En el suplemento de libros del NYTimes, una reseña de The Boys From Dolores de Patrick Symmes firmada por Guy Martin:

The key is that the author understands the cultural and political role of the school whose story he tells. The colegio stood rigorously in the colonial tradition of educating the young men who would rule the country. Inevitably, as in the case of the Castro boys, these were gallegos — which, literally translated, meant those of Galician, or Spanish, descent, but which was also used to refer to any “white” Cuban, as opposed to those with milliliters of black blood. From North and South Africa to India to China, private military secondary schools were (and occasionally still are) bastions of their respective colonial societies: French and Belgian schools in Algiers, Tunis and Kinshasa; English schools in Cape Town and Johannesburg, Bombay and Hong Kong. Not at all surprisingly, the defiantly agrarian, slave-based American South supported an abundance of such high schools until the late 20th century. And the colleges remain: the Citadel, as well as the Virginia Military Institute, where Stonewall Jackson’s favorite war horse, Little Sorrel — lovingly skinned and stuffed in 1886 — is on display to this day.
All these schools taught, and were governed by, the concepts of duty, noblesse oblige and maintenance of social, political and economic primacy. Inside their walls, meanwhile, the cadets were ruled by adolescent high jinks, rivalries and tests of will and face — in other words, the classic Orwell/Waugh/Hogwarts social brew in which pranks could turn deadly and the death of reputation was considered worse than the real thing. Here, in “The Boys From Dolores,” is the striving, blustery 12-year-old Fidel, writing to Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 for “a 10 dollars bill green american.” Here is Fidel openly admiring Mussolini and calling the Nazi invasion of Poland “our first victory.”