A landmark archival project preserving the legacy of Cuban revolutionary history has been made available to global audiences this week, as the Fidel Castro Center launches a fully annotated digital edition of *Selected Works of Fidel Castro Ruz* that can be downloaded by the public completely free of charge.
Spanning an extraordinary 76 years of the Cuban leader’s public life, from 1940 to 2016, the collection comprises 23 comprehensive volumes that gather together every form of Fidel Castro’s public output: from landmark speeches and parliamentary interventions to intimate public letters, broadcast interviews, official messages, published articles, and transcripts of key public appearances. Carefully curated for academic accessibility and historical accuracy, the edition includes a preface written by Raúl Castro Ruz, former Cuban leader and brother of Fidel Castro, and every text included carries detailed scholarly annotations to contextualize its contents.
Each volume is structured to support deeper understanding of the historical period it covers, with an introductory essay outlining the key political and social events of the era, plus comprehensive analytical, name, and geographic indexes to help researchers navigate the material. A separate supplementary booklet adds consolidated general indexes and a subject guide for the entire collection, creating a structured resource for anyone studying Cuban history and revolutionary thought. The footnotes included throughout the work clarify references to key people, locations, political institutions, and historical events that may not be familiar to contemporary readers.
Of particular historical interest is the 23rd and final volume, which devotes extensive space to primary documents chronicling the close personal and political friendship between Fidel Castro and former Venezuelan Bolivarian leader Hugo Chávez. The materials included in this section stand as a permanent archival record of the deep fraternal political and national ties that bound the Cuban and Venezuelan movements together.
The Fidel Castro Center, a leading Cuban academic institution focused on preserving and studying the legacy of the Cuban revolution, confirmed the release of the digital collection in an official announcement, noting that the project is designed to make an essential primary source on 20th and 21st century Cuban history available to all people, rather than restricting access to specialized academic archives. The complete collection is currently hosted for public download via an open-access Google Drive folder, allowing anyone from independent researchers to casual readers to access the full 23 volumes without cost or access barriers.