The Double Life of Fidel Castro: My 17 Years as Personal Bodyguard to El Lider Maximo. This item is unavailable.The Double Life of Fidel Castro: My 17 Years as Personal Bodyguard to El Lider Maximo

In The Double Life of Fidel Castro, one of Castro's soldiers of seventeen years breaks his silence and shares his memoirs of his years of service, his eventual imprisonment and torture for displeasing the notorious dictator, and his dramatic escape from Cuba.

Responsible for protecting the Líder Máximo for two decades, Juan Reinaldo Sánchez was party to his secret life: from the ghost town in which guerrillas from several continents were trained; to Castro's 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.

Sánchez's tell-all exposé 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 reexamine everything we thought we knew about the Cuban story and Fidel Castro Ruz.

Lieutenant Colonel Juan Reinaldo Sanchez was Fidel Castro's personal bodyguard for 17 years before being imprisoned in 1994 for the "crime" of wanting to retire early. He left Cuba in 2008 after ten unsuccessful bids to escape. He wrote The Double Life of Fidel Castro with Axel Gyldén, star French reporter at L'Express. Sanchez now lives in Miami with his family.

Axel Gylden is a star French reporter at L'Express.

Catherine Spencer is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art History at the University of St Andrews, UK. She is the author of Beyond the Happening: Performance Art and the Politics of Communication (2020), and co-editor of London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent and Ephemeral Networks 1960-1980 (2018).