This book by Simon Hall was definitely an interesting read, I recommend it to every person who wants to read and learn more about Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro.

An intimate itinerary of Castro's trip to Harlem in 1960. What really happened on the streets of New York when Castro decided to make his appearance to protest for human rights?

I adored this. I used to live in Harlem but yet was completely unaware about this part of history. I completely inhaled this book and would totally recommend.

Thank you to the publisher for an advance copy of this book via netgalley!


This book was a Pleasant surprise! it is so brightly detailed that you feel like you are right in the middle of the action. The author went  well beyond to adequately research every detail associated with Castro’s ten days in New York. All these details make it  easier for you to visual being in the crowds in front of the Theresa or sitting at the General Assembly admiring Castro’s freshly pressed fatigues for four hours. I could Almost smell Castro’s cigars! highly recommended for history buffs! Viva la revolution and the beginning of the 1960s!

An excellent example of how microhistory can hone in on a small topic, unpack all its details, and also ripple out to touch on surrounding issues of context and contiguity. Simon Hall is confused by GoodReads with another writer of the same name and is amusingly and incorrectly identified as the author of the TV Detective books - um, no, he's actually a Professor of Modern History at Leeds and so this is a book which is executed with academic rigour (endnotes after each chapter, a full primary and secondary bibliography at the end, an impressively granular index) as well as being an admirably readable crossover text - the writing is engaging, the huge amount of research is digested and presented with a light hand, and there's a frequently humorous edge to the telling which doesn't undermine the serious nature of the politics. Kudos, too, to Faber & Faber for producing a book that appeals to a general readership but which maintains all the scholarly apparatus necessary for an academic readership.

Focusing on Fidel Castro's visit to New York in 1960 to make an address at the United Nations, this traces how, spurned by the US Government and the upmarket hotels where diplomats and delegates usually stayed, Castro and his entourage decamped to an unknown hotel in Harlem where they were greeted rapturously by the local African American population. Castro was visited there by everyone from Malcolm X, Nehru, Nasser and Khruschev, and when he was deliberately snubbed by Eisenhower by being excluded from a Presidential luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria to which other Latin American heads of delegation had been invited, Castro instead had lunch with the employees of his hotel, treating them to steaks and beer and declaring he was 'honoured to lunch with the poor and humble people of Harlem'. It was a spectacular own-goal by Eisenhower's administration and certainly not the only one recounted in this book.

Spanning the freighted politics of the era from pre-Civil Rights segregation and a global uprising against colonialism to the Cold War (the Bay of Pigs fiasco and Cuban Missile Crisis happened just a year later) and tightening Soviet rule in Eastern Europe, this also gives us the glorious light moments when Khrushchev delightedly plays the maracas Castro has just given him, and when Castro himself is disappointed that Nasser doesn't bring him a crocodile from Egypt!