This short novel, already a modern classic, is the superbly told, tragic story of a Cuban fisherman in the Gulf Stream and the giant Marlin he kills and loses—specifically referred to in the citation accompanying the author's Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.

The Old Man and the Sea

Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause

Graham Greene's classic Cuban spy story, now with a new package and a new introduction

 First published in 1959, "Our Man in Havana" is an espionage thriller, a penetrating character study, and a political satire that still resonates to this day. Conceived as one of Graham Greene's 'entertainments,' it tells of MI6's man in Havana, Wormold, a former vacuum-cleaner salesman turned reluctant secret agent out of economic necessity. To keep his job, he files bogus reports based on Lamb's "Tales from Shakespeare" and dreams up military installations from vacuum-cleaner designs. Then his stories start coming disturbingly true.

Our Man in Havana

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 dream-world, Everly and K.C. nevertheless have keen eyes for the indulgences and betrayals of 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 Mazire, 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. If their parents manage to remain blissfully untouched by the forces of history, the children hear the whispers of what is to come.

At the time, the 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.

Telex from Cuba

In modern-day Havana, the remnants of the glamorous past are everywhere—old hotel-casinos, vintage American cars &amp; flickering neon signs speak of a bygone era that is widely familiar &amp; often romanticized, but little understood. In "Havana Nocturne", T.J. English offers a multifaceted true tale of organized crime, political corruption, roaring nightlife, revolution &amp; international conflict that interweaves the dual stories of the Mob in Havana &amp; the event that would overshadow it, the Cuban Revolution.

As the Cuban people labored under a violently repressive regime throughout the 50s, Mob leaders Meyer Lansky &amp; Charles "Lucky" Luciano turned their eye to Havana. To them, Cuba was the ultimate dream, the greatest hope for the future of the US Mob in the post-Prohibition years of intensified government crackdowns. But when it came time to make their move, it was Lansky, the brilliant Jewish mobster, who reigned supreme. Having cultivated strong ties with the Cuban government &amp; in particular the brutal dictator Fulgencio Batista, Lansky brought key mobsters to Havana to put his ambitious business plans in motion. 

Before long, the Mob, with Batista's corrupt government in its pocket, owned the biggest luxury hotels &amp; casinos in Havana, launching an unprecedented tourism boom complete with the most lavish entertainment, the world's biggest celebrities, the most beautiful women &amp; gambling galore. But their dreams collided with those of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara &amp; others who would lead the country's disenfranchised to overthrow their corrupt government &amp; its foreign partners—an epic cultural battle that English captures in all its sexy, decadent, ugly glory. 

Bringing together long-buried historical information with English's own research in Havana—including interviews with the era's key survivors—"Havana Nocturne" takes readers back to Cuba in the years when it was a veritable devil's playground for mob leaders. English deftly weaves together the parallel stories of the Havana Mob—featuring notorious criminals such as Santo Trafficante Jr &amp; Albert Anastasia—&amp; Castro's 26th of July Movement in a riveting, up-close look at how the Mob nearly attained its biggest dream in Havana—&amp; how Fidel Castro trumped it all with the revolution.

Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba & Then Lost it to the Revolution

Here is the dreamy and bittersweet story of a family divided by politics and geography by the Cuban revolution. It is the family story of Celia del Pino, and her husband, daughter and grandchildren, from the mid-1930s to 1980. Celia's story mirrors the magical realism of Cuba itself, a country of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. DREAMING IN CUBAN presents a unique vision and a haunting lamentation for a past that might have been.

Dreaming in Cuban

In 1962, at the age of eleven, Carlos Eire was one of 14,000 children airlifted out of Cuba, his parents left behind. His life until then is the subject of "Waiting for Snow in Havana," a wry, heartbreaking, intoxicatingly beautiful memoir of growing up in a privileged Havana household -- and of being exiled from his own childhood by the Cuban revolution.

That childhood, until his world changes, is as joyous and troubled as any other -- but with exotic differences. Lizards roam the house and grounds. Fights aren't waged with snowballs but with breadfruit. The rich are outlandishly rich, like the eight-year-old son of a sugar baron who has a real miniature race car, or the neighbor with a private animal garden, complete with tiger. All this is bathed in sunlight and shades of turquoise and tangerine: the island of Cuba, says one of the stern monks at Carlos's school, might have been the original Paradise -- and it is tempting to believe.

His father is a municipal judge and an obsessive collector of art and antiques, convinced that in a past life he was Louis XVI and that his wife was Marie Antoinette. His mother looks to the future; conceived on a transatlantic liner bound for Cuba from Spain, she wants her children to be modern, which means embracing all things American. His older brother electrocutes lizards. Surrounded by eccentrics, in a home crammed with portraits of Jesus that speak to him in dreams and nightmares, Carlos searches for secret proofs of the existence of God.

