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Cuba, my lovely
José Latour's
Havana Best Friends shows the locals' side
of life on Cuba
Lisa Carter, Globe
and Mail Update and Canadian Press.
February 24, 2006.
Havana Best Friends
By José Latour
McClelland & Stewart, 352 pages, $22.99
Cuba, it seems, is the perfect location
for a crime novel: Committees of "volunteers"
are encouraged to spy on their neighbours,
distrust is rife in everyday life, and there
is a constant veneer that hides the truth.
Havana Best Friends is José Latour's
most recent novel, and he knows of what
he speaks. He wrote several successful novels
in his native land, winning his first award
at the age of 13. Life changed when his
fifth book was said to be counter-revolutionary
and he became an enemy of the state. Dogged
relentlessly by government agents, he left
for Spain in 2002 and moved to Canada in
2004.
After he fell out of favour in Cuba, Latour
began writing in English, debuting in 1999
with Outcast, nominated for an Edgar Award.
He is one of those rare and wonderful beings:
a true bilingual. Although occasional odd
turns of phrase in Havana Best Friends hint
at non-native speech, I was impressed by
the novel's fluency of expression and nuance,
qualities that are very hard to achieve
in a second language.
This is the story of unlikely pairs. Elena
and Pablo are estranged siblings who share
a spacious apartment in Havana. Sean and
Marina, a Canadian couple on holidays, befriend
the Cuban brother and sister under what
we will discover are false pretences. They
have come to Cuba not as tourists, but at
the request of their friend Carlos, to scout
out a possible $10-million treasure in diamonds
that Carlos's father supposedly left behind
when the family fled the country after the
dictator Batista was overthrown. Are the
diamonds still in what is now Elena and
Pablo's home? Will Sean and Marina make
it out of the country with the loot? I leave
that for you to discover.
Given that very little is what it seems
in Havana Best Friends, there is plenty
of opportunity to become lost in the labyrinth.
But Latour, considered to be a master of
Cuban noir, skillfully leads his readers
down a path of twists and turns. Before
the end of the first chapter, we are hooked,
anxious to read more. Although we may have
a sense of what will come next, occasional
jarring surprises keep our interest piqued.
Characteristic of Latour, this novel is
not set in the tropical Cuba of Canadian
winter getaways, although there are romanticized
allusions to that world every now and then.
Instead, we are shown the locals' side of
life on that tropical island.
These insights begin as vignettes, but
as the story progresses we are plunged deeper
into Cuban reality. In one succinct paragraph,
Latour highlights the difference between
tourists' and locals' viewpoints on life
there: "Elena wanted to say to the
exasperated Marina, You find this upsetting?
You find this unacceptable? Well, honey,
you can't imagine what people who pay their
fare in Cuban pesos have to put up with
to travel from an eastern province to a
western province. Some spend two, sometimes
three days at a terminal waiting in line
for a bus or a train, sleeping on the floor,
eating junk food, unable to wash. You don't
know! This is nothing! A bus will come in
an hour or two and take us to Varadero because
you paid for our tickets in dollars, because
all these passengers are foreigners."
Although at times I found myself questioning
a character's actions or motivations, it
was nothing that suspended belief. The tension
that rises and falls throughout the book
heightens toward the end, to the point that
my eyes wanted to leap ahead. I found myself
forced to cover the bottom of the final
pages with my hand so as to savour each
delicious moment of suspense.
I read Havana Best Friends almost in a
single sitting, drawn in by Latour's characters
and plot. Much more than simply being entertained
by an engaging detective story, I was rewarded
with an insightful glimpse into Cuba.
Lisa Carter is a Spanish-to-English translator
and vice-president, Ontario region, of the
Literary Translators Association of Canada.
Her most recent work, Turing's Delirium,
a novel by Edmundo Paz Soldán, is
due out this summer.
* © Copyright 2006
Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights
Reserved.
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