King Of Cuba

A Fidel Castro-like octogenarian Cuban exile obsessively seeks revenge against the dictator.

"Fascinating...A richly detailed portrait." -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Known in his day as the King of Sugar, Julio Lobo was the wealthiest man in prerevolutionary Cuba. He had a life fit for Hollywood: he barely survived both a gangland shooting and a firing squad, and courted movie stars such as Joan Fontaine and Bette Davis. Only when he declined Che Guevara's personal offer to become Minister of Sugar in the Communist regime did Lobo's decades-long reign in Cuba come to a dramatic end. Drawing on stories from the author's own family history and other tales of the island's lost haute bourgeoisie, The Sugar King of Havana is a rare portrait of Cuba's glittering past—and a hopeful window into its future.

Havana, New Year’s Eve 1957, a terrorist bomb rips through the Tropicana nightclub. King Bongo, a rogue Cuban-American, tortured by a mysterious past and possessed of a mythic musical talent, goes on the hunt for the culprits, and for his sister, Cuba’s most exotic showgirl, who disappeared in the explosion. Navigating Havana’s maze of Colonial backstreets, red-light districts, swank country clubs, and opulent casinos, Bongo encounters an outrageous cast of characters—American hit men, decadent movie stars, prophetic shoeshine boys, and a beautiful American socialite. At the center of the mystery is a sinister secret police operative with whom Bongo is destined to have a lethal showdown.

Lolcats. Salsa dancing. Unrequited love. Tom Crosshill's smart and witty debut teen novel treads a colorful coming-of-age journey from New York City to Havana that will appeal to fans of books by Matthew Quick and Junot Díaz. When Rick Gutiérrez—known as "That Cat Guy" at school—gets dumped on his sixteenth birthday for uploading cat videos from his bedroom instead of experiencing the real world, he realizes it's time for a change. So Rick joins a salsa class . . . because of a girl, of course. Ana Cabrera is smart, friendly, and smooth on the dance floor. He might be half Cuban, but Rick dances like a drunk hippo. Desperate to impress Ana, he invites her to spend the summer in Havana. The official reason: learning to dance. The hidden agenda: romance under the palm trees. Except Cuba isn't all sun, salsa, and music. As Rick and Ana meet his family and investigate the reason why his mother left Cuba decades ago, they learn that politics isn't just something that happens to other people. And when they find romance, it's got sharp edges.

“Joan Mellen tells a brilliantly researched, meticulously supported, and compulsively readable tale that everyone concerned with how America operates should know.” —Samuel R. Delany, author of Dhalgren and Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders This completely revised and newly updated edition of The Great Game in Cuba uses the backdrop of the Cuban Revolution to examine the CIA’s inner workings during the fifties and sixties. Detailing the agency’s lies and deceits, Mellen paints a vivid behind-the-scenes picture of the CIA in Cuba after the Castro revolution: what it wanted and the lengths it was willing to go to paralyze the opposition to Fidel Castro. The game begins with Robert J. Kleberg, Jr., proprietor of the legendary King Ranch, one of the largest ranches in the world. Kleberg’s messianic ambitions bring him to Cuba, where he establishes a satellite ranch managed by his right-hand man, the James Bond–type character Michael J. P. Malone, who secretly reported to both the FBI and to at least five CIA handlers. From there, the plot thickens as an array of Cubans share never-before-revealed information regarding the agency’s activities in Cuba and its attempts to unseat Castro and install a CIA-friendly figurehead in his place. The mysterious disappearance of Camilo Cienfuegos, a major figure in Castro’s government, is told here for the first time. The agency’s shady dealings with a major US publication are uncovered. A testament to the sheer volume of previously classified and untold information, The Great Game in Cuba is a story the world needs to hear.

Citizen Engagement in Cuba: Neighbors and the State in Pogolotti examines citizen engagement at the local level in Cuba through projects initiated by the community since the 1990s. The nature of citizen participation in Cuba is not clearly understood by many in the United States, where the communist government is conflated with the Soviet states of Eastern Europe as a totalitarian regime in which the people of Cuba are helpless to confront, and punished when they do. The reality in Cuba is much more nuanced. This book discusses this reality through a focus on Pogolotti, reflecting on its history as the first low-cost housing community in Cuba in 1910. This community is but one example of a neighborhood where projects represent active participation by citizens. The willingness of communist authorities to work with officially sanctioned workshops and partner with civic groups indicates a level of citizen participation that has not been studied fully and provides an understanding of the relationship between citizens and the state in Cuba.