Then, in January 1959, President Batista is suddenly gone, a cigar-smoking guerrilla named Castro has taken his place, and Christmas is canceled. The echo of firingsquads is everywhere. At the Aquarium of the Revolution, sharks multiply in a swimming pool. And one by one, the author's schoolmates begin to disappear -- spirited away to the United States. Carlos will end up there himself, alone, never to see his father again.

Narrated with the urgency of a confession, "Waiting for Snow in Havana" is both an exorcism and an ode to a paradise lost. More than that, it captures the terrible beauty of those times in our lives when we are certain we have died -- and then are somehow, miraculously, reborn.

Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy

"Acclaimed around the world and a national best-seller, this is the definitive work on Che Guevara, the dashing rebel whose epic dream was to end poverty and injustice in Latin America and the developing world through armed revelation. Jon Lee Anderson's biography traces Che's extraordinary life, from his comfortable Argentine upbringing to the battlefields of the Cuban revolution, from the halls of power in Castro's government to his failed campaign in the Congo and assassination in the Bolivian Jungle.

Anderson has had unprecedented access to the personal archives maintained by Guevara's window and carefully guarded Cuban government documents. He has conducted extensive interviews with Che's comarades-some of whom speak here for the first time-and with CIA men and Bolivian officers who hunted him down. Anderson broke the story of where Guevara's body was buried, which led to the exhumation and stat burial of the bones. Many of the details of Che's life have long been cloaked in secrecy and intrigue. Meticulously researched and full of exclusive information, Che Guevara illuminates as never before this mythic figure who embodied the high-water mark of revolutionary communism as a force in history."

Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life

Before Grand Master Elmore Leonard earned his well-deserved reputation as “the best writer of crime fiction alive” ("Newsweek"), he penned some of the finest western fiction to ever appear in print. (The classics "Hombre", "Valdez is Coming", and "3:10 to Yuma" were just a few of his notable works.) With his extraordinary "Cuba Libre", Leonard ingeniously combines all of his many talents and delivers a historical adventure/caper/western/noir like none other. The creator of U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, star of "Raylan", "Pronto", "Riding the Rap", and TV’s "Justified", spins a gloriously exciting yarn about an American horse wrangler who escapes a date with a Cuban firing squad to join forces with a powerful sugar baron’s lady looking to make waves and score big in and around Spanish-American War-torn Havana in 1898. Everything you love about Leonard’s fiction—and more—is evident in "Cuba Libre".

Cuba Libre

Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas describes his poverty-stricken childhood in rural, his adolescence as a rebel fighting for Fidel Castro, and his life in revolutionary Cuba as a homosexual. Very quickly the Castro government suppressed his writing and persecuted him for his homosexuality until he was finally imprisoned.

Before Night Falls

It's 1949. Two young Cuban musicians make their way up from Havana to the grand stage of New York. It is the era of the mambo, and Castillo brothers, workers by day, become by night stars of the dance halls, where their orchestra plays the lush, sensuous, pulsing music that earns them the title of Mambo Kings. This is their moment of youth—a golden time that thirty years later will be remembered with nostalgia and deep affection. In "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love", Oscar Hijuelos has created a rich and enthralling novel about passion and loss and memory and desire.

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

Change looms in Havana, Cuba's capital, a city electric with uncertainty yet cloaked in cliché, 90 miles from U.S. shores and off-limits to most Americans. Journalist Julia Cooke, who lived there at intervals over a period of five years, discovered a dynamic scene: baby-faced anarchists with Mohawks gelled with laundry soap, whiskey-drinking children of the elite, Santería trainees, pregnant prostitutes, university graduates planning to leave for the first country that will give them a visa. 

This last generation of Cubans raised under Fidel Castro animate life in a waning era of political stagnation as the rest of the world beckons: waiting out storms at rummy hurricane parties and attending raucous drag cabarets, planning ascendant music careers and black-market business ventures, trying to reconcile the undefined future with the urgent today.

Eye-opening and politically prescient, "The Other Side of Paradise" offers a deep new understanding of a place that has so confounded and intrigued us.

The Other Side of Paradise: Life in the New Cuba

Cabrera Infante's masterpiece, Three Trapped Tigers is one of the most playful books to reach the U.S. from Cuba. Filled with puns, wordplay, lists upon lists, and Sternean typography--such as the section entitled "Some Revelations," which consists of several blank pages--this novel has been praised as a more modern, sexier, funnier, Cuban Ulysses. Centering on the recollections of a man separated from both his country and his youth, Cabrera Infante creates an enchanting vision of life and the many colorful characters found in steamy Havana's pre-Castro cabaret society.

