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

The Colegio de Dolores was a Jesuit boarding school in Santiago, Cuba's rich and ancient second city, where Fidel and Raul were educated in the 1930s and '40s. Patrick Symmes begins his story here, tracking down dozens of Fidel's schoolmates glimpsed in a single period photograph. And it is through their stories—their time at the Colegio; the catastrophic effects of the revolution on their lives; their fates since—that Symmes opens a door onto a Cuba, and a time in Castro's life, that have been deliberately obscured from us. Here too is the elusive Raul Castro, a cipher destined to rule Cuba in Fidel's place.

We see Castro in his formative youth, an adolescent ruling the classrooms of the Colegio and running in the streets of Santiago. Symmes traces the years in which the revolution was conceived, won, and lost, describing the changes it wrought in Santiago and in the lives of Fidel's own classmates: we follow them through the maelstrom of the 1960s, as most fight to leave Cuba and a few stay behind. And here, in Santiago today, Symmes finds Castro's most lasting achievement, the creating and sustaining of a myth-soaked revolutionary idealism amid the harshest realities of daily life.

Wholly original in its approach, The Boys from Doloresis a powerfully evocative, eye-opening portrait of Cuba—and of the Castro brothers—in the twentieth century.