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In The Double Life of Fidel Castro, one of Castro's soldiers of 17 years breaks his silence and shares his memoir of years of service, and eventual imprisonment and torture for displeasing the notorious dictator, and his dramatic escape from Cuba. Responsible for protecting the Lider maximo for two decades, Juan Reinaldo Sánchez was party to his secret life – because everything around Castro was hidden. From the ghost town in which guerrillas from several continents were trained, to his immense personal fortune – including a huge property portfolio, a secret paradise island, and seizure of public money – as well as his relationship with his family and his nine children from five different partners. Sanchez's tell-all expose reveals countless state secrets and the many sides of the Cuban monarch: genius war leader in Nicaragua and Angola, paranoid autocrat at home, master spy, Machiavellian diplomat, and accomplice to drug traffickers. This extraordinary testimony makes us re-examine everything we thought we knew about the Cuban story and Fidel Castro Ruz.
Fidel Castro is one of the most interesting and controversial personalities of our time – he has become a myth and an icon. He was the first Cuban Caudillo – the man who freed his country from dependence on the USA and who lead his people to rediscover their national identity and pride. Castro has outlived generations of American presidents and Soviet leaders. He has survived countless assassination attempts by the CIA, the Mafia, and Cubans living in exile. He has become one of the greatest politicians of the 20th Century. His biography, and the history of his country exemplify the tensions between East and West, North and South, rich and poor. As Castro's life draws to a close, the que...
She's been kidnapped and beaten, lives under surveillance, and can only get online—in disguise—at tourist hotspots. She's a blogger, she's a Cuban, and she's a worldwide sensation. Yoani Sánchez is an unusual dissident: no street protests, no attacks on big politicos, no calls for revolution. Rather, she produces a simple diary about what it means to live under the Castro regime: the chronic hunger and the difficulty of shopping; the art of repairing ancient appliances; and the struggles of living under a propaganda machine that pushes deep into public and private life. For these simple acts of truth-telling her life is one of constant threat. But she continues on, refusing to be silenced—a living response to all who have ceased to believe in a future for Cuba.
Tracking Cuban history from 1492 to the present, The Cuba Reader includes more than one hundred selections that present myriad perspectives on Cuba's history, culture, and politics. The volume foregrounds the experience of Cubans from all walks of life, including slaves, prostitutes, doctors, activists, and historians. Combining songs, poetry, fiction, journalism, political speeches, and many other types of documents, this revised and updated second edition of The Cuba Reader contains over twenty new selections that explore the changes and continuities in Cuba since Fidel Castro stepped down from power in 2006. For students, travelers, and all those who want to know more about the island nation just ninety miles south of Florida, The Cuba Reader is an invaluable introduction.
Reveals how political change and economic development led to the collapse of democracy and the origins of the Spanish Civil War.
This book is a collection of the most recent approaches that combine metaheuristics and machine learning. Some of the methods considered in this book are evolutionary, swarm, machine learning, and deep learning. The chapters were classified based on the content; then, the sections are thematic. Different applications and implementations are included; in this sense, the book provides theory and practical content with novel machine learning and metaheuristic algorithms. The chapters were compiled using a scientific perspective. Accordingly, the book is primarily intended for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Science, Engineering, and Computational Mathematics and is useful in courses on Artificial Intelligence, Advanced Machine Learning, among others. Likewise, the book is useful for research from the evolutionary computation, artificial intelligence, and image processing communities.
Enforced disappearance is one of the most serious human rights violations. It constitutes an autonomous offence and a crime under international law on account of its multiple and continuing character. It is not a phenomenon of the past, nor is it geographically limited to Latin America: such scourge is widespread today and on the increase in other continents. For more than twenty-five years, relatives of disappeared people worldwide have insisted on the pressing need for an international legally binding instrument against enforced disappearances. 2006 is the year of the adoption of the International Convention on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances, which represents the result of several legislative and jurisprudential developments that are duly analyzed in this book. The Convention has been opened for signature in February 2007.
This in-depth and comprehensive investigation describes how "revolutionary" Cuba essentially occupied Venezuela not through a large military force in-situ but asymmetrically, by placing assets strategically to command Venezuela' security forces, economy, information, communications, and society in general. It explores the evolution of a long-held plan that led to a radical political alliance and regional integration project and the establishment of an international criminal network. Finally, it explains how the much smaller, poorer, and underdeveloped Cuba pulled this off thanks to a unique methodological tool kit arisen from the totalitarian nature of its system. The implications are far from regional.
“A conclusive, ground-breaking portrait, based on firsthand sources, of how the Cuban strongman . . . ran circles around the CIA.” —Daily Beast In Castro’s Secrets, intelligence analyst and Cuba expert Brian Latell offers an unprecedented view of Fidel Castro in his role as Cuba’s supreme spymaster. Based on interviews with high level defectors from Cuba’s intelligence and security services—including some who have never spoken on record before—Latell reveals long-buried secrets of Fidel’s nearly 50-year reign. While the CIA grossly underestimated his capabilities, Castro built one of the best and most aggressive intelligence systems in the world. Their sophisticated network ran moles and double agents who penetrated the highest levels of American Institutions. They also carried out numerous assassinations—some against foreign leaders. Latell also sheds new light on the CIA’s deplorable plots against Cuba—including previously obscure schemes to assassinate Castro—and presents shocking new conclusions about what Fidel actually knew of Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Introduction : why agroecology? -- The scientific principles of agroecology -- The scientific evidence for agroecology : can it feed the world? -- Scaling up agroecology : social process and organization -- The politics of agroecology -- Conclusions : conform or transform?