The Boys from Dolores: Fidel Castro's Classmates from Revolution to Exile (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Symmes, whose Chasing Che retraced Che Guevara's transformational 1952 motorcycle trip through Latin America, writes a history of the Cuban revolution that also explores the qualities that define what it is to be Cuban. He draws on his own visits and extended stays in Cuba, and the half-century-old memories of a group of formerly privileged boys, now mostly exiled, who along with Castro attended Dolores, a Jesuit school that until the revolution, educated Cuba's elites. The Dolores alumni speak poignantly of prerevolutionary Cuba and the necessary revolution in which many participated. Equally poignant are their descriptions of events as the revolution lurched toward socialism and repression, events that led them to self-imposed exile. The memories of several expats who were part of the Bay of Pigs fiasco make compelling reading. To the Dolores alumni the Holy Grail is a Cuba without Castro, but Symmes, whose picture of Castro is unsympathetic in the extreme, nonetheless worries that a Castro-less Cuba will, without remorse, leave its poor bereft and evolve into a society that is more free but less just. Symmes's writing is lyrical and evocative; his powerful and complex picture of Cuba and the exile community is well worth reading.
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From Booklist

The Colegio de Dolores was a prestigious Jesuit run school for boys and located in eastern Cuba. In the 1940s, the student body included three brothers raised on a plantation in Oriente province. The Castro brothers, Ramon, Fidel, and Raul, were noted for their boisterous behavior, crude manners, and propensity to challenge authority. What seemed to unite them with their more refined schoolmates were their shared hopes for a more progressive and independent Cuba. But this isn't really a story about the Castro brothers. Rather, Symmes, a journalist who has traveled extensively in Cuba, has profiled some of their classmates, many of whom now reside in exile in the U.S. Many of them display intense hostility toward Fidel and the Cuban Revolution, but they also provide interesting insights into life in Cuba before the revolution. Their memories are often rather poignant, as they reveal a narrow nostalgia for a Cuba that is now gone (and, in fact, may never have existed). This work provides a useful look at the island's past, present, and possibilities for the future. Freeman, Jay

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition (July 10, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375422838
• ISBN-13: 978-0375422836
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #605,792 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What Castro never revealed, September 11, 2007

By	Jon Hunt "musician, teacher" (Old Greenwich, Ct. USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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"The Boys from Dolores", a rich and detailed account of Fidel Castro's boyhood as told through the eyes of his classmates, is terrific in every way. From the opening reunion in Miami of the alumni from the Jesuit Dolores School in Santiago, Cuba to the finale where the author returns to Miami, Castro is revealed to the hilt. Though Castro was never very popular in school, these aging classmates can't hide their despisement of the former Dolores student. Along the way, Symmes shows us a Cuba which few get to see.

It's one thing to be an historical contributor (as Symmes no doubt is) but it's another to write so grippingly, keeping the pace flowing as he does. Not only does he relate the intricate details of what it was like to be a student at Dolores (down to the exact time allotments given to students each day at school) but Symmes also delves into the aspects of Cuban culture and the "doble caras" nature of the Cuban people. This gives a human face to the telling of the Castro story, replete with his final success in overthrowing the dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959. In two short years the revolution was complete, Castro's Cuba was communist, much of the country's wealthy had fled and the people settled into the iron rule of a man who has been called everything from "Invincible Marshal of the Republic" to things far worse. Symmes's account of the Bay of Pigs invasion is particularly noteworthy and dramatically told.

Yet it's what the author sets out to do the most that he does the best. Interviews with more than a half dozen of Castro's classmates at Dolores are the centerpiece of the book. Told in their own words, their collective indictment of Castro couldn't have been more personal and Symmes captures it all. His eleven trips to Cuba have added a full measure of insight.

"The Boys from Dolores" is unique. Since Castro doesn't talk about his past, Symmes does, or rather his subjects do. I highly recommend this extraordinary book at a time nearing a probable transition in Cuba.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars NYT: "Atmospheric, Richly Evocative", August 3, 2007

By	Patrick Symmes - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

July 27, 2007
Books of The Times
The Boys From Dolores

By WILLIAM GRIMES
Every year, an aging group of Cuban exiles gathers in Miami to celebrate a school, a way of life and a past that recedes a little further into myth and memory day by day. They are los Dolorinos, former students of the Colegio de Dolores, a prestigious Jesuit academy in Santiago de Cuba, and their members represent what was once the city's social elite and liberal professional class. One classmate in particular, never present, overshadows all the rest, one of three brothers who attended the school and went on to greater fame. He is Fidel Castro, Cuba's supreme leader, but still known to some Dolorinos by his school nickname, Bola de Churde, or dirtball.

Patrick Symmes, the author of "Chasing Che," returns to Cuba in fine style with "The Boys From Dolores." Sneaking up on his subject sideways, he uses the Colegio de Dolores and its graduates as the starting point for creating an atmospheric, richly evocative history of modern Cuba: the Cuba that produced Fidel; the Cuba that might have been, had the Dolorinos and their ideals prevailed; and the sorry, compromised Cuba of today, charismatic even in decay.

