I was researching the assassination of Sweden’s Prime Minister Olof Palme when I came across the private archive of author Stieg Larsson. After eight years of research, my book The Man Who Played with Fire – Stieg Larsson’s Lost Files and the Hunt for an Assassin was published, which shines new light on the conspiracy behind the unsolved murder. The book has been translated into 27 languages. My first book Gripen by Prague exposes corruption by Saab and BAe in connection with the sale of supersonic jet fighters to the Czech Republic. In the aftermath of the book, police investigations were opened in seven countries including the US and the UK.
My first pick was the story of Marita Lorenz who tried to kill Fidel Castro. This book is the story of the man who gave her that assignment. Frank Sturgis struggled side-by-side with Fidel Castro in the Cuban revolution only to turn against him when he realized that Castro had become a communist. Then Sturgis joined forces with the American Mafia as well as with the CIA. He made several attempts to assassinate Castro during several decades as well as carried out assignments for the Mafia and the CIA in the US, Latin America, Europe, and Africa. We know he was one of the “Plumbers” arrested for the Watergate burglary, but was he involved in the assassination of John F Kennedy as Marita Lorenz claimed? Opinions differ…
Fidel Castro called him "the most dangerous CIA agent."
History remembers him as a Watergate burglar, yet the Watergate break-in was his least perilous mission.
Frank Sturgis―using more than thirty aliases and code names―trained guerilla armies in twelve countries on three continents and spearheaded assassination plots to overthrow foreign governments including those of Cuba, Panama, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti.
Warrior follows the shocking, often unbelievable adventures of Sturgis, brought to life by his nephew, Jim Hunt, and his cowriter, Bob Risch. Also included are never-before-seen personal photos of Sturgis and…
I was researching the assassination of Sweden’s Prime Minister Olof Palme when I came across the private archive of author Stieg Larsson. After eight years of research, my book The Man Who Played with Fire – Stieg Larsson’s Lost Files and the Hunt for an Assassin was published, which shines new light on the conspiracy behind the unsolved murder. The book has been translated into 27 languages. My first book Gripen by Prague exposes corruption by Saab and BAe in connection with the sale of supersonic jet fighters to the Czech Republic. In the aftermath of the book, police investigations were opened in seven countries including the US and the UK.
This is an incredible story about the young Marita Lorenz who falls in love with Fidel Castro one month after the Cuban Revolution and then gets persuaded by the CIA to try and assassinate him. Marita Lorenz was a spy for the CIA, had a child with at least one Latin American dictator and several lovers among the New York Mafia. That much we know, but it’s up to you if you believe her take on the JFK assassination. As she puts it herself at the beginning of the book: “I have been a woman in a man’s world. I have lied to protect myself and my children and I have told the truth when it suited me. Now I want to leave things clear”.
Few can say they've seen some of the most significant moments of the twentieth century unravel before their eyes. Marita Lorenz is one of them.
Born in Germany at the outbreak of WWII, Marita was incarcerated in a Nazi concentration camp as a child. In 1959, she travelled to Cuba where she met and fell in love with Fidel Castro. Yet upon fleeing to America, she was recruited by the CIA to assassinate the Fidel. Torn by love and loyalty, she failed to slip him the lethal pills.
Her life would take many more twists and turns - including having…
Van Gosse, Professor of History at Franklin & Marshall College, is the author ofWhere the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America, and the Making of a New Left, published in 1993 and still in print, a classic account of how "Yankees" engaged with the Cuban Revolution in its early years. Since then he has published widely on solidarity with Latin America and the New Left; for the past ten years he has also taught a popular course, "Cuba and the United States: The Closest of Strangers."
Utterly engrossing, this behind-the-scenes narrative over many decades demonstrates that the Cuban diplomats were almost always willing to move towards normalizing relations, but were repeatedly stymied by non-negotiable demands from the U.S. side. Besides that, it’s full of piquant details, involving the many non-official actors and secret meetings in New York, on the island, or in other countries. Diplomatic history rarely gets this exciting!
Challenging the conventional wisdom of perpetual hostility between the United States and Cuba--beyond invasions, covert operations, assassination plots using poison pens and exploding seashells, and a grinding economic embargo--this fascinating book chronicles a surprising, untold history of bilateral efforts toward rapprochement and reconciliation. Since 1959, conflict and aggression have dominated the story of U.S.-Cuban relations. Now, William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh present a new and increasingly more relevant account. From John F. Kennedy's offering of an olive branch to Fidel Castro after the missile crisis, to Henry Kissinger's top secret quest for normalization, to Barack Obama's promise of a…
As the eldest daughter raised in an Evangelical home in rural Pennsylvania, I was immersed in normative, Anglo notions of gender and the family. I built on this embodied experience to cultivate expertise in discourse about the family and labor in early revolutionary Cuba. Perhaps surprisingly, the celebration of patriarchy, monogamy, and heterosexuality that bracketed my youth was also an important element of Cuban revolutionary discourse of the 1960s—albeit within a very different context. I received my PhD in Latin American and Caribbean History from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College. I am now an independent scholar.
