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

by Patrick Symmes

From the author of Chasing Che, here is the remarkable tale of a group of boys at the heart of Cuba's political and social history. Chosen in the 1940s from among the most affluent and ambitious families in eastern Cuba, they were groomed at the elite Colegio de Dolores for achievement and leadership. Instead, they were swept into war, revolution, and exile by two of their own number, Fidel and Raúl Castro. Trained by Jesuits for dialectical dexterity and the pursuit of absolutes, Fidel Castro swiftly destroyed the old Cuba they had come from, down to the hallways of Dolores itself. At once sweeping and intimate, this remarkable history by Patrick Symmes is a tour de force investigation of the world that gave birth to Fidel Castro – and the world his Cuban Revolution leaves behind.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Biography

438 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 10, 2007

Reviews

[Michael McCue · Rating 4 out of 5]

In The Boys from Delores: Fidel Castro's Classmates from the Revolution to Exile the author begins with a group photo of the entire student body from about 1942. The boys are all in their school uniforms and standing in the central courtyard of the school. The author followed up on as many of the boys in the photo as he could. He found and interviewed many of them. Most of the Delores students were from the elite of the eastern end of Cuba and all but a few went into exile after the Cuban Revolution in 1959-60. The Colegio Delores was a Jesuit prep school in Santiago Cuba. While some have called Delores a boarding school all but 40 or so of the nearly 250 students were day students who mostly lived close enough to the campus to walk home for lunch. The Castro boys, Fidel, Raul and Ramon were among the boarding students. Their father, Angel Castro, was an uneducated but very wealthy land owner. The Castros lived too far from Santiago to commute to Delores. The author, Patrick Symmes, described Fidel Castro as a student who dominated the whole school. Fidel was the pitcher of the baseball team, the captain of the debaters and the basketball star as well. He was domineering and would be considered a bully today.

I should thank my cousin, Rebecca, for recommending this book. Among the students at Delores in the 1930s and 40s were another set of brothers, the De Jonghs. My grandmother was born a De Jongh in Santiago and this set of three brothers were my father's cousins. A very interesting connection to a part of my family I know very little about. Patrick Symmes has done a good job with this book. Even though it drags in places I recommend it. I will be looking for his other books about Cuba.

[Ernesto Aguilar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ostensibly, this book tracks the lives of the men who went to school at El Colegio de Dolores with Fidel Castro, years before his rebellion would change Cuba forever. El Colegio de Dolores was run by Jesuit priests as a school where the country's future leaders could be groomed as the next generation of elites. And the book does indeed follow those men, now elderly and in various positions, inside Cuba and out. Slices of history, including the Bay of Pigs and meetings heretofore unknown, come to life in this unique tale. Stories of hope as well as despair abound. Symmes brings a realist's eye to Cuba.

But what is interesting about this book is how much farther it goes than as a history lesson. From the pen of a truly gifted writer, it is as much about Cuba's present as it is its past. The author shares an exuberant, colorful tale of the poorly understood island nation through the eyes of friends as well as enemies of the revolution, those who live there, as well as the first-person experience. Symmes is a consummate storyteller. Whether it is his retelling of the Carnaval experience or the operations of the government in the lives of Cuban people and tourists, his interactions with the Cuba few know are entrancing. The richness of each detail makes the book a real feast for those of you who appreciate the craft of creative writing. This a triumphant book, well worth your time.

[Ricardo Martini Kato · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nota: 1.9/5.0

A revolução cubana até os dias de hoje emite um certo ar de romantismo e evoca que um governo que luta pela igualdade contra o totalitarismo é uma boa causa.
“Os meninos de Dolores” retrata personagens que se cruzaram na escola Dolores em Santiago e entre esses alunos estavam os irmãos Castros.
Memórias desses alunos se fundem com a narrativa do escritor em coletar essa entrevistas e entremeado com algumas pílulas históricas.
A partida poderia ser um grande livro, porém com uma narrativa não linear e cheios de desvios para contar tudo e nada ao mesmo tempo fica a sensação de um livro pesado com pequenos respiros de aprendizados.
Poderia ser um livro de memórias dos meninos de Dolores, poderia ser um livro sobre a história recente de Cuba e também poderia ser um livro de relatos sobre o que é a Cuba hoje.
Ser um único livro sobre tudo isso acabou sendo ouvir Fidel Castro durante seus discurso de horas…

[Mari Iglesia · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half of the book was slow... almost the author's interview of a bunch of men that studied with Fidel Castro. The second half of the book is good, it is the story once again of the Cuban revolution. Amazing what our people have gone through... amazing how long the "revolution" has lasted. I guess it is one of the reasons it makes me shudder whenever I hear a leader with an attitude of "my way or the highway." Cubans went through it with Castro already! You are either with him or you are a loser!

