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“... Once the United States is in Cuba, who will drive them out?’ José Martí, the father of Cuban independence, asked from his New York exile in 1889. Six years later, as Cuba’s revolt against Spanish colonial rule began, Martí, now back in Cuba, was still preoccupied with the US threat. ‘What I have done, and shall continue to do,’ he wrote in his last letter, ‘is to … block with our blood … the annexation of the peoples of America to the turbulent and brutal North that despises them … I lived in the monster and know its entrails – and my sling is that of David ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... We were​ absolutely convinced that we had discovered an infallible method to free the people,’ a close aide of Che Guevara’s once told me as we talked about Cuba’s support for armed struggle in Latin America in the 1960s. When Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, levels of poverty and exploitation in Latin America seemed to meet what Marxists called ‘the objective conditions’ for revolution ...”

“... Party (a friend of Árbenz, which led to much of the paranoia around him) told the historian Piero Gleijeses: ‘They would have overthrown us even if we had grown no bananas.’ Take a quick look at the landowners who were unwilling to give up a single hill unless forced, and it’s obvious: there would have been guerrillas even if there had been ...”

“... south. The end of Portuguese rule was hastened by a left-wing officers’ coup in Lisbon in 1974. Piero Gleijeses’s story in Visions of Freedom begins shortly afterwards, with the MPLA fighting off the FNLA and Unita, in a bid to take control of Luanda and proclaim itself the first government of the new country. By now, Cold War sponsors were fully ...”