Cuban Fiction: Novels from the 20th and 21st Centuries: Home

This is a novella in which everyone living in an island dictatorship is trained to betray everyone else, and an agent of the Bureau of Counterwhispering is seeking enemies of the state.

This biographical novel depicts the brutality of life for a gay man in Castro's Cuba.

This is a parable about Cuba in which the dictator of an island decides to resurrect all his dead enemies in order to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his rule. The trouble is that even dead, the individuals keep trying to escape.

A Cuban refugee who becomes a doorman at a luxury apartment house in New York tries to help the residents open the door to happiness, but ends up better friends with the residents' pets than with the people.

The only escape from poverty for an impoverished family in pre-revolutionary Cuba is a descent into madness.

Taking place at the beginning of the twentieth century, a rural family moves to Havana after a hurricane destroys their home. The author uses bulls as a metaphor for the machismo of Cuban culture as members of the family try to live life according to their own natures.

This is a reconstruction of pre-Castro Havana nightlife in a James Joyce-like fashion. The novel is full of puns, world games and intellectual gymnastics and the rhythms of nightclub music.

An unhappy New York composer undertakes an assignment to discover primitive musical instruments in the Amazonian jungle. There he finds people who live in harmony with their environment and a renewed creativity that civilization could not offer him.

A good-hearted prostitute and a Canadian conman join forces in a caper novel taking place in Havana where everyone is on the take and no one wins, but no one loses either. This is a very cheerful view of Havana by a Uruguayan author.

A Cuban poet writes a novel of magic realism that tells the story of his troubled island homeland and of the people who live there.

Two sisters, one in New York and one in Havana, try to make sense of their past and the politics that divided them.

A family of Cubans that is bitterly divided by politics works out its destinies in Havana and New York.

This is the Nobel Prize winning epic of an old Cuban fisherman and his battle, alone at sea, with a giant marlin.

Two Cuban refugee brothers gain and lose success with a mambo band in New York.

This detective story begins in Nazi Germany, but is resolved in Batista’s Havana. Fans of Kerr’s detective Bernie Gunther will enjoy this addition to the series.

A young woman describes her life in Castro's Cuba living with an irresponsible mother whose deceits create chaos in their lives both in Cuba and in the United States after they escape.

As he lies paralyzed and unable to speak in a Florida nursing home, the aged Amadeo Terra recalls his life, his many infidelities, his wife and children. Having lived without restraint, he is now dying alone. The novel also explores the Cuban immigrant community in Florida.

This collection of interlinked short stories, describe the lives of Cuban immigrants in Miami, their dreams of a homeland that becomes more perfect in memory than it was is reality, their feeling of being observed like animals in a zoo,

This novel is a riveting account of the Cuban revolution and its aftermath, employing magic realism and skill beyond what is typical in a first novel.

This is the story of the daughter of Cuban exiles who, as an adult, discovers while she pieces together her parents' life in Cuba that she is descended from Crypto-Jews who converted to avoid the inquisition and for hundreds of years practiced Judaism secretly.

An aging Cuban patriot, who is committed to Castro's revolution, sees his friends and family all try to escape the repression and poverty of the island, either by attempting to float on makeshift rafts to the US or by participating in the underground economy.

Inspector Condé is asked to investigate the discovery of a forty-year dead corpse found on the property of Hemingway's home, now a museum in Cuba.

A police inspector investigates the murder of a man, dressed as a woman who was the son of a noted diplomat. The victim was gay, introducing readers to the problems of homosexuals in modern day Cuba. Padura is a popular author throughout the world.

This novel tells the story of the assassination of Leon Trotsky in three voices. It follows Trotsky through his years of exile from Russia until his murder in Mexico. It tells the story of the Spanish Communist who was turned into an assassin by Stalin's minions. And it tells the story of a failed Cuban writer who learns these stories and needs to pass on the tales for historians.

A young woman tries to bring meaning and dignity to members of her New Jersey Cuban-American community even if it means falsifying their history.

A group of Cuban-American women gather together in Miami to recreate the old Cuban tradition of reading aloud. The book they select is a novel of nineteenth century Cuba that draws them in until the reality of the novel intersects with their everyday realities

An honest Russian police detective comes to Havana to investigate the death of a Russian KGB officer who was formerly his nemesis. This is a very dark view of Cuba after the Russians withdrew.

This novel tells the story of a teenage girl who leaves the countryside for Havana where she meets the love of her life – a man who abandons her not once but twice. Nonetheless she and her friends struggle to make a life despite politics and shortages - until her lover returns for a disastrous third time.

This is a science fiction view of the world in which aliens have captured it, and use it as a tourist destination. A metaphor for Cuba, everyone is on the take, or trying to escape to a better planet.