This is a welcome and important book at a time when the question of the ethical dimension of politics – both the politics of those in power and the political struggles of those resisting neoliberal domination – is of acute relevance and human significance. Jayatilleka's provocative central argument is that the moral dimension of Fidel Castro's political thought and practice has been at the core of his and Cuba's astounding military, political and social-cultural success against the odds. Jayatilleka contends that Castro thereby overcomes the theoretical impasse in radical thought in relation to ethics and violent political struggle as exemplified in the polemic between Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. In his insistence on the morally correct use of violence, Castro breaks the mould of all radical and revolutionary thought and practice to forge a ‘unique synthesis’ (p. 159) between the realist and idealist/romantic political traditions (p. 194). Castro also overcomes the dichotomy between absolute non-violence and the unrestrained use of violence for political ends and, so Jayatilleka argues, provides a model for a ‘leftist political ethos’ and a military-political ethics for both states and anti-state organisations (p. 115).

The argument is clearly developed in four parts divided into seven chapters. Part I introduces the ethics of violence in relation to political power and struggle, highlighting the relative paucity of ethical-theoretical resources for radical politics and movements for change. Neither ‘Just War Theory’ nor Marxism has provided adequate moral resources for guiding radical and revolutionary movements. As Jayatilleka points out, ‘Unfortunately, within the radical and Marxian tradition in which Castro must be situated, there is for the most part a silence concerning the correct use of violence’ (p. 19). Lenin is shown to have placed merely strategic and not ethical constraints on the use of violence, while Mao is held to have lacked an ethics of violence despite having outlined regulations for the correct treatment of prisoners and for dealing with internal contradictions and rivalries in the revolutionary conjuncture. For Jayatilleka, Mao's ideas on the right and wrong use of violence were never a recurrent theme in his thought, and their credibility ‘was vitiated by Mao's resort to or permitting of precisely the categories of violence he deplored during the Cultural Revolution’ (p. 15). Later radical/Marxist theorists like Sartre, Sorel and Fanon addressed the theme of violence, applauding its liberating aspects but never stipulating moral restraints on its use. Theirs was ultimately an ethics of ends divorced from means, and they had ‘no dialectical understanding of the violence of the oppressed, encompassing its contradictory aspects, both liberating and dehumanising’ (p. 26). Jayatilleka then makes the provocative but well-supported argument that the failure of socialist revolutionary projects across the globe had as one of its root causes the absence of an ethics of violence, which led to internecine rivalry and the subsequent implosion and discrediting of socialism as a cause and project.

Part II impressively documents the moral dimension of Castro's political thought, demonstrating its authentic nature through the use of hostile sources and Castro's own speeches and writings in contexts that prove his ideas were genuinely held and not mere histrionic adornments for strategic use. The consistency of ethical themes in these sources stands out and certainly buttresses Jayatilleka's contention that morality was central to Castro's thought and practice. Part III analyses the form and content of Castro's moral-political thought, helpfully condensing Castro's moral arguments and positions in relation to the use of violence, foreign policy, and the wider moral-political issues of the nature of the revolution and its particular embodiment of socialism. In Jayatilleka's view, Cuba has not gone the way of the USSR or Eastern Europe ‘primarily because it rests on a far stronger foundation of moral legitimacy’ (p. 150), which is an argument with arguably important philosophical implications for political theory and practice. Finally, Part IV demonstrates in detail the way Castro resolves through synthesis the contradictions in radical political thought in relation to violence and social change. It is an intriguing and powerful argument that points to the contemporary relevance of Castro or Fidelismo.

In general terms this book makes a convincing case for the necessity and efficacy of a strong and genuine moral dimension to politics that is capable of transcending radically divergent ideological positions. As such it implicitly makes a profound philosophical argument about morality that is distinct from classical Marxism, liberalism and some forms of post-modernism: morality is not reducible to economic or class interests and is not ahistorical or detached from desire and substantive conceptions of the good; nor is it merely relative to cultural formations or radically separate from politics.

Unfortunately, the book's ‘top-down’ focus on the morality of Castro means it leaves out important philosophical questions about the ethics of social change and political struggle from below. Although the emphasis in the title is on Castro's ethics of violence, the third chapter is titled ‘Evolution of Castro's Ethics of Liberation’, which led me to expect an exploration of the wider social and political dimensions of Castro's thought and practice. A closer examination of these other moral dimensions of Castro's political thought besides the military aspect was lacking, however, perhaps because they were not prominent in Castro's moral thinking, which it seems tended to centre on the single dimension of violence and military practice. Indeed, this suggests that Castro's contemporary relevance to the complex ethical-political issues of violence, power, resistance and revolution is not as great as the author suggests. There are also serious questions about the kind of moral agency permitted by Castro and his tightly controlled state, and these raise important issues about the moral legitimacy of the Cuban project irrespective of its superiority relative to other political-economic systems.

One of the most important moral-political philosophers of the last 30 years, Alasdair MacIntyre, has powerfully critiqued the philosophical cogency of the ethical dimensions of modern state-centred politics and Marxism as well as the latter's claim to a morally distinctive standpoint. For MacIntyre, ‘large-scale politics has become barren. Attempts to reform the political systems of modernity from within are always transformed into collaborations with them. Attempts to overthrow them always degenerate into terrorism or quasi terrorism’ (‘An Interview with Giovanna Borradori’, in K. Knight (ed.), The MacIntyre Reader (1998), p. 265). I would suggest, however, that Jayatilleka provides strong evidence against this in the case of Cuba, and at the level of theory he implicitly posits Fidelismo as the kind of ethical-political-social theory/tradition that MacIntyre sees as the necessary intellectual framework for rational moral-political inquiry – for example, in his Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990). In my view Jayatilleka makes a strong case that Fidel Castro's moral-political thought not only constitutes an important theoretical contribution to political philosophy but is itself also a moral-political tradition partly born of concrete political-social practice. This tradition takes ethics out of the liberal domain of ahistorical morality and the problematic modern fragmentation and incommensurability of moral discourse diagnosed by MacIntyre, embodying not just a rival theory but also a rival mode of socio-political-military practice through which moral criteria regain rational purchase and can once again play a role in guiding social-political relations and the search for social justice.