100 Best Cuba Books of All Time

We've researched and ranked the best cuba books in the world, based on recommendations from world experts, sales data, and millions of reader ratings. Learn more

Featuring recommendations from Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey, Richard Branson, and 17 other experts.
1

The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea, an apparently simple fable, represents the mature Hemingway at his best. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature soon after its publication, and half a century later it is still one of his most read books. less

Jack DorseyI keep coming back to it. I love the straightforwardness, the tightness, and the poetry. I think it shows a common struggle that is repeated over and over in so many narratives both fictional and nonfictional. (Source)

Jordan B PetersonThe Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway https://t.co/7dJE4Pfn56, a book from my great books list https://t.co/AxBNX3QpMb (Source)

May WitwitI taught this book to my students in Iraq during the economic sanctions. And I feel like it gave me some kind of strength to continue. (Source)

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2

Next Year in Havana

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...
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3

Our Man in Havana

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...
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Recommended by William LeoGrande, and 1 others.

William LeoGrandeYes. What I like about this book is how Greene captures so beautifully the Cold-War contradictions of U.S. policy in the region. Even though the United States plays no role directly, Greene captures the way in which U.S. policy is often so blind to the realities on the ground that it produces disastrous, unintended consequences.  The story is, of course, about a British citizen living in Havana... (Source)

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4
To underworld kingpins Meyer Lansky and Charles "Lucky" Luciano, Cuba was the greatest hope for the future of American organized crime in the post-Prohibition years. In the 1950s, the Mob—with the corrupt, repressive government of brutal Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in its pocket—owned Havana's biggest luxury hotels and casinos, launching an unprecedented tourism boom complete with the most lavish entertainment, top-drawer celebrities, gorgeous women, and gambling galore. But Mob dreams collided with those of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and others who would lead an uprising of the... more

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5
Recommended by William LeoGrande, and 1 others.

William LeoGrandeThis is the most recently published book in my selection. It’s a history of the Bacardi family, beginning in the middle of the 19th century when the famous rum empire was founded in Cuba. If you told me you could sum up 150 years of the island through the story of a single family, I would reply it couldn’t be done. But Gjelten has done it. What makes this possible is that key members of the... (Source)

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6

When We Left Cuba

In 1960s Florida, a young Cuban exile will risk her life--and heart--to take back her country in this exhilarating historical novel from the author of Next Year in Havana, a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick.

Beautiful. Daring. Deadly.

The Cuban Revolution took everything from sugar heiress Beatriz Perez--her family, her people, her country. Recruited by the CIA to infiltrate Fidel Castro's inner circle and pulled into the dangerous world of espionage, Beatriz is consumed by her quest for revenge and her desire to reclaim the life she lost.
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7
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...
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8

Before Night Falls

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. less

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9

Refugee

Three different kids.

One mission in common: ESCAPE.

Josef is a Jewish boy in 1930s Nazi Germany. With the threat of concentration camps looming, he and his family board a ship bound for the other side of the world…

Isabel is a Cuban girl in 1994. With riots and unrest plaguing her country, she and her family set out on a raft, hoping to find safety and freedom in America…

Mahmoud is a Syrian boy in 2015. With his homeland torn apart by violence and destruction, he and his family begin a long trek toward Europe…

All three young people...
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10

Dreaming in Cuban

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. less

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11

Che Guevara

A Revolutionary Life

"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...
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12

The Man Who Loved Dogs

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...
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Recommended by Roberto Setubal, and 1 others.

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13

Three Trapped Tigers

Many of Cuba's intellectuals embraced the Castro regime, but Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who criticized it, was condemned as a traitor and forced into exile. From this bitter experience, which included his hospitalization for mental collapse, came the vivid sketches of Cuban life that made up the acclaimed View of Dawn from the Tropics. In exile he revised this work into Three Trapped Tigers, a savage comedy that catapulted him into the first rank of Latin American novelist. less
Recommended by Oscar Hijuelos, and 1 others.

Oscar HijuelosFor me as a writer, this book is one of the first Cuban novels I have read that had an explosive and musical energy, which I found irresistible. I think that Mario Vargas Llosa has demonstrated that same kind of explosive energy in novels like Conversation in the Cathedral, with words populating the pages in the same way that vegetation takes over a forest. But few other writers can approach... (Source)

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14

Paradiso

In the wake of his father's premature death, Jose Cemi comes of age in a turn of the century Cuba described in the Washington Post as "an island paradise where magic and philosophy twist the lives of the old Cuban bourgeoisie into extravagant wonderful shapes." less
Recommended by Oscar Hijuelos, and 1 others.

