Category Archives: History

Castro!: An Impact Biography

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castroI recently posted a commentary about President Obama’s initiative to normalize relations with Cuba. I noticed this small book by Don E. Beyer at the library and I’m glad I checked it out.  The book quickly gets to the point of explaining Fidel’s origins and how he became the face of revolution in Cuba. The first sentences of the book are, “Fidel Castro is a man at odds with the world. He likes to say he came into it under conditions natural for a guerrilla fighter. He was born on August 13, 1926, as an explosive storm swept over the mountains of the Oriented Province, the wild land that has long served as an incubator of revolution in Cuba.”

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born illegitimate, one of seven children from two mothers. His father, Angel Castro, and his mother, Lina Ruz Gonzalez, were not married until several years after Fidel’s birth.  Fidel’s combative nature was displayed frequently in childhood. He was described as rebellious and combative. His brother Raul described him as dominating every situation. “He challenged the biggest and strongest ones, and when he was beaten, he started it all over again the next day. He would never quit.” As a student he displayed a photographic memory. “In later years, Fidel’s prodigious memory enabled him to give the impression of knowledge and competence where it did not exist.” Spanish Jesuit teachers taught him to admire Spanish Fascists such as Francisco Franco. He later admired Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. “He was described as walking around his school with a copy of Mein Kampf under his arm.”

Fidel began to move into revolutionary politics when he went to Havana in 1945 to study law. He admired the stories of Jose Marti who had become a Cuban independence martyr in 1895 when he was killed fighting with a revolutionary army. Castro “…saw himself as Marti’s spiritual heir.” Continue reading →

America’s Forgotten History – Surprising, Important, and Sometimes Funny

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here is whereHere is Where is a fun read. Andrew Carroll had a file of clippings about events in “America’s great forgotten history.” He was also between jobs and between girlfriends, so he decided to visit the sites of events that have no plaque, no memorial, and may only be known to local historians.

Carroll’s style is conversational. He writes about his problems arranging his trips, contacting people who might know about the sites he is seeking, even his troubles operating the car’s GPS. While he is on the trail of some particular event, he is sometimes distracted by other places he discovers.

Carroll concentrates on little-known events that had an impact on the nation. For example, the first amphibious landing and ground campaign of World War II was on American soil. During the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese plane crashed on Niihau, an outlying Hawaiian island. The pilot survived and the residents seized documents from his cockpit and held the pilot until authorities could arrive. Three residents of Japanese descent tried to help the pilot escape. There was a gun battle and a death before Company M of the 299th Infantry arrived on the island. Americans were “terrified” by the “sudden betrayal of their neighbors” by the three Japanese-Americans. The fact that Company M included loyal Japanese-Americans got lost. This event contributed to the internment of Japanese-Americans.

He also covers some famous Americans who have memorials that may be in the wrong place. Daniel Boone – who did not wear a coonskin cap! He wore a felt Quaker hat with a brim that came in handy shielding his gun barrel during muzzle-loading in rainy weather. A fifteen foot obelisk in Kentucky displays a carving of Boone in a coonskin cap, much to the annoyance of a local historian. He is also “peeved by the last image, of Boone fighting Native Americans… If anything, he was a peacemaker.” But the obelisk gets into the book because it marks one of two Daniel Boone graves. The other is in Missouri. The Missouri gravesite was raided and some bones brought to Kentucky. The original grave contained jumbled remains from several individuals and only some bones were retrieved, so Boone probably lies in both graves. Continue reading →

The Man Behind the Rosenbergs

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the-man-behindThis is a fascinating book written by retired KGB agent Alexander Feklisov with Sergei Kostin. The book begins with an interesting description of Feklisov’s life in the Soviet Union as a youngster and his eventual acceptance into the INO, or Soviet Foreign Intelligence. He is sent to the United States early in World War II and spends four years sending and receiving messages without being involved in espionage. He is a capable and loyal employee and he eventually enters the world of the “illegals” with the assignment of recruiting spies from the many Americans who sympathized with the Communism and the Soviet cause. I found it interesting that Feklisov ardently defended his contacts as being “anti-fascist activists” and not Communist spies.

Feklisov’s advancement in Soviet intelligence was enhanced by the remarkable fact there were few older agents when he began his training. Feklisov was surprised there “…was only one older officer in our section…” He “…later learned that the Stalinist purges had not spared the intelligence services. The leadership of the INO had been decimated as much as the Red Army by the end of the 1930s.” It is difficult to understand Feklisov’s dedicated loyalty to the Stalinist system after such a revelation.

Feklisov was almost prohibited from receiving a foreign assignment because he wasn’t married. He was told, “How can you recruit any agents if you can’t even recruit a wife?” His immediate supervisor praised his abilities and recommended him for an overseas assignment. He even complimented him with the comment, “If you want my opinion, it’s rather good that he didn’t get married on command. It goes to prove he’s a serious sort of fellow.” That and the fact the NKVD was short of people in the United States led to his assignment in New York as a communication specialist.

