The collective imagination’s image of the Cuban revolution tends to focus on the dictator Batista’s undignified flight and Fidel Castro’s Barbudos’ heroic victory. After 60 years of a totalitarian regime in Havana and of Castro’s propaganda, the time has come to reconsider the pre-Castro era, and a key figure in it: Ruben Fulgencio Batista.

An officer who participated in a coup d’état, a democratically elected president, and a self-taught, patriotic, autocratic statesman of mixed race, Batista represented all of the island nation’s political, social and cultural paradoxes. His fall, in 1959, led to Castro’s clan seizing power and acquiring a complete stranglehold over Cuban society.

Jacobo Machover revisits both the Batista years and the Castro years, focusing on first-person accounts that illustrate the tragedy of so many Cuban families.

He paints a portrait of a little-known and paradoxical Batista, as well as a tormented, violent and sensual one of Cuba itself: the source of Castro’s revolution and its oppressive regime.

French publication will be timed to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, in January 2019.