Oscar HijuelosTo be blunt, this is a very hard book to get through because it is so literary. I attempted to read the Spanish very carefully. Lima was the kind of writer whom Spanish scholars study for his language and syntax. One of the descriptions he uses is “yawning grass”, which is really wonderful. He has constructions that are amazing. But what really spoke to me is one of the characters in his... (Source)

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15

The Kingdom of This World

A masterful new translation of a haunting novel of nineteenth-century Haiti

A few years after its liberation from harsh French colonial rule in 1803, Haiti endured a period of great brutality under the reign of King Henri Christophe, who was born a slave but rose to become the first black king in the Western Hemisphere. In this unnerving novel from one of Cuba's most celebrated authors, Henri Christophe's oppressive rule is observed through the eyes of the elderly slave Ti Noel, who suffers abuse from masters both white and black. As he ranges across the country searching...
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Recommended by Brian Crecente, and 1 others.

Brian CrecenteGreat book. Highly recommend https://t.co/5bkiTh8ooY (Source)

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16

Telex from Cuba

Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction

The debut novel by New York Times bestselling author Rachel Kushner, called “shimmering” (The New Yorker), “multilayered and absorbing” (The New York Times Book Review), and “gorgeously written” (Kirkus Reviews).

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...
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17

The German Girl

Berlin, 1939. Before everything changed, Hannah Rosenthal lived a charmed life. But now the streets of Berlin are draped in ominous flags; her family’s fine possessions are hauled away; and they are no longer welcome in the places they once considered home. A glimmer of hope appears in the shape of the St. Louis, a transatlantic ocean liner promising Jews safe passage to Cuba. At first, the liner feels like a luxury, but as they travel, the circumstances of war change, and the ship that was to be their salvation seems likely to become their doom.

New York, 2014. On her twelfth...
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18

Dirty Havana Trilogy

For the last four decades, Fidel Castro's communist Cuba has survived a harsh economic blockade. In 1993, Castro attempted economic reform by allowing Cubans to use U.S. dollars and begin their own business ventures—"a huge messy free-for-all." This time of confused, low-rent capitalism is the backdrop for Pedro Juan Gutierrez's gritty, powerful, and atmospheric novel-in-stories, Dirty Havana Trilogy, translated from the original Spanish version by Natasha Wimmer.

Gutierrez, whose prose sings of grime and simple, hard-clay truths, much like the words of
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19

The Red Umbrella

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...
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20

My Life

A Spoken Autobiography

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. less

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21

Drum Dream Girl

How One Girl's Courage Changed Music

Girls cannot be drummers. Long ago on an island filled with music, no one questioned that rule—until the drum dream girl. In her city of drumbeats, she dreamed of pounding tall congas and tapping small bongós. She had to keep quiet. She had to practice in secret. But when at last her dream-bright music was heard, everyone sang and danced and decided that both girls and boys should be free to drum and dream.

        Inspired by the childhood of Millo Castro Zaldarriaga, a Chinese-African-Cuban girl who broke Cuba's traditional taboo against female drummers, Drum...
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22
Recommended by Juliet 'Kego Poetry4change, and 1 others.

Juliet 'Kego Poetry4changeA Pulitzer-winning book: The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos A film adaptation starring Banderas, Assante (1992) [It missed some key parts of the book] Hauntingly, beautiful soundtrack.. Immigrants, dreams, family, heartbreak and love https://t.co/ApyFhu63Di (Source)

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23

Havana

A Subtropical Delirium

A city of tropical heat, ramshackle beauty, and its very own cadence--a city that always surprises--Havana is brought to pulsing life by New York Times bestselling author Mark Kurlansky.

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...
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24

All the Way to Havana

So we purr, cara cara, and we glide, taka taka, and we zoom, zoom, ZOOM!

Together, a boy and his parents drive to the city of Havana, Cuba, in their old family car. Along the way, they experience the sights and sounds of the streets--neighbors talking, musicians performing, and beautiful, colorful cars putt-putting and bumpety-bumping along. In the end, though, it's their old car, Cara Cara, that the boy loves best.
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25
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... more

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26
This powerful and inspiring book shows how one person can make a difference, as Kidder tells the true story of a gifted man who is in love with the world and has set out to do all he can to cure it.

Tracy Kidder is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the author of the bestsellers The Soul of a New Machine, House, Among Schoolchildren, and Home Town. He has been described by the Baltimore Sun as the "master of the non-fiction narrative." This powerful and inspiring new book shows how one person can make a difference, as Kidder tells the true story...
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Richard BransonToday is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. (Source)

Bill Gates[On Bill Gates's reading list in 2011.] (Source)

Roger ThurowYes, and I have chosen this is in connection with social entrepreneurship and what Yunus does with social business. So, this is on the medical and health side, and poverty and hunger and malnourishment are distinctly a part of that. Mountains Beyond Mountains looks at the work of Dr Paul Farmer setting sail against the inequities in the healthcare world. It’s practical and inspirational. It’s... (Source)

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27

90 Miles to Havana

90 Miles to Havana is a 2011 Pura Belpré Honor Book for Narrative and a 2011 Bank Street Best Children's Book of the Year.