[Sam Bauman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I went in thinking this was a book about Castro's upbringing and path to power. It was, kind of, but it was also a travelogue of the author. This annoyed me in the first third of the book as it's more about the author than the topic at hand. Gradually the author stopped writing about himself so much and it became an interesting look into some of modern Cuba and more what happened to the Cubans who were exiled in addition to Castro.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book showed me how little I knew about Cuba (Historical Cuba and Modern Cuba). It is an interesting collection of personal stories and interactions with the students who were Castro's classmates. I am glad I took the time to read it between picking it up at a library book sale and soon giving it as a gift to someone else. It is amazing how much history we never learn about unless we pick up a book like this.

[Fernando Amaral · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Going into exile simply substituted new problems for old ones. (…) They didn’t know Cuba, as it was now, and lived without fully participating in the life of America, Spain, Mexico, or wherever they ended up. “There’s a double isolation”(…)."


Cuanto duele verse reflejado en las palabras de un niño de Dolores.

[Benjamin Wetmore · Rating 3 out of 5]

Slow and meandering. Very conversational but flowing in all directions. Well researched. Many little facts that add a great deal to the story. At points it becomes less of a book about the school or the boys than just a Cuban history lesson.

[Michael Schmidt · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's an old journalistic device and it works a charm: take an old school class photograph of someone (in)famous and track down the careers of as many of their classmates as possible, interviewing them in detail about who the blighter was back as a pimply youth, and what they think of how they turned out. I've done it before, but Patrick Symmes' study of the forgotten youth of Fidel Castro is a masterful recreation.

For one thing, he has clearly done the leg-work, wearing out his shoe-leather in Castro's old stamping ground of Santiago de Cuba in Oriente Province, and on the streets of Havana and elsewhere as well as in the offices and restaurants of the Cuban exile milieu Miami. Some of Castro's old mates rose as apparatchiks in the new regime, others went into embittered exile, and more just blurred into the obscure poverty of regular Cuban society.

Castro to my mind is one of the most misrepresented figures of the 20th Century, reviled by the right as a communist and lauded by the left as the same, but the picture that emerges of his youth is far more complex, if not downright contradictory of those positions. As the son of a labour-broker, the young Castro first came to the approving attention of the Santiago newspapers for strike-breaking a bunch of unruly black Haitian cane-cutters by beating them down from horseback with the flat of his machette. Not much of a workers' champion.

An avid reader of Mein Kampf to the bombastic phrases of which he often fell asleep as a schoolboy, he is reported to have celebrated the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 and imitated Il Duce's speeches from a balcony at the Dolores school, to the amusement of his conservative Catholic peers. These may be considered of course, on the one hand the usual experiments of youth, and on the other a rather traditionalist fascination with the Latino strongman archetype. Except that this right-wing tendency remains constant in Castro's life, as he goes from gun-toting thug in the conservative bourgeois Orthodox Party to the self-titled "Maximum Leader of the Cuban Revolution". Not the political trajectory of a freedom-loving guy.

Symmes' evidence suggests how, on his ascension to power (by the chance defection to his 26 July Movement of the military governor of Oriente Province, to whom the fleeing dictator Batista had naively handed power in late 1959, allowing Castro to assume command of the demoralised Cuban Armed Forces), Castro's main ideological influence was not Marx (whose works he hardly touched), but Juan Perón, the Nazi-friendly "third way" fascist strongman of Argentina. This is hardly anecdotal: Castro became personal friends with Perón, had him over as a regular house guest during his 1955-1973 hiatus in power, and declared three days of national mourning upon his death in 1974 - despite the fact that right-Perónism gave life to the death squads of the Operaton Condor era in Latin America.

