By Ignacio Ramonet on September 28, 2026
The first thing that struck one about Fidel Castro was neither his uniform, nor his stature, nor even his eloquence. It was his curiosity. After long hours of interviews for my book Fidel Castro: My Life (A Spoken Autobiography), when everyone was exhausted, the Comandante continued to ask questions, to request clarifications, and to return to historical or scientific details with intact energy. I have often thought that this was the secret of his political longevity: before being a man of power, Fidel was a restless intellectual, a visionary genius, a man of knowledge.
In the course of my life as a journalist, I have had the opportunity to meet a great number of heads of state, political leaders, intellectuals, creators, and leaders who marked their era. Few of them, however, impressed me as much as Fidel Castro.
I am not referring here to the myth, abundantly maintained by his admirers as well as by his adversaries. I am speaking of the man with whom I had the privilege of spending time for many years, of questioning for countless hours, and of seeing reason aloud in order to reconstruct historical episodes in their smallest details, connecting apparently insignificant facts to a vast geopolitical perspective.
In him, memory was prodigious. Even more remarkable was his intellectual curiosity, which remained intact until the end of his life. Nothing that concerned human beings and the world seemed foreign to him.
These conversations taught me an essential lesson: to understand Fidel Castro, one always had to look beyond the man himself. His existence merges with the history of Cuba for more than half a century, but it also embraces the great convulsions of the twentieth century: decolonization, the Cold War, national liberation movements, neoliberal globalization, and the subsequent emergence of a more diversified world, in which the old Western powers no longer hold a monopoly on decision-making.
It is precisely because Fidel Castro occupies such a singular place in contemporary history that any new biography may seem, at first glance, superfluous. What more could be said about a man to whom so many books have already been devoted?
The answer is simple: each era poses new questions to the past, and each generation rereads great historical figures in the light of its own questions.
This book Fidel Castro Beyond the Legend by Katrien Demuynck and Marc Vandepitte responds to these demands.
I have known Marc and Katrien for a long time. I appreciate the rigor of their work, their in-depth knowledge of Latin America, and their constant desire to place events in their proper context. In a publishing landscape where Fidel Castro is often reduced to either an icon or a bogeyman, they have chosen a more difficult approach: to restore the complexity of an exceptional destiny without yielding to hagiography or an ideological trial.
This method has become indispensable.
For decades, the figure of Fidel Castro has been locked in a battle of narratives. For some, he remains the symbol of resistance to imperialism; for others, he embodies all the excesses of state socialism. These opposing representations, sometimes legitimate in their inspiration, often end up masking the historical reality, which is infinitely more nuanced.
Yet the historian’s mission is not to feed passions; they must, above all, shed light on the facts.
One of the main qualities of this work is precisely to remind us that Cuba cannot be understood independently of the singular relationship it has maintained, for more than two centuries, with its powerful neighbour: the United States. The Revolution of 1959 never evolved in a normal environment. Very early on, it found itself confronted with attempts at destabilization, an armed invasion, an economic embargo destined to last for decades, and a permanent political confrontation. No serious judgment on the choices of the Cuban government can ignore this reality.
That does not mean that everything can be explained, still less justified, by external pressures. Fidel Castro himself knew that every revolution produces its own contradictions, errors, and rigidities. He sometimes spoke about this with a frankness that would surprise many of his detractors as well as many of his admirers. His ambition was not to build a perfect society – he knew that it does not exist – but to preserve national independence, which he considered the primary condition of any social policy.
The deepest imprint he wanted to leave from his passage on this earth, he did not wish to write with bullets, but with words, books, and acts of solidarity in all directions.
What was also striking about him was his visionary side, the extraordinary breadth of his horizon. His gaze went far beyond the borders of Cuba. Africa occupied a particular place in his reflections. Latin America constituted his natural space. Asia interested him more and more as the centre of gravity of the world shifted toward the Far East. Long before the terms became common, he already glimpsed the advent of a Global South and of a multipolar international order.
With hindsight, these intuitions appear particularly illuminating today. The world taking shape before our eyes is no longer the one that emerged in 1991, after the disappearance of the Soviet Union. New powers are asserting themselves, the countries of the South are claiming greater autonomy, the BRICS are making themselves heard, and international power relations are undergoing a a far-reaching overhaul. Rereading Fidel Castro in this new context is not a matter of nostalgia; it is a way of better understanding certain lines of force of the present. That is why this biography comes at the right time.
Katrien Demuynck and Marc Vandepitte do not seek to convince their readers to admire Fidel Castro. They offer them something more precious: to understand him. To understand how a young lawyer from Santiago de Cuba became one of the greatest revolutionary strategists and one of the most influential geopolitical figures of the second half of the last century; to understand why a small island in the Caribbean could exercise a diplomatic and moral influence out of all proportion to its size; and finally, to understand why, ten years after his passing, Fidel Castro continues to occupy such a singular place in the global political imagination.
Great historical figures never cease to be reinterpreted. Passions calm down, archives open, and perspectives change. History gradually replaces polemics. This shift is necessary. It makes it possible to approach the truth more closely, without ever claiming to possess it entirely.
I hope that readers will approach this excellent book with an open mind. They will discover in it a solid, well-documented work, attentive to facts as well as to contexts. Above all, they will encounter a profoundly human Fidel Castro: a strategist, a visionary, sometimes stubborn, often audacious, and always convinced that peoples can write their own history and shape their own destiny.
It is this conviction, more than any other, that no doubt explains why the name of the Cuban Comandante remains, even today, inseparable from the great debates on sovereignty, social justice, international law, and the independence of nations. In opening this book, readers do not merely enter into the life of a man and of a country. They enter into an era whose formidable echoes continue to shape our contemporary world.
To purchase Fidel Castro: Beyond the Legend go to https://www.strandbooks.com/fidel-castro-beyond-the-legend-9781899155255.html
Ignacio Ramonet is the former editor-in-chief of Le Monde Diplomatique and author, among other works, of the extensive interview book with Fidel: Fidel Castro: My Life (A Spoken Autobiography), 2009.