When Julian's parents make the heartbreaking decision to send him and his two brothers away from Cuba to Miami via the Pedro Pan operation, the boys are thrust into a new world where bullies run rampant and it's not always clear how best to protect themselves.
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28

El siglo de las luces

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... more

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29

The Motorcycle Diaries

Notes on a Latin American Journey

The young Che Guevara’s lively and highly entertaining travel diary, now a popular movie and a New York Times bestseller.

This new, expanded edition features exclusive, unpublished photos taken by the 23-year-old Ernesto on his journey across a continent, and a tender preface by Aleida Guevara, offering an insightful perspective on the man and the icon.

Features of this edition include:

A preface by Che Guevara’s daughter Aleida
Introduction by Cintio Vintier, well-known Latin American poet
Photos & maps from the original journey
Postcript:...
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30

The Firefly Letters

The freedom to roam is something that women and girls in Cuba do not have. Yet when Fredrika Bremer visits from Sweden in 1851 to learn about the people of this magical island, she is accompanied by Cecilia, a young slave who longs for her lost home in Africa. Soon Elena, the wealthy daughter of the house, sneaks out to join them. As the three women explore the lush countryside, they form a bond that breaks the barriers of language and culture.

In this quietly powerful new book, award-winning poet Margarita Engle paints a portrait of early women's rights pioneer Fredrika Bremer and...
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Don't have time to read the top Cuba books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.

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  • Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
31

Enchanted Air

Two Cultures, Two Wings

In this poetic memoir, which won the Pura Belpré Author Award, was a YALSA Nonfiction Finalist, and was named a Walter Dean Myers Award Honoree, acclaimed author Margarita Engle tells of growing up as a child of two cultures during the Cold War.

Margarita is a girl from two worlds. Her heart lies in Cuba, her mother’s tropical island country, a place so lush with vibrant life that it seems like a fairy tale kingdom. But most of the time she lives in Los Angeles, lonely in the noisy city and dreaming of the summers when she can take a plane through the enchanted air to her beloved...
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32
In his 2003 National Book Award–winning memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana, Carlos Eire narrated his coming of age in Cuba just before and during the Castro revolution. That book literally ends in midair as eleven-year-old Carlos and his older brother leave Havana on an airplane—along with thousands of other children—to begin their new life in Miami in 1962. It would be years before he would see his mother again. He would never again see his beloved father.

Learning to Die in Miami opens as the plane lands and Carlos faces, with trepidation and excitement, his new...
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Recommended by Oscar Hijuelos, and 1 others.

Oscar HijuelosHe is best known for his earlier book, Waiting for Snow in Havana. (Source)

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33

Cuba

A New History

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...
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34
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...
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35
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...
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36
In October 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union appeared to be sliding inexorably toward a nuclear conflict over the placement of missiles in Cuba. Veteran Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs has pored over previously untapped American, Soviet, and Cuban sources to produce the most authoritative book yet on the Cuban missile crisis. In his hour-by-hour chronicle of those near-fatal days, Dobbs reveals some startling new incidents that illustrate how close we really did come to Armageddon.
Here, for the first time, are gripping accounts of...
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37

Havana Bay (Arkady Renko, #4)

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...

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38

Pasado Perfecto

El primer fin de semana de 1989 una insistente llamada de teléfono arranca de su resaca al teniente Mario Conde, un policía escéptico y desengañado. El Viejo, su jefe en la Central, le llama para encargarle un misterioso y urgente caso: Rafael Morín, jefe de la Empresa de Importaciones y Exportaciones del Ministerio de Industrias, falta de su domicilio desde el día de Año Nuevo. Quiere el azar que el desaparecido sea un ex compañero de estudios de Conde, un tipo que ya entonces, aun acatando las normas establecidas, se destacaba por su brillantez y autodisciplina. Por si fuera poco, este caso... more

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39

The Lost Steps

A composer, fleeing an empty existence in New York City, takes a journey with his mistress to one of the few remaining areas of the world not yet touched by civilization-the upper reaches of a great South American river. The Lost Steps describes his search, his adventures, and the remarkable decision he makes in a village that appears to be truly outside history. less

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40

Invisible Cities

"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his." So begins Italo Calvino's compilation of fragmentary urban images. As Marco tells the khan about Armilla, which "has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be," the spider-web city of... more
Recommended by Colin Thubron, James Meek, and 2 others.

Colin ThubronOh God. Well, officially it’s Marco Polo describing the cities of his travels to Kublai Khan. It’s been opined that every city he describes is a version of Venice, but I think that doesn’t really work. They seem to me to be marvellous imaginative fantasies, which sometimes reproduce states of mind. There are 40 or so cities described, all entirely imaginary I think, and that’s what’s so magical... (Source)

James MeekIt has different layers. The set-up is that Kublai Khan has conquered this vast empire; an empire so large that he, sitting at the centre of it, cannot know all the many parts of it. He can’t visit them, he can’t see them, and if he goes to one part all the other parts have changed. So he sits there at the centre of his empire and Marco Polo travels around and visits the various cities and comes... (Source)

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Don't have time to read the top Cuba books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.

Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:

  • Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
  • Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
  • Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
41

The Cuban Affair

Nelson DeMille’s #1 New York Times bestseller, “an action-packed, relentlessly paced thriller” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), featuring DeMille’s newest character—U.S. Army combat veteran Daniel “Mac” MacCormick, a charter boat captain setting sail on his most dangerous cruise yet.

Daniel Graham MacCormick—Mac for short—seems to have a pretty good life. At age thirty-five he’s living in Key West, owner of a forty-two-foot charter fishing boat, The Maine. Mac served five years in the Army as an infantry officer with two tours in Afghanistan. He...
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42
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... more

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43

The Price of Paradise

In a city as corrupt as it was luxurious, those who dared to dream were bound to pay the price.

Havana, Cuba, 1947. Young Patricio flees impoverished Spain and steps into the sultry island paradise of Havana with only the clothes on his back and half-baked dreams of a better life. Blessed with good looks and natural charm, he lands a job as a runner at El Encanto—one of the most luxurious department stores in the world.

Famous for its exquisite offerings from French haute couture to Arabian silks, El Encanto indulges the senses in opulent extravagance. It caters...
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44

Martina the Beautiful Cockroach

A Cuban Folktale

Martina the beautiful cockroach doesn't know coffee beans about love and marriage.
That's where her Cuban family comes in. While some of the Cucarachas offer her gifts to make her more attractive, only Abuela, her grandmother, gives her something really useful: un consejo increible, some shocking advice. At first, Martina is skeptical of her Abuela's unorthodox suggestion, but when suitor after suitor fails the Coffee Test, she wonders if a little green cockroach can ever find true love. Soon, only the gardener P'rez, a tiny brown mouse, is left. But what will happen when Martina offers...
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45

To Have and Have Not

To Have and Have Not is the dramatic story of Harry Morgan, an honest man who is forced into running contraband between Cuba and Key West as a means of keeping his crumbling family financially afloat. His adventures lead him into the world of the wealthy and dissipated yachtsmen who throng the region, and involve him in a strange and unlikely love affair.
Harshly realistic, yet with one of the most subtle and moving relationships in the Hemingway oeuvre, To Have and Have Not is literary high adventure at its finest.
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46
THE BASIS OF THE MOVIE “CHE: PART ONE” FROM STEVEN SODERBERGH STARRING BENICIO DEL TORO

The dramatic art and acute perceptiveness evident in Che Guevara’s early diaries fully blossom in this highly readable and often entertaining account of the guerrilla war that led to the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Reminiscences is one of the two books for Steven Soderbergh’s biopic (along with The Bolivian Diary).

Feature chapters describe Che’s first meeting with Fidel in Mexico, the mythical moment when Che had to choose between a knapsack of medicine and another of...
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47

Love and Ruin

The bestselling author of The Paris Wife returns to the subject of Ernest Hemingway in a novel about his passionate, stormy marriage to Martha Gellhorn—a fiercely independent, ambitious young woman who would become one of the greatest war correspondents of the twentieth century
 
In 1937, twenty-eight-year-old Martha travels alone to Madrid to report on the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War and becomes drawn to the stories of ordinary people caught in devastating conflict. She also finds herself unexpectedly—and uncontrollably—falling in love with Hemingway, a man...
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48
“I find it so easy to forget / that I’m just a girl who is expected / to live / without thoughts.”

Opposing slavery in Cuba in the nineteenth century was dangerous. The most daring abolitionists were poets who veiled their work in metaphor. Of these, the boldest was Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, nicknamed Tula. In passionate, accessible verses of her own, Engle evokes the voice of this book-loving feminist and abolitionist who bravely resisted an arranged marriage at the age of fourteen, and was ultimately courageous enough to fight against injustice. Historical notes, excerpts,...
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49

Havana Red

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. less
Recommended by Oscar Hijuelos, and 1 others.

Oscar HijuelosPart of the reason I like his work so much is that it has a real noiresque feel about it.  He has a very literary sensibility and a wonderful sense of narrative, and really knows how to build themes in a way that is rather beguiling. When I first started reading his books I said this guy has got a wonderful style, and it is reminiscent of something I like myself – and then I found out he was a... (Source)

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50

Herejes

The S.S. Saint Louis spent several days anchored at Havana in 1939 while waiting for the Cuban authorities to allow 900 Jewish refugees from Germany into their country. Confident that a painting by Rembrandt that had belonged to their family since the 17th century — and which they had smuggled into the ship — would convince the Cubans to let them in, little Daniel Kaminsky and his uncle waited at the dock for their relatives to land. However their plan failed and the ship returned to Germany, taking away with her any chance of encounter. In 2007, with the crying of the painting in London,... more

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51

Live by Night (Coughlin, #2)

Live by Night is a riveting epic layered with a diverse cast of loyal friends and callous enemies, tough rumrunners and sultry femmes fatales, Bible-quoting evangelists and cruel Klansmen, all battling for survival and their piece of the American dream.

Boston, 1926. The '20s are roaring. Liquor is flowing, bullets are flying, and one man sets out to make his mark on the world.

Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston police captain, has...
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52

Against All Hope

A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

Against All Hope is Armando Valladares' account of over twenty years in Fidel Castro's tropical gulag. Arrested in 1960 for being philosophically and religiously opposed to communism, Valladares was not released until 1982, by which time he had become one of the world's most celebrated "prisoners of conscience." Interned all those years at the infamous Isla de Pinos prison (from whose windows he watched the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion), Valladares suffered endless days of violence, putrid food and squalid living conditions, while listening to Castro's firing squads eliminating... more

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53
She's been kidnapped and beaten, lives under surveillance, and can only get online—in disguise—at tourist hotspots. She's a blogger, she's a Cuban, and she's a worldwide sensation.

Yoani Sánchez is an unusual dissident: no street protests, no attacks on big politicos, no calls for revolution. Rather, she produces a simple diary about what it means to live under the Castro regime: the chronic hunger and the difficulty of shopping; the art of repairing ancient appliances; and the struggles of living under a propaganda machine that pushes deep into public and private life.
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54
Challenging the conventional wisdom of perpetual hostility between the United States and Cuba -- beyond invasions, covert operations, assassination plots using poison pens and exploding seashells, and a grinding economic embargo -- this fascinating book chronicles a surprising, untold history of bilateral efforts toward rapprochement and reconciliation.

Since 1959, conflict and aggression have dominated the story of U.S.-Cuban relations. Now, LeoGrande and Kornbluh present a new and increasingly more relevant account.

From Kennedy's offering of an olive branch to...
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55
Finding Ma�ana is a vibrant, moving memoir of one family's life in Cuba and their wrenching departure. Mirta Ojito was born in Havana and raised there until the unprecedented events of the Mariel boatlift brought her to Miami, one teenager among more than a hundred thousand fellow refugees. Now a reporter for The New York Times, Ojito goes back to reckon with her past and to find the people who set this exodus in motion and brought her to her new home. She tells their stories and hers in superb and poignant detail-chronicling both individual lives and a major historical... more

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56

La pasión según Carmela

For the ENGLISH version, please click:"The Passion According to Carmela"

La pasión según Carmela narra con un realismo impresionante la historia de un médico argentino que se enamora de una médica cubana. Juntos viven en Cuba algunos de los años clave de la revolución de Castro. Poco antes del advenimiento de la democracia en la Argentina, él vuelve; ella, en cambio, queda en Cuba, libre, pero de alguna manera convertida en rehén.
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58

The Distant Marvels

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...
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59

Selected Writings

José Martí (1853-1895) is the most renowned political and literary figure in the history of Cuba. A poet, essayist, orator, statesman, abolitionist, and the martyred revolutionary leader of Cuba's fight for independence from Spain, Martí lived in exile in New York for most of his adult life, earning his living working as a foreign correspondent. Throughout the 1880s and early 1890s, Martí's were the eyes through which much of Latin America saw the United States. His impassioned, kaleidoscopic evocations of that period in U.S. history, the assassination of James Garfield, the... more

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60
”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... more

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61
Daniel has escaped Nazi Germany with nothing but a desperate dream that he might one day find his parents again. But that golden land called New York has turned away his ship full of refugees, and Daniel finds himself in Cuba.

As the tropical island begins to work its magic on him, the young refugee befriends a local girl with some painful secrets of her own. Yet even in Cuba, the Nazi darkness is never far away...
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62
A History of the Cuban Revolution presents a concise socio-historical account of the Cuban Revolution of 1959, an event that continues to spark debate 50 years later. Balances a comprehensive overview of the political and economic events of the revolution with a look at the revolution's social impact Provides a lively, on-the-ground look at the lives of ordinary people Features both U.S. and Cuban perspectives to provide a complete and well-rounded look at the revolution and its repercussions Encourages students to understand history through the viewpoint of individuals living it... more

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63

Adios Hemingway

When the skeletal remains of a man brought down by shotgun surface on the Havana estate of Ernest Hemingway, writer, drinker, and ex-cop Mario Conte reluctantly accepts a reinstatement to investigate the forty-year-old crime. As the truth of the night of October 3, 1958, slowly reveals itself, Conte must come to terms with his idealistic memory of Papa Hemingway on Cuba's sun-drenched docks, back when Conde was a child tagging along with his grandfather." Padura Fuentes weaves Conte's world with that of Hemingway's Cuba four decades earlier, a period marking the beginning of Hemingway's... more

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64

A Planet for Rent

The most successful and controversial Cuban Science Fiction writer of all time, Yoss (aka José Miguel Sánchez Gómez) is known for his acerbic portraits of the island under Communism. In his bestselling A Planet for Rent, Yoss pays homage to Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and 334 by Thomas M. Disch. A critique of Cuba in the nineties, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, A Planet for Rent marks the debut in English of an astonishingly brave and imaginative Latin American voice.

