...[a] fascinating new novel ... How well does Mr. Fuentes channel his former comrade and current enemy? To what extent does his novel reflect his hatred for the Cuban leader, and how much does it reflect his firsthand knowledge of Mr. Castro and the early days of the revolution? While some of Mr. Fuentes’s conjurings of Mr. Castro’s rise to power and his group’s triumphs over daunting, sometimes ridiculous odds have the hard, burnished glow of authenticity, many of the fictional Fidel’s noisier outbursts sound like the contrived rantings of a paper-doll demagogue, designed by his creator to embody all that is alarming and megalomaniacal ... When Mr. Fuentes stops trying to italicize his hero’s villainy and instead focuses on the narrative of his story, we’re able to stop trying to figure out just how historically accurate his Comandante might be, and enjoy his creation as a compelling fictional personage — by turns arrogant, funny, pompous, lewd, self-absorbed and self-deluding.
...[an] impressive English translation ... Castro is renowned for having delivered some of the longest speeches in world history, so it is no mean feat that Fuentes impersonates his bombastic tone without boring us to tears. He illuminates the Cuban leader's pettier concerns through vivid descriptions of his political point-scoring, grandiose obsessions and macho posturing ... There are some wonderfully playful moments in The Autobiography, such as when Castro is caught, quite literally, contemplating his cojones (testicles) or when he declares: 'Sometimes it's hard for me to act like a professional soldier instead of the intellectual that I am' ... Fuentes has produced a fascinating portrait of one of the most controversial figures from the past century as well as a meticulously researched account of the Cuban revolution and its legacy.
[Fuentes'] revenge is to steal his former comrade's psychological clothes, hijack his life-history and tell his story more truthfully than Castro presumably would himself ... the autobiographical technique is double-edged. Fuentes's fiction brings Castro magnificently alive, thus making what he presents as his casual brutality all the more repellent. Yet in doing so it can't help humanising the very figure it is out to discredit ... There is something curiously obsessive about Fuentes's fascination with Fidel. Stealing someone else's selfhood is a wickedly effective way of getting even with them; yet wanting to become someone else suggests admiration as much as antagonism. For all his imaginative ventriloquism, it is hard to feel that Fuentes is aware of these ambiguities, let alone that he has resolved them.
Blurring the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, and possibly placing great reliance on hearsay ... This work of fiction is also a painstakingly researched non-fiction book, which adds verisimilitude and muddies the waters to the point that even participants in political rallies, military mobilizations and other events recounted often wonder, 'Is this fact or fantasy?' Although Fuentes asserts that he "has avoided mention of any event of which confirmation, besides his own testimony, is inaccessible,' credibility is at issue on numerous occasions ... The book's greatest shortcoming is the lack of analysis and commentary on economics and finance. Perhaps W.W. Norton expunged those chapters from the original in Spanish, or Castro never discussed those issues, or Fuentes knows little about the single most important reason for the abysmal failure of the Cuban revolution.
...[a] deliciously wicked construct ... as the cliche goes, history gets written by the winners. And therein lies the conceit of this entertaining, edifying and voluminous work (572 pages!) that purports to channel the wily Cuban strongman ... Most Cubaphiles will find Fuentes' effort to be a masterful act of ventriloquism, offering a Castro who is prideful, intuitively Machiavellian and relentlessly cynical ... What is most remarkable are the many similarities between Castro's version and that of Fuentes. However, when Fuentes' Castro shares the details of his romantic and sexual history, we know we have fully entered the realm of farce. Say what one will - enemies and friends alike attest to Castro's mania for privacy ... It was inevitable that Castro would seek to have the last word, but Norberto Fuentes may have trumped him.
This...is a long book, though it is mercifully an abridgement of the original Spanish edition, which ran to over 1,400 pages. Anything in it both significant and new has escaped me ... All the same, it provokes thoughts. The first is that it confirms the view that history or biography is best written straight, and that funny business should always be avoided ... despite the author’s assertion that he can back anything up with some source or other, the reader has no means of evaluating the claim ... The second thought comes from the book’s enormous load of irrelevant and frequently trivial detail, piled on in the hope that it will give the work authenticity ... Americans, one publishing joke goes, will do anything for Latin America except read about it, and this sort of offer will strengthen that resistance.