In sum, the No.1 Barbudo (Beared One) seems to be rather a political chameleon, if not a cleverly disguised neo-fascist (and for more evidence, read my review of Giles Tremlett's Ghosts of Spain). I'm sure this review won't endear me to those who genuinely believe that Cuba Libre in the rum-and-cola sense was a gentler revolution than that in the USSR or Perónist Argentina, but then, I'm pretty sure they never lived under a red or brown (really, is there a difference?) dictatorship.

[Rock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably as good a portrait of contemporary Cuba as you can get from an Irish dude from Virginia. Well, contemporary as of a few years ago; things have probably changed a bit in the last few years as some barriers to American travel and investment were removed. The Castro schoolmate device works well as a source for first-hand interviews and the mix of reporting current conditions and providing the history that led to those conditions is seamless. I appreciated his first-hand anecdotes for their candor and acknowledgment that he is not omniscient, but they can be digressive. The strangest digression was probably a brief interview with Jerry Brown, governor of California whose only connection to the story seems to be that he also went to a Jesuit school. Odd.

[Natalie Tyler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Desi Arnaz had been a boy from Dolores about a decade before the three Castro boys—Ramon, Fidel, and Raul—arrived. The Colegio de Dolores, one of three Jesuit-run schools in Cuba, was very prestigious. The Jesuit school was not a military academy, but the discipline and very high-expectations make it seem so. Located in Santiago, Cuba, (the second largest city) the Colegio de Dolores trained the elite students of the wealthy families to be personally and academically and religiously rigorous.

The book begins with a fantastic opening device: It’s a school reunion and the boys of the 1940’s are now grown men, retired or approaching retirement. But this reunion is not on the school grounds: instead, a majority of the alums live in the Miama/Key Biscayne area where the reunion is set. And they do not discuss Castro willingly at the reunion although the author (not an alumni) does manage to get some information: at school Ramon was a sort of ideal student but Fidel and Raul—especially Fidel—were boisterous. They were not stupid at all: they just were lively and not very respectful of the rules. Fidel excelled at athletics. Keep in mind, however, that this memory is from men who fled Cuba. Why did they flee Cuba? Mostly, I suspect, because they had money and class and did not want to lose anything in the Revolution. They are bitter about the loss of their old country and hence are politically “conservative”. Only a few will share somewhat fond memories of Fidel.

Fidel Castro was able to come to power after the Batista presidency/dictatorship. Batista was extremely right-wing and ran a sort of hedonistic paradise for the very wealthy. Fidel’s July 26 movement was a nationalist guerrilla uprising. Castro governed as a nationalist and communist. The book does an excellent job of representing the various political viewpoints of the boys who went to the prestigious school from schooldays up to old age. My only criticism is that the book is self-selecting: all of these boys started out at a prestigious school and the implication is that they had to have money to go there. Hence so many became wildly successful business men in the USA and were able to come here without difficulty.

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book began with somewhat of an attitude. One of the exiles "wallowed in history like a boy in a mud bog", another "cackles gleefully", and others "unashamedly shook hands" (why be ashamed to shake hands?). I almost put it down, but I'm glad I didn't. A lot of information and some very good writing follows.

The book is one part travelog, one part recent Cuban history and one part the story of Castro's classmates at the exclusive Jesuit school. Some of "the boys" supported Castro and his revolution before they fought against him. History is intertwined with descriptions of rations, baseball games and streetscapes.

The stories of the "boys" are the stories of the upheaval. Some smelled the coffee right away and left. Others were jolted out as they saw their liberties and property falling away. Some, like Kiki de Jongh remain for reasons that are very unclear.

I wonder how this author has slipped in and out of Cuba, as he says, for 11 years. He clearly knows the turf, and can write of the changing moods and landscapes. He has ferreted out some oral histories inside of and outside of Cuba that add to the literature to be sifted by future historians. It seems that Symmes knows some of the interviewees quite well. Presumably he has more extensive tapes and notes that I hope will someday be donated to a research institution.

In the final pages Symmes gives some ideas about what could happen after Castro's death.

