This book will change how you think about Fidel Castro. Until now, biographers have treated Castro<U+2019>s life like prosecutors, scouring his past for evidence to convict a person they don<U+2019>t like or don<U+2019>t understand. This can make for bad history and unsatisfying biography. Young Castro challenges readers to put aside the caricature of a bearded, cigar-munching, anti-American hot head to discover how Castro became the dictator who acted as a thorn in the side of US presidents for nearly half a century. These pages show Fidel Castro getting his toughness from a father who survived Spain<U+2019>s nasty class system and colonial wars to become one of the most successful independent plantation owners in Cuba. They show a boy running around that plantation more comfortable playing with the children of his father<U+2019>s laborers than his tony classmates at elite boarding schools in Santiago de Cuba and Havana. They show a young man who writes flowery love letters from prison and contemplates the meaning of life, a gregarious soul attentive to the needs of strangers but often indifferent to the needs of his own family. These pages show a liberal democrat who admires FDR<U+2019>s New Deal policies and is skeptical of communism, but is also hostile to American imperialism. They show an audacious militant who stages a reckless attack on a military barracks but is canny about building an army of resisters. In short, Young Castro reveals a complex man.