Three Trapped Tigers

This new look at the history of Cuba illuminates the island’s entire revolutionary past as well as the most recent decades of the Castro regime

 Events in Fidel Castro’s island nation often command international attention and just as often inspire controversy. Impassioned debate over situations as diverse as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Elián Gonzáles affair is characteristic not only of modern times but of centuries of Cuban history. In this concise and up-to-date book, British journalist Richard Gott casts a fresh eye on the history of the Caribbean island from its pre-Columbian origins to the present day. He provides a European perspective on a country that is perhaps too frequently seen solely from the American point of view.

 The author emphasizes such little-known aspects of Cuba’s history as its tradition of racism and violence, its black rebellions, the survival of its Indian peoples, and the lasting influence of Spain. The book also offers an original look at aspects of the Revolution, including Castro’s relationship with the Soviet Union, military exploits in Africa, and his attempts to promote revolution in Latin America and among American blacks. In a concluding section, Gott tells the extraordinary story of the Revolution’s survival in the post-Soviet years.

Cuba: A New History

Based on over 100 hours of interviews with Fidel Castro conducted over three years, Fidel Castro: My Life is as close to a memoir as we will ever get from the Cuban leader. Here Castro speaks with raw frankness about the events of his extraordinary life and the legacy he hopes to leave behind.

My Life: A Spoken Autobiography

The body, at least what was left of it, was drifting in Havana Bay the morning Arkady arrived from Moscow. Only the day before, he had received an urgent message from the Russian embassy in Havana that his friend Pribluda was missing and asking that he come.The Cubans insisted that this corpse floating in an inner tube was Pribluda, but Arkady wasn't so sure."You don't investigate assault, you don't investigate murder. Just what do you investigate?" Arkady asks Ofelia Osorio, a detective in the Policia Nacional de la Revolucion. "Or is it simply open season on Russians in Havana?"The comrades of the Cold War have parted bitterly, and the Russians who used to swarm through Havana's streets are now as rare as they are despised, much more so than Americans.Havana is overrun with color, music, and suspicion. The Revolution's heroes have outlived idealism. The Com-munist world has shrunk to Cuba. Paradise has become a stop on sex tours. It is a city of empty stores and talking drums, Karl Marx and sharp machetes, where an American radical rides around in Hemingway's car to tout island investments and a Wall Street developer on the run from the FBI flies a pirate flag."A dead Russian, a live Russian," Ofelia says. "What's the difference?" But the dead Russian is followed by the murders of a Cuban boxer and a prostitute. Although none of them is supposed to be investigated, Arkady cannot be stopped. He speaks no Spanish, knows nothing about Cuba, and, as a Russian, is a pariah. However, there is something about this faded, lovely, dangerous city--the rhythms of waves against the seawall, the insinuation of music always in the air, and, finally, Ofelia herself--that plunges Arkady back into life."What ultimately sets the Renko books apart is the careful writing, and, more important, the knowledge of the human heart that is carried through it, through them, first to last."–"Chicago Tribune"

Havana Bay (Arkady Renko, #4)

A young transvestite in a beautiful red dress is found strangled in a Havana park. Conde’s investigation into a violent murder exposes a stifling, corrupt society, a Cuban reality where nothing is what it seems. A dark and fascinating world of men and women born in the revolution who live without dreaming of exile and seek their identity in the midst of disaster.

Havana Red

It is 1896. Cuba has fought three wars for independence and still is not free. People have been rounded up in reconcentration camps with too little food and too much illness. Rosa is a nurse, but she dares not go to the camps. So she turns hidden caves into hospitals for those who know how to find her.

Black, white, Cuban, Spanish—Rosa does her best for everyone. Yet who can heal a country so torn apart by war? Acclaimed poet Margarita Engle has created another breathtaking portrait of Cuba.

"The Surrender Tree" is a 2009 Newbery Honor Book, the winner of the 2009 Pura Belpre Medal for Narrative and the 2009 Bank Street - Claudia Lewis Award, and a 2009 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom

”Havana knew me by my shoes”, begins Tom Miller's lively and entertaining account of more than eight months traveling through Cuba, from coastal cities to mountain villages, from the Bay of Pigs to both sides of the fence at Guantánamo, mixing with its literati and black marketeers, its cane cutters and cigar rollers. Granted unprecedented access to travel throughout the country, the author presents us with a rare insight into one of the world's only Communist countries. Its best-known personalities and ordinary citizens talk to him about the U.S. embargo and tell their favorite Fidel jokes as they stand in line for bread at the Socialism or Death Bakery. Miller provides a running commentary on Cuba's food shortages, exotic sensuality, and baseball addiction as he follows the scents of Graham Greene, José Marti, Ernest Hemingway, and the Mambo Kings. The result of this informed and adventurous journey is a vibrant, rhythmic portrait of a land and people too long shielded from American eyes.

