After Havana: A Novel

by Charles Fleming

After Havana is the story of the nightclubs, revolutionaries, and crooked cops in the sour twilight of the Batista empire. Sloan - the protagonist of the richly acclaimed Ivory Coast - is a gifted white American horn player with a bruised past and a wounded heart. Anita is the mixed-race beauty who will recapture his love and spark a manhunt through the streets of the city and into the heart of the rebel-held Sierre Maestra mountains. Delgado is the famed rebel Communist leader, having secretly returned to his homeland from exile in Mexico. And Cardoso is the haunted police agent assigned to find and kill Delgado, thereby shifting the power back to the corrupt Batista government.

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Charles Fleming teaches entertainment reporting at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. He has written for numerous magazines, including LA Weekly, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, the New York Times, and Vanity Fair. He is the author of High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess and the coauthor of The Goomba Diet: Living Large, The Goombas Book of Love, A Goombas Guide to Life, My Lobotomy, Three Weeks in October: The Manhunt for the Serial Sniper. He lives in Los Angeles."

Reviews

[Nick Baam]

3.75

Well done. Some nice characters in compelling situations, and you get a nice sense of Cuba, what a playground Havana must have been in the 50's for those who could afford flying there for the night. (Isn't it where Marlon Brando took Jean Simmons?) The bar at the Nacional doesn't seem to have changed much.

It shows revolutions done right in a way the film Havana didn't quite pull off. (By venturing out of Havana!)

Still, the book to read about "modern-day" Havana is Martin Cruz Smith's brilliant Havana Bay. And speaking of films, I've read all the Arkady Renko novels (Havana Bay is the fourth; they are the best), and every time Renko says something, I'm hearing, and seeing, William Hurt -- Gorky Park, the first.

[Tetyana]

This is an amazing book, with a very interesting story. It is very well written, while still being an easy read. The action,adventure and mystery move at a perfect pace, so the book isn't boring at all.

[J]

Very good. Provides a good idea of why Castro came to power and who is responsible.

[Viktoriya]

It was a good read. Kind of makes me want to read more about Cuban revolution now.