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The Cap d'Antibes, where Matthews was
spending the winter and spring of 1967-
68, was one of the most seductively attractive
places on earth, a mecca for movie stars and the
wealthy who loved to lounge there under gentle
breezes and the admiring eyes of others. By the time
Matthews got there however, he was almost sixty-eight,
painfully thin and frail looking, with sullen,
suspicious eyes. He spent much of his time indoors,
out of the off-season sun, sorting through his voluminous
files. He was a meticulous and obsessive
note-taker who had long before—in the days before
tape recorders—adopted the practice of debriefing
himself after every interview, pouring out untold
thousands of words that he organized by themes and
later worked into articles, editorials and books. He
typed his own notes, but preferred to write his manuscripts
by hand, on legal-sized yellow pads, page
after densely packed page. When he was done, he
handed the pages to Nancie, whose responsibility it
had long been to laboriously type out the manuscript,
freeing up Matthews to do more writing.
After he had been at the Castro biography for a
short time, he came across something that must
have stopped him cold. To anyone else it would have
seemed of minor importance, merely a scrap of
white, lined paper bearing nothing but a signature,
albeit one some collector might have paid some money for. But for Matthews it was far more than a
collector's item, for it was a signature that he had
brought back from the dead, and it represented the
unique and unpredictable forces that had raised him
to undreamt of heights and then nearly buried him.
In a folder of old photographs from Cuba that
Matthews hadn't looked through for years, he found
the curiously rigid signature of Fidel Castro Ruz. He
couldn't remember the last time he had seen
Castro's autograph, but he did
remember the first time as
though it had been tattooed
on the back of his faded
brown eyes. Over a lifetime
of memories, nothing stood
above the three hours he
had spent in the fierce
Sierra Maestra of southeastern
Cuba while a
young Castro whispered
into his war-weary ears
his hopes and dreams
for a Cuba that, it
turned out, would
never come to be.
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HARDCOVERISBN 978-1-58648-332-6 Pub date: 04/24/06 Price: $26.95/36.95 Canada 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 320 pages 8 pp b/w photos Carton Quantity: 24 Biography, History, Journalism, Latin Am. Studies Selling Territory: W Rights:
PAPERBACK
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