Castro felt so uncomfortable in public that he had to consciously wind himself up into a lather of indignation. Some observers felt that his legendary loquacity—he often spoke for five or six hours at a stretch—was connected to his shyness. “Fatigued by talking, he rests by talking,” the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez would later observe of Fidel. “When he starts speaking, his voice is always hard to hear and his course is uncertain, but he takes advantage of anything to gain ground, little by little, until he takes possession of his audience.” Having made the huge mental effort to
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