A diplomat for the government of the United Kingdom, Coltman had been appointed to the position of British ambassador to Cuba from 1991 through to 1994, during which time he got to know Castro personally.

The book is accompanied by anecdotes about Castro and his relationship with other politicians, supplied by Coltman from his years in the diplomatic service.

"From [Coltman's account], Castro emerges more as a liberal utopian of the 19th century than a 20th-century totalitarian, a Garibaldi more than a Joseph Stalin.

He remains a figure from all our yesterdays, grey-bearded but eternally youthful, a man who effortlessly changed his slogan from "Socialism or death", suitable for the violent 20th century, to the more emollient "A better world is possible", appropriate for the more pacifistic revolutionaries of the present era."

In a review published in the British magazine New Statesman, the journalist and historian Richard Gott noted that Coltman "has a good eye for detail and the telling anecdote" but at the same time, Gott felt that he "devotes rather too much space to Castro's early life, galloping though the 1990s about which his personal experience and insights might have been better deployed at greater length."