Cuba, Que Linda

Ben Tyler’s ship docked in Havana just days after the U.S. battleship Maine blew up. Buzzards still roosted on the Maine mast. Ostensibly Tyler, a less-than-successful cowboy and bank robber, was delivering horses, but clandestinely he had weapons aboard for Cubans in their struggle for independence from Spain. The roguish Tyler was lured to the island by a fellow who told him Cuba “has palm trees and pretty little dark-eyed girls and you don’t freeze to death you step outside.” In short, some of the same reasons visitors still go there.

The parallels between Cuba 100 years ago and today are not lost on Elmore Leonard, whose new historical novel has his usual cast of opposing characters: man against woman, poverty versus wealth, righteousness fighting evil, absolute control versus the desire to break free. In “Cuba Libre’s” Havana, Spaniards paid prostitutes with bullets that were then passed on to insurrectionists who used them against the Spanish. Similarly, during the Castro revolution, many American sailors paid prostitutes near the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station with weapons that were subsequently turned over to guerrillas to use against the Batista dictatorship.

Set against the backdrop of the opening salvos of the Spanish-American War, the fast-paced “Cuba Libre” draws on Leonard’s earlier mysteries and westerns in this shoot-em-up-cum-love story. The steady and dependable formula that Leonard relies on serves him well here; the lingo and settings are as precise and accurate as they are in his contemporary crime thrillers. His characters develop distinct personalities, recognizable speech patterns and disturbing foibles. Loyalties shift sides depending on who’s speaking to whom; cryptic euphemisms reveal patriotic impulses. And the book’s certifiable ogre, New Orleans sugar baron Roland Boudreaux, the one character with no moral compass, knows he’ll come out on top whether Spain or the United States wins the war. “Rollie’s fear is the Cubans will end up running their own country,” says his convent-educated American mistress, Amelia Brown, “the Creoles and all those black people who used to be slaves. He knows they wouldn’t put up with him.”

At the outset Ben Tyler kills a haughty young Spanish officer in the bar of the Inglaterra Hotel, thus setting off twisting plot lines that pause at the major currents of the day--combat, passion, atrocities and devotion. Leonard coils all the elements of his book in one sentence: “She slipped on a kimono and walked to the window again to see, three floors below, the coaches lining the street, the beggars, the children with swollen babies, mounted soldiers passing by.”

As it happens, I was recently in Havana pinning down obscure detail and large truths on another project and read much of “Cuba Libre” sitting in the lobby of the Inglaterra. Let me tell you, after weeks of research, it’s refreshing to see how that same body of information can be so skillfully manipulated in the hands of a master storyteller. I could hear echoes of Tyler’s boots jingle past, see the American press corps from Joyce Milton’s “The Yellow Kids” come alive, imagine carriages and paupers at the door. The Inglaterra is a place, says Leonard’s correspondent, “where rumors and fabrications are created to justify hotel bills.” Speaking of his colleagues, the reporter said, “some can stir up sentiment against Spain with mordant diatribes, recount eyewitness scenes of atrocities without leaving this room.”

Tyler is thrown in a dungeon for the Inglaterra shooting, and one cellmate is a survivor of the Maine who may--or may not--have seen a small, Spanish boat near the ship shortly before the explosion. Just to make sure the survivor doesn’t talk to the press or the investigators, a rogue officer from the Spanish Guardia Civil had spirited him away from the hospital where he lay recovering and imprisoned him. Some crafty Cubans and Boudreaux’s mistress rescue the pair, and the chase scene--which takes them deep into the neighboring province of Matanzas--begins.

One by one, characters reveal their true identities. The only clunky passages are spoken by Victor Fuentes, a kindly, elderly Cuban patriot who acts as historical narrator but occasionally sounds like a Cliffs Notes summary. Yet Leonard’s story line, whose curves touch on themes from Havana’s conflicting passions to everyday countryside Santeria, successfully blends history with wistful imagination. “Cuba Libre” maintains its equilibrium throughout, gives a dash of entertainment to the origins of the still-unresolved relationship between the United States and Cuba and carries the reader to a rewarding, if somewhat predictable, climax. To Leonard’s immense credit, after more than 30 books, he still explores new terrain, continues to expand his turf and pulls it off with class.