Wracked by economic and...
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65

Thirteen Days

A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

During the thirteen days in October 1962 when the United States confronted the Soviet Union over its installation of missiles in Cuba, few people shared the behind-the-scenes story as it is told here by the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy. In this unique account, he describes each of the participants during the sometimes hour-to-hour negotiations, with particular attention to the actions and views of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. In a new foreword, the distinguished historian and Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., discusses the book's enduring importance, and the significance... more

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66
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.... more

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67

My Brigadista Year

In an engrossing historical novel, the Newbery Medal-winning author of Bridge to Terabithia follows a young Cuban teenager as she volunteers for Fidel Castro's national literacy campaign and travels into the impoverished countryside to teach others how to read.

When thirteen-year-old Lora tells her parents that she wants to join Premier Castro's army of young literacy teachers, her mother screeches to high heaven, and her father roars like a lion. Lora has barely been outside of Havana -- why would she throw away her life in a remote shack with no electricity,...
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68

Havana Fever

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... more

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69

Concierto barroco

This novella is a bizarre and compelling fantasy, a labyrinth-like journey laced with layers of allusions, insights and humor through the transculturation between the Old World and New less

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70

Lonely Planet Cuba

#1 best-selling guide to Cuba*

Lonely Planet Cuba is your passport to the most relevant, up-to-date advice on what to see and skip, and what hidden discoveries await you. Walk through Havana's cobbled streets and evoke the ghosts of mega-rich sugar barons and sabre-rattling buccaneers; stay in a private homestay where you can quickly uncover the nuances of everyday Cuban life; and hop on your bike and hit the quintessentially rural Cuba in Valle de Vinales -all with your trusted travel companion. Get to the heart of Cuba and begin your journey now!
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71
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...
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72

The Agüero Sisters

Reina and Constancia Agüero are Cuban sisters who have been estranged for thirty years. Reina--tall, darkly beautiful, and magnetically sexual--still lives in her homeland. Once a devoted daughter of la revolución, she now basks in the glow of her many admiring suitors, believing only in what she can grasp with her five senses. The pale and very petite Constancia lives in the United States, a beauty expert who sees miracles and portents wherever she looks. After she and her husband retire to Miami, she becomes haunted by the memory of her parents and the unexplained death of her beloved... more

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73
This is a compelling and dramatic account of Cuban policy in Africa from 1959 to 1976 and of its escalating clash with U.S. policy toward the continent. Piero Gleijeses's fast-paced narrative takes the reader from Cuba's first steps to assist Algerian rebels fighting France in 1961, to the secret war between Havana and Washington in Zaire in 1964-65--where 100 Cubans led by Che Guevara clashed with 1,000 mercenaries controlled by the CIA--and, finally, to the dramatic dispatch of 30,000 Cubans to Angola in 1975-76, which stopped the South African advance on Luanda and doomed Henry Kissinger's... more

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74

The Ultimate Cigar Book

The Ultimate Cigar Book is a classic on the subject, covering everything from how cigars are made, to storage, etiquette, and accessories.

Richard Carleton Hacker’s category bestselling is often credited with helping to create a new generation of cigar aficionados. No other book contains as much detailed and factual information on virtually every facet of cigar making and cigar smoking. And now this trendsetting has been revised in this fourth edition for the aficionado of the future!

Forget 1492. This book starts out in B. C. (Before Columbus) and...
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75
A lyrical biography of a Cuban slave who escaped to become a celebrated poet.

Born into the household of a wealthy slave owner in Cuba in 1797, Juan Francisco Manzano spent his early years by the side of a woman who made him call her Mama, even though he had a mama of his own. Denied an education, young Juan still showed an exceptional talent for poetry. His verses reflect the beauty of his world, but they also expose its hideous cruelty.

Powerful, haunting poems and breathtaking illustrations create a portrait of a life in which even the pain of slavery...
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76

Broken Paradise

In "Broken Paradise" Cecilia Samartin offers heart wrenching insight into the tender balance between hope and grief that shapes the immigrant heart and exposes the struggles of everyday people amid political turmoil.Cuba, 1956: Cousins Nora and Alicia are accustomed to living among Havana's privileged class -- lavish dinners, days at the beach, dances, and dresses.

Their idyllic lives take a turn for the worst after Castro's rise to power. Food becomes scarce, religion is forbidden, and disease is rampant. Alicia stays behind while Nora emigrates to the United States and struggles...
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77

Cuba Libre

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... more

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78

The Last Train to Key West

In 1935 three women are forever changed when one of the most powerful hurricanes in history barrels toward the Florida Keys in New York Times bestselling author Chanel Cleeton's captivating new novel.

Everyone journeys to Key West searching for something. For the tourists traveling on Henry Flagler’s legendary Overseas Railroad, Labor Day weekend is an opportunity to forget the economic depression gripping the nation. But one person’s paradise can be another’s prison, and Key West-native Helen Berner yearns to escape.

The Cuban Revolution of 1933...
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79

Lucky Broken Girl

Based on the author's childhood in the 1960s, a young Cuban-Jewish immigrant girl is adjusting to her new life in New York City when her American dream is suddenly derailed.