Trading With The Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro's Cuba

After the death of her beloved grandmother, a Cuban-American woman travels to Havana, where she discovers the roots of her identity--and unearths a family secret hidden since the revolution...

Havana, 1958. The daughter of a sugar baron, nineteen-year-old Elisa Perez is part of Cuba's high society, where she is largely sheltered from the country's growing political unrest--until she embarks on a clandestine affair with a passionate revolutionary...

Miami, 2017. Freelance writer Marisol Ferrera grew up hearing romantic stories of Cuba from her late grandmother Elisa, who was forced to flee with her family during the revolution. Elisa's last wish was for Marisol to scatter her ashes in the country of her birth. 

Arriving in Havana, Marisol comes face-to-face with the contrast of Cuba's tropical, timeless beauty and its perilous political climate. When more family history comes to light and Marisol finds herself attracted to a man with secrets of his own, she'll need the lessons of her grandmother's past to help her understand the true meaning of courage.

Next Year in Havana (The Cuba Saga, #1)

Mario Conde has retired from the police force and makes a living trading in antique books. Havana is now flooded with dollars, populated by pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, and other hunters of the night. In the book collection of a rich Cuban who fled after the fall of Batista, Conde discovers an article about Violeta del Rio, a beautiful bolero singer of the 1950s who disappeared mysteriously. A murder soon follows. This is a crime story set in today’s darker Cuba, but it is also an evocation of the Havana of Batista, the city of a hundred night clubs where the paths of Marlon Brando and Meyer Lansky crossed.

Havana Fever

This fine, somber novel, by the author of the widely acclaimed "The Lost Steps", deals with the French Revolution, chiefly in the Caribbean. Not an ordinary historical novel, but rather a poetic, highly informed essay, it forth, in rich prose, a host of memorable impressions -- of Revolutionary Paris, of Caribbean islands sweltering in the sunlight, and of the Revolutionary ideals which, transplanted to these islands, died in blood, sweat and a return to slavery and the old ways. Its chief protagonist is Victor Hugues, a historical figure, who is shown through the eyes of three fictional orphaned adolescents -- Carlos, Sofia, and their cousin Esteban, whom he dazzled at first meeting. Esteban follows Victor as he rises from baker's son and merchant to Revolutionary master of the Caribbean, but sickens eventually of bloodshed and of Victor's ruthless changing to fit shifting policies. Sofia, who loves Victor and joins him, is also finally sickened by the betrayal of Revolutionary ideals, and the changes power has made in Victor. Above its many modern political parallels, this story is powerful evocation of the mysterious evolution, decay and persistence of all human relations and ambitions. Splendidly written.

Explosion in a Cathedral

A revelatory account of life in one of the most restrictive, isolated and misunderstood places in the world.

Famed for its equality and good health, sunshine and beauty, many celebrate Cuba, one of the world’s five remaining Communist countries, for bravely holding out against the rampant capitalism of the West. But after six decades of socialist state control, the Cubans themselves now tell a different story.

Still the government decides what work you can do and where you live. Food is rationed, milk and eggs are often scarce and basic medicines unavailable. Buildings collapse and rubbish goes uncollected. Millions break the law every day to run small businesses or simply to get by. In the desperate 1990s, after Soviet support for Cuba’s economy disappeared, people resorted to making steaks from grapefruit rinds and hair dye from old batteries. Those who attempt to cross the ninety miles of ocean to Florida have at times been imprisoned, tortured and even killed. And yet even after the death of Fidel Castro in 2016, with no free press to report such crimes or galvanise opposition, the regime shows few signs of loosening its grip.

In this pioneering work of life-writing and reportage, Anthony DePalma reconstructs the interwoven stories of five ordinary citizens and their families – some whose loyalty to the system led to great personal reward but ultimately disillusionment, others turned against it by tragedy – to lay their complex reality bare. Through their extraordinary journeys, from Castro’s heyday, through the devastation of post-Soviet collapse, to the false dawn and retrenchment of recent years, we see how the revolution that once inspired its people has tested their faith, and we witness the daily acts of heroism and the endlessly adaptive resilience of a people determined to survive.

The Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times

A gripping novel about the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940

In "The Man Who Loved Dogs", Leonardo Padura brings a noir sensibility to one of the most fascinating and complex political narratives of the past hundred years: the assassination of Leon Trotsky by Ramón Mercader.

