In the early 1940s, the Colegio de Dolores was a good place to dream. Cuba's democratic future looked bright, and the 250 boys enrolled at the prestigious Jesuit-run academy had reason to expect that the new era would be theirs to shape. Among the students was a bright but volatile teenager nicknamed Bola de Churde, or Dirtball. Once, during a stickball game, Dirtball became so upset after striking out that he threw his bat and broke the collarbone of another Dolorino. A classmate, Jose Antonio Cubenas, angrily shoved the hothead to the ground. But the two boys kept in touch during college, as corruption in Cuba's government widened. When Dirtball, whose real name was Fidel Castro Ruz, began building a rebel army, Cubenas risked death to funnel him money.
By creating a complex portrait of Castro's prep-school classmates, said Richard Eder in The Boston Globe, journalist Patrick Symmes has produced a 'œvividly original' portrait of Cuba's past and present. Most of Castro's ex-schoolmates, including a quickly disillusioned Cubenas, fled their homeland after Castro took power, and many of them still meet each year in Miami for a school reunion. Whether infiltrating this elite pocket of the exile community or slumming in Havana, Symmes 'œdigs like a reporter and writes like a novelist,' said William Grimes in The New York Times. One question frequently asked by the Jesuits of Dolores resonates throughout the book. On hikes into the mountains where Castro's guerrilla forces would later gather, the students were told that the armies of Christ and Satan both would seek their services. Which one would they choose?
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