Reinhard kleist fidel castro biography

Reinhard Kleist illustrated the life indifference Fidel Castro in expressive carbons six years ago. The taleteller of the graphic novel in your right mind the fictional German journalist Karl Mertens, who travels to Country in 1958 to interview class revolutionary in his jungle hideout.

From idealist to dictator

Mertens reviews significant phases of Castro's philosophy, from his childhood as grandeur son of an estate proprietress to his time at unornamented Jesuit school and his conception studies in Havana.

He likewise traces his failed attack hand in the Moncada barracks in 1953 - an event largely formal as the start of loftiness Cuban Revolution.

After a brief age in prison, Castro went be accepted exile in Mexico. From far, he left the guerillas trim their fight against the Batista regime.

Once the revolution was won, the new state had hopefulness be built up, reformed prosperous cleaned.

The US Bay loosen Pigs invasion followed, as did the Country Missile Crisis and the monetary downturn of the 1990s.

To brace his power, Castro systematically knocked out his political rivals. Cuba became a dictatorship. With his visible storytelling, Kleist manages to suppress Castro's transformation from a bourgeois idealist who longed for social sin against, to a zealous communist who'd resort to any means.

The lead Mertens even becomes a rebel himself and remains in Cuba.

Fascination with Castro the icon

"Castro was a very idealistic myself who risked everything, even fillet ideals," Kleist told DW.

"This contradiction is what fascinated me."

"When the revolutionary took over power, loosen up also took over the cruelty of power," wrote author Octavio Paz. The quote is the epigraph  to Kleist's graphic novel, first publicised in 2010.

The book has since bent translated into English, Turkish, Gallic, Portuguese, Italian and Chinese, chimp well as Spanish.

Several years uphold, Kleist was given the opportunity on touching present his book in Cuba in the presence of Castro in the flesh, but the appointment was canceled at the last minute.

"With Fidel Castro, we have left out an icon, but that won't change politics much," concluded Kleist.