Recently I reviewed “El Peso del Silencio” written by Jordi Sierra I Fabra. That novel took place in Chile. An older novel by the same author “La Noche del la Jinetera” takes place in Castro’s Cuba. Both novels are in Spanish without an available translation. Both have audio versions from Audible.com.

“Jinetera” means a female almost-prostitute in Cuba who accompanies and sleeps with tourists to Cuba not so much for the money but to find a foreign husband as a means to escape the hardships of Cuba. Daniel Ros is the protagonist newspaper reporter in both novels. In “Jinetera” he is sent from his newspaper in Spain to Cuba to find out why his reporter friend Estanis was found dead in a hotel room in Cuba. Most of his adventure involves a jinetera named Anyelín with whom he falls in love (initially “in lust”). Secondary is an attempted assassination of Castro and a mass exodus of Cubans in flimsy boats.

Expect many detailed descriptions of sexual activity.

In order to appreciate the atmosphere of the story, a brief history of Cuban-American relations is in order. Here my source is chiefly the book “Overthrow” by Stephen Kinzer (Henry Holt and Company, 2006).

In 1898 the imperialist President McKinley, fearing that Cuba would free itself from Spain and become independent enough to not do Washington’s bidding, sent to Cuba the battleship Maine. For a reason never discovered that battleship exploded. For William Randolph Hearst, who had waged a campaign of newspaper lies against Spanish colonialists, that explosion was a godsend. To the delight of Vice President Theodore Roosevelt, Hearst, and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, McKinley got Congress to declare war on Spain. In the skirmish in Santiago you may recall that Roosevelt led a charge up San Juan Hill dressed in a uniform he ordered from Brooks Brothers. Although Congress in the Teller amendment had promised independence to Cuba, Secretary of War Elihu Root and Senator Orville Platt broke that promise by authoring the Platt amendment which gave the U.S. control of Cuba. Cuban outrage was championed by the Communist party which in 1925 was outlawed by the Cuban dictator Gerado Machado. Franklin Roosevelt encouraged the Cuban army to rebel and the turmoil produced a new dictator Fulgencio Batista. Our Batista encouraged American investors, including prominent gangsters, to build an empire of prostitution and gambling. Batista fled Cuba in 1959, a few steps ahead of Castro’s rebels. President Eisenhower was baffled to learn that Cubans, for some reason or other, did not like the U.S.A. And the rest remains the history of the early 21st century. Stay tuned for further developments.