The story revolves around Iván Cárdenas Maturell, who in his youth was the great hope of modern Cuban literature—until he dared to write a story that was deemed counterrevolutionary. When we meet him years later in Havana, Iván is a loser: a humbled and defeated man with a quiet, unremarkable life who earns his modest living as a proofreader at a veterinary magazine. One afternoon, he meets a mysterious foreigner in the company of two Russian wolfhounds. This is "the man who loved dogs," and as the pair grow closer, Iván begins to understand that his new friend is hiding a terrible secret. 
Moving seamlessly between Iván's life in Cuba, Ramón's early years in Spain and France, and Trotsky's long years of exile, "The Man Who Loved Dogs "is Padura's most ambitious and brilliantly executed novel yet. This is a story about political ideals tested and characters broken, a multilayered epic that effortlessly weaves together three different plot threads— Trotsky in exile, Ramón in pursuit, Iván in frustrated stasis—to bring emotional truth to historical fact. 
A novel whose reach is matched only by its astonishing successes on the page, "The Man Who Loved" "Dogs "lays bare the human cost of abstract ideals and the insidious, corrosive effects of life under a repressive political regime.

The Man Who Loved Dogs

Maria Sirena tells stories. She does it for money—she was a favorite in the cigar factory where she worked as a "lettora"—and for love, spinning gossamer tales out of her own past for the benefit of friends, neighbors, and family. But now, like a modern-day Scheherazade, she will be asked to tell one last story so that eight women can keep both hope and themselves alive.
 
Cuba, 1963. Hurricane Flora, one of the deadliest hurricanes in recorded history, is bearing down on the island. Seven women have been forcibly evacuated from their homes and herded into the former governor’s mansion, where they are watched over by another woman, a young soldier of Castro’s new Cuba named Ofelia. Outside the storm is raging and the floodwaters are rising. In a single room on the top floor of the governor’s mansion, Maria Sirena begins to tell the incredible story of her childhood during Cuba’s Third War of Independence; of her father Augustin, a ferocious rebel; of her mother, Lulu, an astonishing woman who fought, loved, dreamed, and suffered as fiercely as her husband. Stories, however, have a way of taking on a life of their own, and transported by her story’s momentum, Maria Sirena will reveal more about herself than she or anyone ever expected.
 
Chantel Acevedo’s "The Distant Marvels" is an epic adventure tale, a family saga, a love story, a stunning historical account of armed struggle against oppressors, and a long tender plea for forgiveness. It is, finally, a life-affirming novel about the kind of love that lasts a lifetime and the very art of storytelling itself.

The Distant Marvels

Cuba is often perceived in starkly black and white terms—either as the site of one of Latin America’s most successful revolutions or as the bastion of the world’s last communist regime. "The Cuba Reader" multiplies perspectives on the nation many times over, presenting more than one hundred selections about Cuba’s history, culture, and politics. Beginning with the first written account of the island, penned by Christopher Columbus in 1492, the selections assembled here track Cuban history from the colonial period through the ascendancy of Fidel Castro to the present."The Cuba Reader" combines songs, paintings, photographs, poems, short stories, speeches, cartoons, government reports and proclamations, and pieces by historians, journalists, and others. Most of these are by Cubans, and many appear for the first time in English. The writings and speeches of José Martí, Fernando Ortiz, Fidel Castro, Alejo Carpentier, Che Guevera, and Reinaldo Arenas appear alongside the testimonies of slaves, prostitutes, doctors, travelers, and activists. Some selections examine health, education, Catholicism, and santería; others celebrate Cuba’s vibrant dance, music, film, and literary cultures. The pieces are grouped into chronological sections. Each section and individual selection is preceded by a brief introduction by the editors.

The volume presents a number of pieces about twentieth-century Cuba, including the events leading up to and following Castro’s January 1959 announcement of revolution. It provides a look at Cuba in relation to the rest of the world: the effect of its revolution on Latin America and the Caribbean, its alliance with the Soviet Union from the 1960s until the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, and its tumultuous relationship with the United States. "The Cuba Reader" also describes life in the "periodo especial" following the cutoff of Soviet aid and the tightening of the U.S. embargo.

For students, travelers, and all those who want to know more about the island nation just ninety miles south of Florida, "The Cuba Reader "is an invaluable introduction.

The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics

Nieve Guerra finds herself caught between the tides of her parents’ rocky relationship and a country in the midst of a revolution. Recording her daily thoughts and accounts of living with her abusive father, an alcoholic theater actor, Nieve uses her diary to express herself. From being sent away from her mother, her mother’s free-spirited and loving boyfriend, and her childhood city of Cienfuegos to being forced to call herself a Cuban “revolutionary Pioneer,” Nieve records in honest detail a life in which she loses those she loves the most—and can do nothing about it.