Chase illuminates for readers the central role played by women in the Revolution, from the urban insurrection and political activism of the 1950s to mobilization for women’s rights in the early 1960s. This book rejects assertations made by leaders, such as Fidel Castro, that men initiated women into activism and that the Revolution rescued women from oppression. The book instead emphasizes how women organized to make public demands and even sometimes convinced reticent leadership to accede to their proposals. Most exciting to me is the final chapter on dueling efforts to fortify the family, as Chase demonstrates how revolutionary supporters and opponents each rested “their political authority in claims that they best protected the family” (p. 14).
A handful of celebrated photographs show armed, fatigues-clad female Cuban insurgents alongside their companeros in Cuba's remote mountains during the revolutionary struggle. However, the story of women's part in the struggle's success only now receives comprehensive consideration in Michelle Chase's history of women and gender politics in revolutionary Cuba. Restoring to history women's participation in the all-important urban insurrection, and resisting Fidel Castro's triumphant claim that women's emancipation was handed to them as a ""revolution within the revolution,"" Chase's work demonstrates that women's activism and leadership was critical at every stage of the revolutionary process.
I'm a former novelist who now writes historical narrative nonfiction, mainly about American cities and the people who give them life. Each book focuses on an important turning point in the history of a specific metropolis (I've written about Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and San Francisco), often when the city goes from being a minor backwater to being someplace of significance. And I try to tell this story through the lives of real individuals who help to make that transformation happen. My goal is to use the skills I developed as a fiction writer to create historical narratives that maintain strict standards of scholarship while being as compelling and compulsively readable as novels.
The Year of Dangerous Days is another of those city books that braid together several storylines into a single vibrant portrait. This time the city is Miami, and the year of crisis is 1980, when the Florida metropolis faced a toxic combination of racial unrest, cocaine-fueled gang violence, and an uncontrollable refugee crisis.
Nicholas Griffin anchors his narrative on a few central characters – a police captain, a prominent journalist, a drug lord, and the city's dynamic mayor – creating a cinematic account of a city that somehow managed to emerge from its annus horribilis scarred and chastened, but primed for an unlikely urban rebirth.
In the tradition of The Wire, the "utterly absorbing" (The New York Times) story of the cinematic transformation of Miami, one of America's bustling cities-rife with a drug epidemic, a burgeoning refugee crisis, and police brutality-from journalist and award-winning author Nicholas Griffin.
Miami, Florida, famed for its blue skies and sandy beaches, is one of the world's most popular vacation destinations, with nearly twenty-three million tourists visiting annually. But few people have any idea how this unofficial capital of Latin America came to be.
The Year of Dangerous Days is "an engrossing, peek-between-your-fingers history of an American city on the…
I was weaned on Cuban stories by my Havana-born mother and first visited the island in 1998. Since then, I earned a PhD in history from the Graduate Center, City University of New York–where I studied twentieth-century Cuban politics. While conducting research in Havana and Miami, I confirmed that legends were imbibed with the same fervor as café cubano.All histories are marked by tall tales, but Cubans are governed by theirs, inside and out, more than most.
José Martí is Cuba’s secular saint who represents all things to all Cubans. He was the idol of Cuba’s first generation to come of age in independent Cuba, during the 1920s, who were taught he was a Christ-like figure who sacrificed himself for Cuban independence. Fulgencio Batista adored him, Fidel Castro revered him, and anti-communist Cuban exiles worshiped him. Even so, Martí was largely unknown on the island during his lifetime and at the time of his death in 1895. This biography of Martí depicts him as a human as well as a hero.
Jose Marti (1853-1895) was the founding hero of Cuban independence. In all of modern Latin American history, arguably only the "Great Liberator" Simon Bolivar rivals Marti in stature and legacy. Beyond his accomplishments as a revolutionary and political thinker, Marti was a giant of Latin American letters, whose poetry, essays, and journalism still rank among the most important works of the region. Today he is revered by both the Castro regime and the Cuban exile community, whose shared veneration of the "apostle" of freedom has led to his virtual apotheosis as a national saint.
In early 1981, the JFK Library began the process of declassifying the Cuban missile crisis ExComm tapes; as the Library’s Historian, the responsibility for reviewing these recordings was mine—and it changed my life. I spent most of the next two years listening to the tapes from the legendary 13 Days (and subsequently from the November “post-crisis”). I was the first non-ExComm participant and professional historian to hear and evaluate these unique and definitive historical recordings. After the tapes were declassified in the late 1990s, I wrote three books (published by Stanford University Press) about their historical importance.
The books discussed above concentrate on the missile crisis in the US, but there was also a crisis in Moscow and Havana. Americans called this event “the Cuban missile crisis,” the Soviets called it “the Caribbean Crisis,” and the Cubans “the October crisis”—because conflict with the US had become a recurring fact of life in Cuba. The Kennedy administration had also been sponsoring sabotage and political assassination in Cuba kept secret from the American people but well known to the Russians and the Cubans. The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis opens a window into Castro’s fury at not being informed or consulted about the secret October 27 Kennedy-Khrushchev deal to remove the missiles from both Cuba and Turkey; only the masterful November diplomacy by Khrushchev’s personal envoy in Cuba, Anastas Mikoyan, kept the deal on track.
