In the Pirates Den—My Life as a Secret Agent for Castro

In 1964, Jorge Masetti was informed by a colonel in Cuban intelligence that his father, a close friend of Che Guevara's, had died gloriously while leading a guerrilla band in Argentina. Jorge was then seven years old. His father would become the ghost in his future, demanding that he prove himself worthy of his revolutionary heritage. By the age of sixteen, Masetti had left Havana to follow in his father's footsteps, fighting as an urban insurrectionist in Buenos Aires. Two years later, he was back in Cuba for a course in "conspiratorial methods" that taught him how to work in Havana's growing international underground. Then he joined the notorious Americas Department, entering "the pirate's den" where he worked as a secret agent for Fidel Castro for the next twenty years.
Things suddenly changed in 1989 when Masetti returned from a mission in Africa to find that Castro's secret police had arrested the de la Guardia brothers along with General Arnaldo Ochoa, Cuba's most famous and respected soldier, all of whom were thought to be fostering a Cuban perestroika. Masetti describes the Kafkaesque workings of the tribunal that resulted in the execution of his father-in-law and General Ochoa, and ultimately allowed him to see the brutal reality of the revolutionary movement to which he had devoted half a lifetime.