Through her diary entries, Nieve reveals the intimate details of a turbulent family life while painting an authentic portrait of the social and political unrest in Cuba under the rule of Castro.

Everyone Leaves

Lieutenant Mario Conde is suffering from a terrible New Year’s Eve hangover. Though it’s the middle of a weekend, he is asked to urgently investigate the mysterious disappearance of Rafael Morin, a high-level business manager in the Cuban nomenklatura. Conde remembered Morin from their student days: good-looking, brilliant, a “reliable comrade’’ who always got what he wanted, including Tamara, the girl Conde was after.

But Rafael Morin’s exemplary rise from a poor barrio and picture-perfect life hides more than one suspicious episode worthy of investigation. While pursuing the case in a decaying but adored Havana, Conde confronts his lost love for Tamara and the dreams and illusions of his generation.

Havana Blue

Guerrilla Warfare (Spanish: La Guerra de Guerrillas) is a military handbook written by Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. Published in 1961 following the Cuban Revolution, it became a reference for thousands of guerrilla fighters in various countries around the world.

Guerrilla Warfare

Award-winning author Mark Kurlansky presents an insider's view of Havana: the elegant, tattered city he has come to know over more than thirty years. Part cultural history, part travelogue, with recipes, historic engravings, photographs, and Kurlansky's own pen-and-ink drawings throughout, "Havana "celebrates the city's singular music, literature, baseball, and food; its five centuries of outstanding, neglected architecture; and its extraordinary blend of cultures.

Like all great cities, Havana has a rich history that informs the vibrant place it is today--from the native Taino to Columbus's landing, from Cuba's status as a U.S. protectorate to Batista's dictatorship and Castro's revolution, from Soviet presence to the welcoming of capitalist tourism. Havana is a place of extremes: a beautifully restored colonial city whose cobblestone streets pass through areas that have not been painted or repaired since the revolution.

Kurlansky shows Havana through the eyes of Cuban writers, such as Alejo Carpentier and José Martí, and foreigners, including Graham Greene and Hemingway. He introduces us to Cuban baseball and its highly opinionated fans; the city's music scene, alive with the rhythm of Son; its culinary legacy. Once the only country Americans couldn't visit, Cuba is now opening to us, as is Havana, not only by plane or boat but also through Mark Kurlansky's multilayered and electrifying portrait of the long-elusive city.

Havana: A Subtropical Delirium

This entertaining history of Cuba and its music begins with the collision of Spain and Africa and continues through the era of Miguelito Valdés, Arsenio Rodríguez, Benny Moré, and Pérez Prado. It offers a behind-the-scenes examination of music from a Cuban point of view, unearthing surprising, provocative connections and making the case that Cuba was fundamental to the evolution of music in the New World. The ways in which the music of black slaves transformed 16th-century Europe, how the "claves" appeared, and how Cuban music influenced ragtime, jazz, and rhythm and blues are revealed. Music lovers will follow this journey from Andalucía, the Congo, the Calabar, Dahomey, and Yorubaland via Cuba to Mexico, Puerto Rico, Saint-Domingue, New Orleans, New York, and Miami. The music is placed in a historical context that considers the complexities of the slave trade; Cuba's relationship to the United States; its revolutionary political traditions; the music of Santería, Palo, Abakuá, and Vodú; and much more.

Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo

Breathe is a collection that explores the heart of Fidel Castro-era Cuba; an outsider's look that is balanced by a weight of empathy to illuminate truths that lie couched between the island's propaganda and the Western media's portrayal. Characters from Europe and the USA in Swimming, Taxi and Sabbatical seem to want to hold on to the indulgences that their countries offer them, while praising Cubans for the more abstemious lives they lead and seeking to sample what the locals experience; in Siempre Luchando, I Never See Them Cry and The Party, romantic liaisons strengthen or buckle under the strain of the minute exploitations that result from the assumptions one makes about the other; the seedy sexual aggression of Luca's Trip to Havana is undercut by the subtle yet intense lust of Breathe; while Leaving Cuba, with its closing image of Havana's night sky, is as eloquently balanced a tale of the lives of everyday Cubans as you will read in a long while - whichever path one takes, something is lost. As Aida Bahr, winner of Cuba's Premio de la Critica Literaria says, "relying more on subtleties than on drama, [Segal] portrays the tensions and struggles, but also the joy and warmth, that fill Cubans' lives."

Breathe: Stories from Cuba


  Historian and travel writer Tony Perrottet chronicles the events of the Cuban Revolution and the figures at the center of the guerrilla uprising: Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and the scrappy band of rebel men and women who followed them.