Based on secret transcripts of top-level diplomacy undertaken by the number-two Soviet leader, Anastas Mikoyan, to settle the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, this book rewrites conventional history. The "missiles of October" and "13 days" were only half the story: the nuclear crisis actually stretched well into November 1962 as the Soviets secretly planned to leave behind in Cuba over 100 tactical nuclear weapons, then reversed themselves because of obstreperous behavior by Fidel Castro. The highly-charged negotiations with the Cuban leadership, who bitterly felt sold out by Soviet concessions to the United States, were led by Mikoyan.
I fell in love with understanding cities toward the end of my college studies. It was the late 1960s and urban issues were foremost in the nation’s consciousness. The times were difficult for cities and many of the problems, seemingly intractable. That drew me to graduate work in urban studies and afterward, teaching about real estate development and finance. My work on public/private partnerships and the political economy of city building has drawn a wide audience. In explaining how cities are built and redeveloped, my goal has been to de-mystify the politics and planning process surrounding large-scale development projects and how they impact the physical fabric of cities.
In riveting prose and masterly reporting, Joan Didion describes the two profoundly different and separate cultures of Miami, a city of Cuban exiles and racial tension with a long history of fast money and luxury living.
This analysis of the politics of immigration and exile told with passion and drama is as relevant today as it was in the 1980s.
Miami is not just a portrait of a city, but a masterly study of immigration and exile, passion, hypocrisy, and political violence, from the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean.
It is where Fidel Castro raised money to overthrow Batista and where two generations of Castro's enemies have raised armies to overthrow him, so far without success. It is where the bitter opera of Cuban exile intersects with the cynicism of U.S. foreign policy. It is a city whose skyrocketing murder rate is fueled by the cocaine trade, racial…
Since I was old enough to read and watch screens, I’ve been fascinated by the promise of adventurous journeys. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Huckleberry Finn, the Starship Enterprise, Star Wars – all occupied valuable real estate in my consciousness. That thirst for journey took me to Eastern Europe after college, where I worked as a freelancer, and to Baghdad and other Middle East cities, where I was a correspondent during and after the Iraq War. My sense of adventure continues today in my writing, drawing me to stories in colorful places, such as the U.S.-Mexico border, to try to make sense of the world and our place in it.
The history of rum is, in so many ways, the history of Cuba. Bacardi shows this about as good as any book I’ve seen. I’m a first-generation Cuban-American (my parents left Cuba in the early ‘60s as teens and resettled to Miami).
So, it was particularly moving to follow the generational story of the Bacardis, the family from Santiago de Cuba who not only created what became the world’s best-known rum but whose patriarchs participated in or funded every coup, uprising, or political lurch in Cuba stretching back to the Spanish-American War.
I loved how Gjelten shepherds the reader from the horrors of the 19th-century war to the Cuban exodus following Fidel Castro’s ascent to power. It transported me to Cuba’s past and, more importantly, deepened my understanding of my own roots.
In this widely hailed book, NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten fuses the story of the Bacardi family and their famous rum business with Cuba's tumultuous experience over the last 150 years to produce a deeply entertaining historical narrative. The company Facundo Bacardi launched in Cuba in 1862 brought worldwide fame to the island, and in the decades that followed his Bacardi descendants participated in every aspect of Cuban life. With his intimate account of their struggles and adventures across five generations, Gjelten brings to life the larger story of Cuba's fight for freedom, its tortured relationship with America, the rise of…
I’ve always been fascinated by the political aesthetics and political ferment of the 1960s. As someone born in the 1960s but not of the 1960’s generation, this has allowed for a certain “critical distance” in the ways I approach this period. I'm especially fascinated by the global circulation of cultural protest forms from the 1960s, what the historian Jeremy Suri called a “language of dissent.” The term Global Sixties is now used to explore this evident simultaneity of “like responses across disparate contexts,” such as finding jipis in Chile. In our book,The Walls of Santiago, we locate various examples of what we term the “afterlives” of Global Sixties protest signage.
Among the books on this list, Gosse’s Where the Boys Areis truly a classic. I first encountered this book a few years after I finished my dissertation and found it to be one of the most original works I had ever read. I still find that to be true. Gosse (with whom I was later a colleague at Franklin & Marshall College) weaves together cultural, intellectual, political, and diplomatic history to show how the Cuban revolution inspired youth in late 1950s America and subsequently helped launch a “New Left” in the United States. Gosse reminds us of how popular Fidel Castro was across the United States in the brief period before he became Enemy #1. But his methodological approach, combining novels, films, and diplomatic records, is truly a model for later interdisciplinary scholarship as well.
The ignominious failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 marked the culmination of a curious episode at the height of the Cold War. At the end of the fifties, restless and rebellious youth, avant-garde North American intellectuals, old leftists, and even older liberals found inspiration in the images and achievements of Fidel Castro's revolutionary guerrillas. Fidelismo swept across the US, as young North Americans sought to join the 26th of July Movement in the Sierra Maestra. Drawing equally on cultural and political materials, from James Dean and Desi Arnaz to C. Wright Mills and Studies on the Left,…
