Piero Gleijeses teaches US foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington and Africa, 1959-76. He is currently finishing a book on US and Cuban policy in Southern Africa in the Carter and Reagan years.
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Vol. 26 No. 16 · 19 August 2004
pages 24-25 | 2565 words
A Bone in the Throat
Piero Gleijeses
- The Real Fidel Castro by Leycester Coltman
Yale, 335 pp, £25.00, October 2003, ISBN 0 300 10188 0
Leycester Coltman was British ambassador in Cuba from 1991 to 1994. During these years, the dust jacket on his book claims, ‘he came as close to personal friendship with Castro as any foreigner was permitted.’ Coltman writes with great confidence, even immodesty – we are given the impression that he knows all Castro’s secrets – and the range of his book extends beyond his immediate experience to take in all of Castro’s life.
Letters
Vol. 26 No. 20 · 21 October 2004
From Grant MacLean
Piero Gleijeses, in presenting Cuban military actions in Angola as a vital boost for black military morale in their fight against the ‘white giants’ of South Africa, veers from analysis into propaganda (LRB, 19 August). When the South Africans faced FAPLA or SWAPO forces they routinely inflicted disproportionate casualties. It was only when their army of young conscripts confronted the forces of the Cuban professional elite (Castro had sent his best), equipped with the latest Soviet matériel and under a Russian general, Konstantin Shagnovich, that it was sometimes a different story – especially when the South Africans were not only outgunned but outnumbered, as they frequently were.
Grant MacLean
St Margaret’s Bay, Nova Scotia