I think a good editor could make this a 5 star book. The first 50 pages or so need some work. Throughout, some phrases could be metaphors or statements, it's hard to tell. Some ideas are introduced in a way that you might not catch that the topic is changing (and go back to find what you missed). Pictures, even blow ups from the cover photo, would be a good addition and for the general reader, a map is needed.

The title is deceiving. I don't think this book was originally intended to be about the "boys". For instance, the author is given 2 addresses for one alumni, and dutifully mails the envelopes. If this were actually about alums, he would have pursued him and other leads.

[Hancock · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first chapter was pretty bad....full of unsubstantiated opinions such as when describing a group of ageing Cuban emigres as, "Brylcreemed, ordered and clipped. You had to draw the line somewhere and this was it: neatness of tonsure was a way of fighting back, of defending civilization against its enemies." There is no indication in the text that the emigres believe this to be true. Nonetheless, I will press on to allow the author to redeem himself.
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I pressed on only to discover that the book is littered with the author's opinion. Nonetheless, I believe that The Boys from Dolores is a pretty good introduction to revolutionary Cuba and offers insight into Castro through the eyes of his classmates at Dolores.

[Rebecca Conard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finished the book a couple of days before the news broke that the Obama administration would begin the process of normalizing diplomatic relations with Cuba. Listening to the news and reflecting on the book, with its focus on the Cuban elite who were in the vanguard of the Cuban diaspora, I was struck by the level of English proficiency among young Cubans, who stand to benefit the most, and their readiness to experience the world outside Cuba--testament I suppose to the influence the U.S. has continued to wield over the past decades through family contacts and various exceptions to the trade embargo.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picked this up at a used book sale. I like history and this offers a nice snapshot of Cuba from the viewpoint of the classmates of Fidel Castro at his old Jesuit school in Santiago. The author spent lots of time talking to these men on the island and off (mostly off-the well to do tended to leave after the revolution). We also get lots of observations by the author from his visits there. Certainly not an in-depth history of Cuba, but an interesting snapshot of history as men lived (and are living-Fidel just keeps on going) it.

[Shanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was the book group pick for May and while it's timely as the restrictions on travelling to Cuba have been eased, I found this book hard to finish. The Washington Post called the author a "staccato historian" and I couldn't have put it better myself. I had hoped the book would focus more on Fidel Castro himself and his relationships with his family and friends but instead it leapt around Cuba's history. While enlightening, I feel I would have enjoyed this book more if it had a clear timeline of events.

[Elaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author's streetwise yet learned style examines the Cuban Revolution and how it affected students who attended the Jesuit boy school, Dolores, in Satiago de Cuba. Among the alumni are Fidel and Raul Castro. The author interviewed Los Dolorinos living in Cuba and the US.
At times, I wondered if he was saying that the awful regime in Cuba might be better than living under a leader like Batista. Then, the opposite thoughts would occur always leaving me wondering.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the multiple story arcs throughout the book. Symmes takes the "boys" from the Jesuit boarding school where the Castros were educated and looks at how the revolution in Cuba affected them all differently. It looks at who stayed in Cuba, who left (and when and how). It makes me wonder what this would look like if we did this with one of my elementary class pictures -- where would everyone be, and what paths did they take to get there?

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read many books about Cuba and Fidel. This is one of the best. It helps you understand the making of Fidel into the tyrant that he his, and the steps that lead to the ruin of the Cuban economy, culture and society as it used to be. Very well researched.

[Chris Carlton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like his first book, this travel journal/historical narrative is fascinating, insightful and highly readable. I learned about Cuba and Fidel in an intimate and personal as I don't believe I could have from a history.

[Georgie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since my trip to Cuba in late January I have read several books about Cuba in my effort to better understand this fascinating and complex country. This is most enlightening book on that topic that I have read because it offers up close insights from a variety of perspectives.

[Glen · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting book about Fidel Castro and school mates all of whom attended a prestigious Jesuit school in Santaigo and their lives up to the present.

[Jenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

An insightful and balanced look at pre and post-revolutionary Cuba, through the eyes of Castro's prep school classmates.

[Lu]

Castro's classmates from revolution to exile

[John F Papandrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

really interesting story of Fidel Castro's youth and education at a Jesuit school in Cuba

[ShandraLee]

Excellent.