Mr. Castro, always tight-lipped about his past, has never said more than a few words about his old school, which he attended as an adolescent from 1940 to 1942. But Mr. Symmes, probing the ethos of the Colegio, puts his finger on a moral question that shaped the thinking of every Dolorino. Life on earth was presented as a conflict between good and evil. On retreats in the mountains around Santiago, the same hills in which Mr. Castro and his rebel armies would later take refuge, the Jesuit fathers asked students to meditate on "the two standards," the battle flags carried by the armies of Christ and Satan, and ask themselves which they would choose.

"Which standard?" runs like a leitmotif through Mr. Symmes's retelling of the events that led to the Cuban revolution, a narrative strand he intertwines with the personal histories of his Dolorinos, men like Lundy Aguilar, a liberal historian and early opponent of Mr. Castro; Alberto Casas, the class troublemaker turned tough-talking cattleman in Puerto Rico; and the three de Jongh brothers, two of them exiles in Miami, one a true believer in the revolution who stayed behind. First the revolution, then the Castro regime, forced life-changing moral choices on all the classmates.

The Dolorinos belonged to a special generation, buoyed by the democratic 1940 Constitution and the cleanest elections in Cuban history, in 1944, after Fulgencio Batista had stepped down as head of state. "The boys of Dolores came of age in this era of hope," Mr. Symmes writes. "When they recalled Cuba, this was what they meant. The early 1940s. The old republic. The time before time." It was their generation that would make the revolution, which celebrated its 48th anniversary yesterday, and be broken by it. Two-thirds of them left Cuba, never to return.

Mr. Symmes digs like a reporter and writes like a novelist. As he makes his rounds, chasing down leads, pestering recalcitrant Cuban bureaucrats, grabbing his opportunities when they come, keeping his eyes and ears open all the time, he accumulates a fat dossier of vivid impressions. These feed into extended dramatic scenes and lightning-quick vignettes, like his epigrammatic take on Havana, "dangerous to body and soul, a high-low environment where you could get arrested for nothing but everyone got away with everything."

He is particularly attuned to the lower frequencies, a close reader of the Cuban subtext. He captures brilliantly the shifts and dodges and little evasions that keep life rolling along in Cuba, like the illicit trade in shellfish. "The lobsters were so valuable as hard currency that mere possession of shellfish was a serious crime, yet there was a discreet black market in crustaceans, and old men whispered lobster lobster like pimps," he writes. "You paid them up front. The crustacean would be delivered separately, like a drug deal."

The Dolorinos, like most Cubans, welcomed the revolution with open arms. Their old classmate, most believed, would sweep out corruption, restore the liberal 1940 Constitution and introduce a government dedicated to equity and justice. Mr. Aguilar was one of the first to experience misgivings, expressed in a newspaper editorial that made him persona non grata. Mr. Symmes, in one of the book's more colorful episodes, describes Mr. Aguilar's amazing adventures as the machine gunner on a PT boat supplied by the United States for the purpose of carrying out sabotage raids on a Cuban oil refinery. Even more hair-raising is the testimony provided by Roberto Mancebo, a much younger Dolorino who as an 18-year-old took part in the Bay of Pigs invasion and was involved in some of the bloodiest fighting.

The Dolores connection, as so often happened in the early years of the revolution, kept appearing in unexpected ways. David de Jongh, eldest of the de Jongh brothers and still in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs, recalled listening to an exile-run radio station and hearing that Santiago had been liberated by the invaders. A few hours later he saw Raúl Castro, Fidel's younger brother, known to the Dolorinos as the Flea, speeding through a city park in a jeep. Recognizing his old schoolmate, Raúl gave a relaxed wave and sped on, unaware that Mr. de Jongh was stockpiling guns to use against the government. Today, Mr. de Jongh insists that Fidel Castro was behind the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Mr. Symmes allows Mr. Castro only fleeting moments on the stage. The great shaper of modern Cuban history is primarily a powerful, unseen, enigmatic presence, his influence reflected in the lives of his old schoolmates and in the ordinary Cubans the author encounters in Santiago and Havana. This is justice. "There was more than one man in Cuba, and more than one boy in Dolores," he writes, musing over a class photo of the 238 students of the Colegio. "His history was not the sum total of Cuban history."

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Necessary reading, September 19, 2007

By	Jose Sotolongo (Kingston, NY United States) - See all my reviews

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This is a wonderful book that explores the historical and social background of the success of a communist regime on an island ninety miles from the U.S. The author reports extensively on the school that Castro attended, and interviews several of his classmates, but this is only a microcosm of Cuban society at large. He has done a lot of homework to capture the Cuban mentality and society, from the 1930's right on up to the present. After 48 years, I finally understand, thanks to this book, what the social and political factors were which resulted in this oppressive regime being so wildly successful in capturing the support of the majority of its citizens, us exiles notwithstanding.

This is a must read for any Cuban expats, their offspring, and also anyone having any notion of setting up a business or any roots in Cuba after democracy creeps in.