Ruthie Mizrahi and her family recently emigrated from Castro's Cuba to New York City. Just when she's finally beginning to gain confidence in her mastery of English and enjoying her reign as her neighborhood's hopscotch queen, a horrific car accident leaves her in a body cast and confined her to her bed for a long recovery. As Ruthie's world shrinks because of her inability to move, her powers of observation...
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80
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...
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81
“A vivid, engaging exploration of Cuban politics, culture and economic life.”— America

“Considerably deeper than much of the work on the subject. It takes on the challenge of describing what’s in a black box with energy and candor.”—VisitCuba.com
 
“The most informative, accurate, insightful, detailed account available on twenty-first century Cuba.”—HavanaTimes.org

“Marc Frank is the best foreign journalist reporting from Cuba today. We now have a behind-the-scenes look at the changes large and small taking place as the Cuban revolution...
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82

Islands in the Stream

First published in 1970, nine years after Ernest Hemingway's death, Islands in the Stream is the story of an artist and adventurer — a man much like Hemingway himself. Rich with the uncanny sense of life and action characteristic of his writing — from his earliest stories (In Our Time) to his last novella (The Old Man and the Sea) — this compelling novel contains both the warmth of recollection that inspired A Moveable Feast and a rare glimpse of Hemingway's rich and relaxed sense of humor, which enlivens scene after scene.
Beginning in the 1930s, Islands...
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83
Fifty years after the Cuban revolution, the legendary wealth of the sugar magnate Julio Lobo remains emblematic of a certain way of life that came to an abrupt end when Fidel Castro marched into Havana. Known in his day as the King of Sugar, Lobo was for decades the most powerful force in the world sugar market, controlling vast swaths of the island's sugar interests. Born in 1898, the year of Cuba's independence, Lobo's extraordinary life mirrors, in almost lurid technicolor, the many rises and final fall of the troubled Cuban republic. The details of Lobo's life are fit for Hollywood....
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84

In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd

In these linked tales about the Cuban-American experience and the immigrant experience in general, Ana Menendez has instantly established herself as a natural storyteller who "probes with steady humor and astute political insight the dreams versus the realities of her characters" (Elle). From the prizewinning title story unfolds a series of family snapshots that illuminate the landscape of an exiled community rich in heritage, memory, and longing for the past. In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd is at once "tender and sharp-fanged" (L.A. Weekly) as Ana Menendez charts the territory from Havana to... more

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85

In The Double Life of Fidel Castro, one of Castro's soldiers of 17 years breaks his silence and shares his memoir of years of service, and eventual imprisonment and torture for displeasing the notorious dictator, and his dramatic escape from Cuba.

Responsible for protecting the Lider maximo for two decades, Juan Reinaldo Sánchez was party to his secret life - because everything around Castro was hidden. From the ghost town in which guerrillas from several continents were trained, to his immense personal fortune - including a huge property portfolio, a secret paradise...

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86

Havana Gold

Twenty-four-year-old Lissette Delgado was beaten, raped, and then strangled with a towel. Marijuana is found in her apartment and her wardrobe is suspiciously beyond the means of a high school teacher. Lieutenant Conde is pressured by “the highest authority” to conclude this investigation quickly when chance leads him into the arms of a beautiful redhead, a saxophone player who shares his love for jazz and fighting fish. less

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87
This is Fidel Castro’s brilliant courtroom defense speech, offering a foretaste of the oratory for which he would become famous. At his trial for initiating an uprising against Batista’s dictatorship in 1953, he was sentenced to fifteen years of imprisonment. He was released twenty months later due to public pressure, and within six years he marched triumphantly into Havana at the head of the Cuban Revolution. less

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88

Dancing With Cuba

In 1970 a young dancer named Alma Guillermoprieto left New York to take a job teaching at Cuba’s National School of Dance. For six months, she worked in mirrorless studios (it was considered more revolutionary); her poorly trained but ardent students worked without them but dreamt of greatness. Yet in the midst of chronic shortages and revolutionary upheaval, Guillermoprieto found in Cuba a people whose sense of purpose touched her forever.

In this electrifying memoir, Guillermoprieto–now an award-winning journalist and arguably one of our finest writers on Latin America–...
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89
A unique dual portrait shines new light on two of the most dramatic figures of the twentieth century.

Drawing on sources in Cuba, Latin America, the United States, Europe, and Russia, and on material not available to previous biographers, Simon Reid-Henry has crafted a compelling portrait of a revolutionary era and the two men whose names and deeds personify it: Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. What began as an association of convenience would fundamentally shape their political visions, propelling them further than either had dared imagine. Ironically,...
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90

Che

A Memoir

In a new, expanded edition of a best-selling Ocean classic, Castro describes a historic political partnership that changed the face of Cuba and Latin America. He vividly portrays Che—the man, the revolutionary, and the thinker—recounting in detail his last days with Che in Cuba, giving a remarkably frank assessment of the Bolivian mission.