He became Alexander Fomin with the code name “Kalistrat” and was assigned to establish a clandestine radio link. The announcement of the Nazi attack on the USSR revealed some attitudes that disturbed Feklisov, or Fomin. Senator Harry Truman announced that Russia should be helped if the Germans were winning or the Germans should be helped if the Russians were winning. “The first prize for bluntness would go to the New York Daily News, which published a cartoon depicting the USSR and Germany as two snakes fighting each other. The caption read, ‘Let’s let them eat each other!’” Feklisov felt Roosevelt was fairer in his assessment. “His attitude toward the USSR in general, now that it was bearing the brunt of the war effort was favorable.” (My reading of history says that FDR’s attitude went far beyond “favorable.) Continue reading →

Spying in America

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spying-in-americaThis book by Michael J. Sulick has the subtitle, “Espionage from the Revolutionary War to the Dawn of the Cold War.” Sulick was a former director of the CIA’s clandestine service, and his book describes how “…nations large and small, from Russia and China to Ghana and Ecuador, have stolen the most precious secrets of the United States.” The book describes thirty of the most famous espionage cases. The introduction discusses a subject that continues to be importance:  government monitoring of communications to uncover potential terrorist threats versus freedom from government intrusion into our daily lives. “America’s susceptibility to the threat of espionage…developed, ironically, from the very qualities that catapulted the nation to superpower status and made it a symbol of democracy:  an exceptional geography and a tradition of individual liberties. These attributes shaped American attitudes toward national security and bred both disbelief about the threat of espionage and a distrust of countering it at the expense of these cherished liberties.”

I’ve always had the question as to why U.S. citizens would spy against the country. The author explains that the massive Soviet espionage efforts before and during World War II were assisted by the ravages of the Great Depression. “Americans disillusioned with capitalism were lured by the utopian promises of communism and swelled the ranks of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA)…Communist sympathizers attracted by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies flocked to work in the new administration and willingly supported the Soviet cause by passing government secrets. When irrefutable proof of widespread Soviet espionage eventually surfaced, the highest levels of the US government still refused to believe the senior officials of the Roosevelt administration were Soviet spies.” Many in the liberal media expressed “…a highly suspicious distrust of government efforts to combat spying, viewing them as intrusiveness and even persecution of its citizenry.” The focus often was on what was seen as the excesses of McCarthy instead of the revelations from Chambers and Bentley, two Soviet spies who turned and provided lists of spies in the government. The book accurately describes that much of the media could or would not accept their stories until irrefutable proof became available years later. Continue reading →

Capture and Escape in the Golden Age of Piracy

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at the point of a cutlassIf you’re in the mood for some pirate tales but your tastes run to non-fiction, here’s the book for you – At the Point of a Cutlass by Gregory N. Fleming. Fleming presents the story of Philip Ashton, a young New England fisherman who was kidnapped from his boat by pirates in 1723. It was three years before Ashton returned home, and a large part of that time he was marooned, alone, on an uninhabited Caribbean island. Ashton published his story in a memoir which is one of Fleming’s sources.

Fleming rounds out his book with the story of piracy in the era. “The governor on Bermuda, John Hope, would blame the surge in Atlantic piracy on Spanish efforts [to evict other nationalities.] ‘It is no great wonder if they embrace the only thing left them to do… This, my lords, is the reason and source of piracy.'”

Pirates were remarkably democratic for the 18th century. “The captain and quartermaster for a pirate ship were elected by the crew, a practice that stood in stark contrast to the nearly unlimited power of sea captains on naval or merchant ships.” Pirate ships had written articles to govern the ship that each man signed, and each signed crewman got an equal vote. Each pirate got a share of the loot, and the captain got a double-share.

Where a fishing or merchant ship might have less than a dozen sailors, pirate ships would carry fifty or more to have enough hands to attack and seize other vessels. Since many men were needed on a pirate ship, they routinely took captives to fill their ranks. Some signed the articles to join the crew willingly, but many were “forced”, beaten and abused until they signed. Anyone who signed would be executed if the ship was captured by authorities, and any association with pirates might get a man executed.

Ashton refused to sign on the ship that captured him, and his life aboard was difficult. One day he was able to hop into a boat going ashore for water (food and water aboard ship were horrible – no wonder they drank alcohol whenever possible). He hid onshore and was left behind without any tools, weapons, or even shoes. He was almost dead when a Scotsman arrived in a canoe. The Scotsman left his supplies with Ashton and left to go hunting, never to be seen again. But at least Ashton had his supplies, including a knife and a flint to make fire. Eventually he was rescued. Continue reading →

Gun, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

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guns-germs-steel book cvrI posted a two part review of this book in 2011, but was inspired to reread parts of it as I was doing some other reading about history. The book by Jared Diamond won several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. It is an excellent book that deserved awards and I decided it deserved a second review.

The Prologue is titled “Yali’s Question, The regionally differing courses of history.” The author explains that New Guineans had tens of thousands of years of history and were still using stone tools when the Europeans showed up with all manner of manufactured goods, including steel axes. New Guineans called all those goods “cargo.” Yali was a New Guinean politician who inquired, “Why do white people have so much cargo, but we New Guineans have so little?” The Europeans used their superior technology to impose a centralized government and dominate the New Guineans, who they considered to be primitive. Yali’s question is mentioned often in the author’s quest to understand how Europeans and Asians were able to dominate original occupants of many lands, such as Native Americans, despite having no genetic superiority.

Part I gives chilling descriptions of man’s actions against man.  One is about the Maori invading the Chatman Islands 500 miles East of New Zealand.  The Moriori who lived there had originated from the same Polynesian origins, but the Maori developed into highly organized warriors while the Moriori had lived peacefully.  The Maori told the Moriori they were their slaves, and those who resisted were killed and consumed.  The others were kept and killed like sheep.  One Maori explained what happened was “…in accordance with our custom.”   Continue reading →