Most people are familiar with the general timeline of the Cuban Revolution of 1956-1958: It was led by two of the 20th century's most iconic figures, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara; it successfully overthrew the island nation's US-backed dictator; and it quickly went awry under Castro's rule.

But less is commonly remembered about the amateur nature of the upstart movement, or the lives of its players. In this wildly entertaining and meticulously researched account, Tony Perrottet unravels the human drama behind history's most improbable revolution: a scruffy handful of self-taught revolutionaries--many of them kids just out of college, literature majors, art students and young lawyers, and including a number of women--defeated 40,000 professional soldiers to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. "Cuba Libre"'s deep dive into the revolution reveals fascinating details: How did Fidel's highly organized lover Celia S�nchez whip the male guerrillas into shape? Who were the two dozen American volunteers who joined the Cuban rebels? How do you make lethal land mines from condensed milk cans -- or, for that matter, cook chorizo � la guerrilla (sausage guerrilla-style)?

"Cuba Libre" is an entertaining look back at a liberation movement that captured the imagination of the world with its spectacular drama, foolhardy bravery, tragedy, and, sometimes, high comedy--and that set the stage for a buildup of Cold War tension that became a pivotal moment in history.

Cuba Libre!: Che, Fidel, and the Improbable Revolution That Changed World History

Starting in the ramshackle but romantic capital of Havana, Peter Millar travels with ordinary Cubans, sharing anecdotes, life stories and political opinions to the far end of the island, the Guantanamo naval base and detention camp.

Slow Train to Guantanamo: A Rail Odyssey Through Cuba in the Last Days of the Castros

A few years after its liberation from French colonialist rule, Haiti experienced a period of unsurpassed brutality, horror, and superstition under the reign of the black King Henri-Christophe. Through the eyes of the ancient slave Ti-Noel, "The Kingdom of This World" records the destruction of the black regime--built on the same corruption and contempt for human life that brought down the French--in an orgy of voodoo, racial hatred, erotomania, and fantastic grandeurs of false elegance.


The Kingdom of This World

From America’s number one Cuba reporter, PEN award–winning investigative journalist Ann Louise Bardach, comes the big book on Cuba we’ve all been waiting for. An incisive and spirited portrait of the twentieth century’s wiliest political survivor and his fiefdom, "Cuba Confidential" is the gripping story of the shattered families and warring personalities that lie at the heart of the forty-three-year standoff between Miami and Havana.

Famous to many Americans for her cover stories and media appearances, Ann Louise Bardach has been covering Cuba for a decade. She’s talked to the crooks, spooks and politicians who have made history, and to their hired assassins and confidants. Based on exclusive interviews with Fidel Castro, his sister Juanita, his former brother-in-law Rafael Díaz-Balart, the family of Elián González, the friends and family of the legendary American fugitive Robert Vesco, the intrepid terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, and the inner circles of Jeb Bush and the late exile leader Jorge Mas Canosa, "Cuba Confidential" exposes the hardball take-no-prisoners tactics of the Cuban exile leadership, and its manipulation and exploitation by ten American presidents.

Bardach homes in on Fidel Castro and his cronies, taking us closer than we’ve ever been—and on the militant exiles who have devoted their lives, with CIA connivance, to trying to eliminate him. From Calle Ocho to Juan Miguel González’s kitchen table in Cárdenas, from Guantánamo Bay to Union City to Washington, D.C., Ann Louise Bardach serves up an unforgettable portrait of Cuba and its exiles.

Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana

It is 1947, and Israel Levis, a Cuban composer whose life had once been a dream of music, love, and sadness, returns to Cuba after being mistakenly imprisoned during the Nazi occupation of France.

When Levis arrives back in Habana, his mind returns to an unrequited romance with the alluring Rita Valladares, a singer for whom Levis had written his most famous song, "Rosas Puras." This 1928 composition became the most famous rumba in the world and changed American and European tastes in music and dance forever.

A love story—of art, family, and country—"A Simple Habana Melody" is a virtuoso performance from one of our most important writers.

A Simple Habana Melody

Isadora Tattlin was accustomed to relocating often for her husband’s work. But when he accepted a post in Cuba in the early 1990s, she resolved to keep a detailed diary of her time there, recording her daily experiences as a wife, mother, and foreigner in a land of contraband. The result is a striking, rare glimpse into a tiny country of enormous splendor and squalor. Though the Tattlins are provided with a well-staffed Havana mansion, the store shelves are bare. On the streets, beggars plead for soap, not coins. A vet with few real medical supplies operates on a carved mahogany coffee table in a Louis XIV–style drawing room. The people adore festivity, but Christmas trees are banned. And when Isadora hosts a dinner party whose guest list includes Fidel Castro himself, she observes the ultimate contradiction at the very heart of Cuba. Vividly capturing Cuba’s simultaneously appalling and enchanting essence, "Cuba Diaries" casts an irresistible spell and lifts the enigma of an island that is trapped in time, but not in spirit.