Fidel Castro, in an unusually gentle, quite emotional mood, remarks, “For me it has been hard to accept the idea that Che is dead. I have dreamed of him often, that I spoke with him, that he was alive . . .” Includes Castro’s speech on the return...
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Recommended by Naval Ravikant, and 1 others.

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91

Martí's Song for Freedom / Martí y sus versos por la libertad

Yo soy un hombre sincero
De donde crece la palma,
Y antes de morirme quiero
Echar mis versos del alma.


As a boy, José Martí was inspired by the natural world. He found freedom in the river that rushed to the sea and peace in the palmas reales that swayed in the wind. Freedom, he believed, was the inherent right of all men and women. But his home island of Cuba was colonized by Spain, and some of the people were enslaved by rich landowners. Enraged, Martí took up his pen and fought against this oppression through his writings. By age seventeen, he was declared...
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92

Cecilia Valdes

Or El Angel Hill

Cecilia Valdes is arguably the most important novel of 19th century Cuba. Originally published in New York City in 1882, Cirilo Villaverde's novel has fascinated readers inside and outside Cuba since the late 19th century. In this new English translation, a vast landscape emerges of the moral, political, and sexual depravity caused by slavery and colonialism. Set in the Havana of the 1830s, the novel introduces us to Cecilia, a beautiful light-skinned mulatta, who is being pursued by the son of a Spanish slave trader, named Leonardo. Unbeknownst to the two, they are the children of the same... more

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93

The Island of Eternal Love

Una saga familiar nacida en tres continentes confluye en el cálido y subyugante embrujo de La Habana del siglo XIX.
 
Para huir de su soledad en Miami, Cecilia se refugia en un bar donde conoce a una misteriosa anciana. Tras ese primer encuentro, regresará al bar cada noche para escuchar de labios de la mujer tres historias que se habían iniciado, más de un siglo atrás, en otros tantos lugares del mundo: un suicidio en China que desata una cadena de reacciones familiares; una extraña maldición que persigue a ciertas mujeres en un pueblo español, y una joven arrancada de su...
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94

Everyone Leaves

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...
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96
A REMARKABLY GRIPPING ACCOUNT OF AMERICA’S BAY OF PIGS CRISIS, DRAWING ON LONG-HIDDEN CIA DOCUMENTS AND DELIVERING, AS NEVER BEFORE, THE VIVID TRUTH—AND CONSEQUENCES—OF FIVE PIVOTAL DAYS IN APRIL 1961

The U.S.-backed military invasion of Cuba in 1961 remains one of the most ill-fated blunders in American history, with echoes of the event reverberating even today. Despite the Kennedy administration’s initial public insistence that the United States had nothing to do with the invasion, it soon became clear that the complex operation had been planned and approved by the best and brightest...

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97
An instant classic in the Bernie Gunther series, with storytelling that is fresher and more vivid than ever.

Berlin, 1934: The Nazis have secured the 1936 Olympiad for the city but are facing foreign resistance. Hitler and Avery Brundage, the head of the U.S. Olympic Committee, have connived to soft-pedal Nazi anti- Semitism and convince America to participate. Bernie Gunther, now the house detective at an upscale Berlin hotel, is swept into this world of international corruption and dangerous double-dealing, caught between the warring factions of the Nazi apparatus.

Havana,...

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98
Eduardo F. Calcines was a child of Fidel Castro's Cuba; he was just three years old when Castro came to power in January 1959. After that, everything changed for his family and his country. When he was ten, his family applied for an exit visa to emigrate to America and he was ridiculed by his schoolmates and even his teachers for being a traitor to his country. But even worse, his father was sent to an agricultural reform camp to do hard labor as punishment for daring to want to leave Cuba. During the years to come, as he grew up in Glorytown, a neighborhood in the city of Cienfuegos, Eduardo... more

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99

Cuba

My Revolution

Seventeen-year-old Sonia, a medical student with dreams of becoming a modernist painter, is caught up in Fidel Castro’s revolution from the moment it captures Havana on New Year’s Eve 1958. While her eccentric mother hatches an increasingly desperate series of plans to flee Cuba, Sonia joins the militia and volunteers as a medic at the Bay of Pigs — where she encounters her mortally wounded high school sweetheart as an enemy fighter, then is arrested and tortured for treating another CIA-trained brigadier.  Scarred, yet clinging to her revolutionary ideals, she seeks fulfillment in an... more

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100

Escape from Cuba

Personal Accounts of Those Who Fled Castro's Regime

 In 1959, Fidel Castro assumed power in Cuba after overthrowing the government of Fulgencio Batista. In response, thousands of Cubans fled the island, mostly to the United States. This book tells the stories of these Cubans in exile, all of whom overcame great obstacles to escape the brutal Castro regime. Neither a history of Cuba nor of Castro, this book illuminates the underrepresented legacy of the Cuban Exile Community and celebrates their continued thriving in a new country. less

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