"In this riveting Cold War history, highly acclaimed author Brian Latell offers us a new and surprising look at Fidel Castro. Latell draws his narrative on personal interviews with high level defectors from Cuba's intelligence, many of whom have not spoken out for over nearly five decades. The result is a vivid and revelatory account that revises our understanding of how Fidel operated, what his goals were, and how he imagined the future for his tiny island nation. Latell takes us from from the crimes Fidel allegedly committed as a youth in the anti-Battista movement, to how quickly he built up an intelligence system that rivaled the Soviet Union's KGB and Britain's M15 in effectiveness, and how that translated into a feud with JFK's administration and the CIA, and the ultimate confrontation during the Cuban Missile Crises that brought the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust"--