Cuba Diaries: An American Housewife in Havana

Con esta manera de componer obras de imaginaci�n, no es f�cil mantener constante el inter�s de la narrativa, ni siempre animada y unida la acci�n, ni el estilo parejo y natural, ni el tono templado y sostenido que exigen las producciones del g�nero novelesco. Y tal es uno de los motivos que me impelen a hablar de la novela y de m�. El otro es, que despu�s de todo, me ha salido el cuadro tan sombr�o y de car�cter tan tr�gico, que, cubano como soy hasta la m�dula de los huesos y hombre de moralidad, siento una especie de temor o verg�enza presentarlo al p�blico sin una palabra explicativa de disculpa.

Cecilia Vald�s o la Loma del �ngel

"The Red Umbrella" is the moving tale of a 14-year-old girl's journey from Cuba to America as part of Operation Pedro Pan—an organized exodus of more than 14,000 unaccompanied children, whose parents sent them away to escape Fidel Castro's revolution.

In 1961, two years after the Communist revolution, Lucía Álvarez still leads a carefree life, dreaming of parties and her first crush. But when the soldiers come to her sleepy Cuban town, everything begins to change. Freedoms are stripped away. Neighbors disappear. Her friends feel like strangers. And her family is being watched.

As the revolution's impact becomes more oppressive, Lucía's parents make the heart-wrenching decision to send her and her little brother to the United States—on their own.

Suddenly plunked down in Nebraska with well-meaning strangers, Lucía struggles to adapt to a new country, a new language, a new way of life. But what of her old life? Will she "ever" see her home or her parents again? And if she does, will she still be the same girl?

"The Red Umbrella" is a moving story of country, culture, family, and the true meaning of home.

The Red Umbrella

In this brilliant, apocalyptic vision of Castro's Cuba, we meet a young couple who leave the dreariness of Havana and spend six days at a small seaside retreat, where they hope to recapture the desire and carefree spirit that once united them. In a stunning juxtaposition of narrative voices, the wife recounts the grim reality of her marriage, the demands of motherhood, and her loss of freedom, innocence, and hope; while her husband, a disillusioned poet and disenchanted revolutionary, recalls his political struggles and laments the artistic and homosexual freedom that has been denied him. Rich in hallucination, myth and fantasy, Farewell to the Sea is a fierce and unforgettable work that speaks for the entire human condition.

Cuba

The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway

Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause

Tom Gjelten

Our Man in Havana

Graham Greene

Telex from Cuba

Rachel Kushner

Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba & Then Lost it to the Revolution

T.J. English

Dreaming in Cuban

Cristina García

Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy

Carlos Eire

Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life

Jon Lee Anderson

Cuba Libre

Elmore Leonard

Before Night Falls

Reinaldo Arenas

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

Oscar Hijuelos

The Other Side of Paradise: Life in the New Cuba

Julia Cooke

Three Trapped Tigers

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Cuba: A New History

Richard Gott

My Life: A Spoken Autobiography

Fidel Castro

Havana Bay (Arkady Renko, #4)

Martin Cruz Smith

Havana Red

Leonardo Padura

The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom

Margarita Engle

Trading With The Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro's Cuba

Tom Miller

Next Year in Havana (The Cuba Saga, #1)

Chanel Cleeton

Havana Fever

Leonardo Padura

Explosion in a Cathedral

Alejo Carpentier

Cuba: A New History

Richard Gott

The Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times

Anthony DePalma

The Man Who Loved Dogs

Leonardo Padura

The Distant Marvels

Chantel Acevedo

The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics

Aviva Chomsky

Everyone Leaves

Wendy Guerra

Havana Blue

Leonardo Padura

Guerrilla Warfare

Ernesto Che Guevara

Havana: A Subtropical Delirium

Mark Kurlansky

Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo

Ned Sublette

Breathe: Stories from Cuba

Leila Segal

Cuba Libre!: Che, Fidel, and the Improbable Revolution That Changed World History

Tony Perrottet

Slow Train to Guantanamo: A Rail Odyssey Through Cuba in the Last Days of the Castros

Peter Millar

The Kingdom of This World

Alejo Carpentier

Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana

Ann Louise Bardach

A Simple Habana Melody

Oscar Hijuelos

Cuba Diaries: An American Housewife in Havana

Isadora Tattlin

Cecilia Vald�s o la Loma del �ngel