his mother, Lina Ruz.

But other than queries about his childhood years — and a few questions about Raul — Ramonet asked no questions about Castro's private life. Not a word about his first wife, Mirta Diaz-Balart, aunt of U.S. Reps. Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart of Miami. Mirta's brother and the congressmen's father, Rafael Diaz-Balart, was a close college friend of Castro — turned ardent foe — who was majority leader in Cuba's congress during the Batista era.

Nor is there a mention of his decades-long marriage to Dalia Soto del Valle. Nor of his many children.

"It never crossed my mind that we should speak about Castro's private life, his wife or his children," Ramonet writes in his introduction, without explanation.

Instead, the book, after the first two chapters, focuses primarily on Castro's public life.

On some subjects, it offers fascinating behind-the-scenes detail: His failed first attempt, on July 26, 1953, to overthrow General Fulgencio Batista with an attack on the Moncada military barracks. He describes a riveting scene a few years later, as Castro and his rebels practically carry Che Guevara up a mountain to avoid Batista forces as the Argentine rebel suffers a severe asthma attack. (Sometimes in the throes of revolution, you forget your inhaler.)

Castro details his personal phone interventions during the short-lived 2002 coup attempt against his friend Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

He gives his side of the 1994 sinking of a hijacked tugboat in Havana Harbor. Dozens drowned in the event, which prompted an exodus of rafters, many of whom were diverted to a refugee camp at Guantanamo Naval Base by the United States. Castro denies widely published accounts that a gunboat rammed the hijacked tug. His version: Another tugboat crew trying to get the hijacked tug to turn around "got too close and at one point, a wave pushed it into the old wooden tug … It was all a tragic accident."

There are many such moments in the book, rarely challenged by Ramonet. The interviewer prods his subject more critically about Cuba's use of the death penalty and on the March 2003 arrests of dozens of dissidents. A 28-page chapter is devoted to the arrests alone.

It is, without doubt, Castro's personal version of events.

Therein lies the autobiography's greatest value — as a reference book into his views on most every major event that touched Cuba during a half-century in power.

He includes the text of letters he traded with Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev at the height of the Cuban missile crisis. There are even two letters he wrote to Saddam Hussein in the months preceding the first Gulf War. He opines — favorably — on Jimmy Carter and even John F. Kennedy, president during the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban missile crisis and the early years of the U.S. embargo on Cuba. He comments not so favorably on presidents such as George W. Bush and "the chubby little brother in Florida," former Gov. Jeb Bush.

The autobiography's greatest disappointment is in Castro's failure to detail his personal history beyond the lengthy detail of historical events. He comes close in that first chapter, in his references to his father and mother. Even then, he leaves some crucial details out.

As he says, both of his parents overcome poverty. What he doesn't say is that his father made it out of poverty first.

According to multiple biographies of Castro, his mother came to know his father as a servant on his estate. While the father was still married to his first wife, Castro's mother, Lina, gave birth to him and his six siblings. His father's wife left him. Many of Lina's children were sent away to boarding school at a young age. (Castro was sent away at age 6, which he details in Chapter 2.) Years later, Castro's father married his mother.

Such details from Castro might have better explained the chasm that existed between father and son — the relationship that "got my dander up" and launched the emergence of his "rebel spirit."

Reporter Karen Branch-Brioso can be reached at (813) 259-7815 or at kbranch-brioso@tampatrib.com.

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