Rachel Kushner has written an astonishingly wise, ambitious, and
riveting novel set in the American community in Cuba during the
years leading up to Castro's revolution -- a place that was a
paradise for a time and for a few. The first novel to tell the
story of the Americans who were driven out in 1958, this is a
masterful debut.
Young Everly Lederer and K. C. Stites come of age in Oriente
Province, where the Americans tend their own fiefdom -- three
hundred thousand acres of United Fruit Company sugarcane that
surround their gated enclave. If the rural tropics are a child's
dreamworld, Everly and K.C. nevertheless have keen eyes for the
indulgences and betrayals of the grown-ups around them -- the
mordant drinking and illicit loves, the race hierarchies and
violence.
In Havana, a thousand kilometers and a world away from the
American colony, a cabaret dancer meets a French agitator named
Christian de La Maziere, whose seductive demeanor can't mask his
shameful past. Together they become enmeshed in the brewing
political underground. When Fidel and Raul Castro lead a revolt
from the mountains above the cane plantation, torching the sugar
and kidnapping a boat full of "yanqui" revelers, K.C. and Everly
begin to discover the brutality that keeps the colony humming.
Though their parents remain blissfully untouched by the forces of
history, the children hear the whispers of what is to come.
At the time, urgent news was conveyed by telex. Kushner's first
novel is a tour de force, haunting and compelling, with the urgency
of a telex from a forgotten time and place.
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