Give Me Liberty: The True Story of Oswaldo Payá and his Daring Quest for a Free Cuba

"Pulitzer winner Hoffman delivers an engrossing history of modern Cuba focused on democratic activist Oswaldo Payá...Born in 1952 and raised Catholic, Payá refused to join the Communist Youth League, which would have required renouncing his faith...He went on to found the movimiento democracy movement and, in 1996, launched the Varela Project, a door-to-door campaign to collect signatures for 'a citizen initiative demanding free speech, a free press, freedom of association,' and other reforms...Despite constant surveillance and harassment, Payá gathered more than 11,000 signatures, but Castro dismissed the campaign as a U.S.-backed conspiracy to overthrow his government...In 2012, Payá died in a car accident that his relatives believe was engineered by the government...Though slow-moving at times, this is an intriguing and often inspiring look at the courage of one man's convictions."

"Hoffman delivers a moving, deeply researched and long-overdue biography of the man who launched the Varela Project, a citizen initiative that challenged Fidel Castro's rule by petitioning for democracy...The initiative was prompted by what Payá called a 'crack in the wall' of tyranny...Hoffman details the ways in which Payá used the initiative to demand 'free speech, a free press, freedom of association, freedom of belief, private enterprise, free elections, and freedom for political prisoners'...Hoffman skillfully leads us through Payá's narrative, as if 'Give Me Liberty' were a historical thriller...The tragedy at the center, of course, is that it's a true story, not only of one man's 'journey into the whirlwind of dictatorship' but also of a country and its suffocating struggle for freedom...As Hoffman observes, 'an important legacy of Oswaldo's quest was that gradually, painstakingly, despite all the obstacles and hardships, Cubans began to lose their fear and raise their voice against despotism.'"

"'Oswaldo Payá was born ten days before Fulgencio Batista seized power in Cuba on March 10, 1952, establishing a brutish autocracy,' writes Hoffman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post reporter...When Fidel Castro came to power, Payá's family, like so many middle-class people of the day, cheered Castro on only to see their freedoms whittled away...The author offers a well-structured overview of predecessor generations who resisted Spanish colonial rule and then American occupation, committed to a democratic country governed on its own terms...Enter Payá again, who courted trouble as a teenager protesting the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia...'Oswaldo Payá was no hippie,' writes Hoffman, 'but in his own mind he was a rebellious outsider'...In time, he blossomed as both an engineer responsible for important technological advances in medical equipment and as a dissident, the author of a popular petition that issued demands for civil liberties to the Castro regime...Payá died in a mysterious car wreck soon after, in 2012...However, as Hoffman notes, his legacy lives on in the form of a new generation of homegrown opponents to Cuba's totalitarian regime...A welcome study of political resistance by figures unknown to most readers outside Cuba."