A thriller ripped from Cuba’s headlines

Lawrence Ferlinghetti once quipped that since 1959, Fidel Castro had been the United States’ only real president.

Even discounting a canny old poet’s fondness for aphoristic Dada, there’s a squirm-worthy element of truth in the remark. Barack Obama will be the 11th American president to hold office since Castro and his comrades triumphantly entered Havana 50 years ago this New Year’s Day. Since then, it’s fair to say that the great dictator has held generations of U.S. policymakers in reactive thrall. Efforts to assassinate or overthrow him have failed. The Missile Crisis brought America and the Soviet Union as close as they ever came to nuclear war. Generations of economic cold war have failed. Communism has fallen, but unlike that other lingering Marxist relic -- Kim Jong Il -- Castro still is held in high regard in wide swaths of the world, particularly Latin America.

In the meantime, the so-called Cuban model grinds along as one of the world’s most perplexing societies. It’s easy to say that Castro eliminated inequality by making everyone equally poor -- but that’s not quite the whole picture. He did that certainly, but he also took a country where a majority were illiterate and created a school system that teaches nearly 100% of its students to read and exports literacy programs to the developing world. He took a nation where few had access to modern medicine and gave it an admirable system of universal healthcare.

At the same time, he imposed a tyranny that gave a literate populace nothing to read but propaganda and a healthy people nothing to which they could devote their energies but party-line politics and sputtering, outdated industries. Cuba can’t feed itself or even grow enough sugar to supply its own market. It has a thriving biotech sector and hospitals open to foreigners willing to pay for organ transplants or other expensive treatments, but its scientists and surgeons can’t adequately feed their own families unless they receive remittances from abroad.

And yet large numbers of Cubans cannot imagine a future without Fidel, now 82 and ailing. He lingers like a ghost in pajamas, still powerful but unseen, while day-to-day power in a nation theoretically run according to the dictates of scientific socialism has passed through the crudest of antique mechanisms -- dynastic succession -- to his 77-year-old brother, Raul.

If Soviet Russia was -- as Winston Churchill famously described it -- “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” Communist Cuba is and has been a melodrama shrouded in paradox.

That ought to make for compelling fiction, the sort that might be approached in a particularly fascinating way through the thriller genre. That’s certainly what Roland Merullo had in mind with “Fidel’s Last Days,” a tightly plotted but ultimately unsatisfying fiction concerning an elaborate conspiracy to kill Castro. Merullo is a prolific author, whose best-known book is probably the fable “Golfing With God,” which envisioned heaven as a villa alongside a celestial fairway. In “Fidel’s Last Days,” he’s come up with a promising structure.

The taut and intricate narrative is essentially built around a pair of promising characters -- one the daughter of Cuban American emigres, the other a conflicted member of Castro’s inner circle. Carolina Perez is a onetime CIA operative, now deeply undercover and enmeshed for five years in a powerful and secretive organization, the White Orchid, whose goal is the dictator’s assassination (one assumes that the association with the tragic anti-Nazi underground organization, the White Rose, is deliberate). Carolina’s uncle is Roberto Anzar, a wealthy political power broker in Miami’s intensely anti-Castro Cuban immigrant community. He, however, is one of the many people Carolina is willing to deceive to prove herself a worthy assassin.

Meanwhile, a fellow conspirator broods in Havana -- Carlos Gutierrez, Cuba’s minister of health, has become a silent dissenter from the hypocrisy and cruelty of the Comandante and has resolved to act, which leads him and his family, particularly his anguished wife, into deep peril. As Carlos becomes more deeply enmeshed in the plot to kill Castro, he must also reconcile the impulse to violent political action with his own deepest instincts as a healer.

He and Carolina will meet in the most difficult imaginable circumstances as the plot builds to a breakneck but oddly surprising conclusion in a series of final chapters that adopt the unfortunate and overused device of proceeding in clipped and abbreviated form.

It’s all rather promising and mildly entertaining, if a reader is in an undemanding frame of mind -- say, on a longish airline flight. Unfortunately, “Fidel’s Last Days” falls short of the thriller’s first rank for a couple of reasons. One has to do with the author’s ability to fully realize his characters. Carlos, in particular, is a potentially fascinating protagonist, and Merullo has situated him in precisely the right geographic, social and political spot to explore the agonizing complexities of the strange legacy that is the residue of revolutionary Cuba. It never quite comes off, though, and that raises another difficulty.

The author doesn’t evince any real first-hand experience of either Cuba or Cuban American Miami. That’s not necessarily a disqualifier, and unnamed Cuban American friends are thanked for their assistance in the acknowledgments. Somehow, however, the result feels a bit too much like imagination based on research.

One can easily recall similar situations in which an author overcame such impediments. Martin Cruz Smith’s 1981 thriller, “Gorky Park,” was a brilliant and entirely believable evocation of the crumbling Soviet Union’s decadence -- even though the author had spent only a few days there as a tourist. The book’s protagonist -- the police inspector Renko -- was also a fully rounded fictional personage, deeply flawed, deeply conflicted and deeply appealing for all of that.

In Merullo’s case, his evocation of contemporary Cuba somehow doesn’t measure up to either the reality or the drama of the headlines. Similarly, neither Carolina nor Carlos ever quite rises to the level of believable humanity that elevates the best thriller’s protagonists to engaging, if bemusing personalities.

The best that can be said of “Fidel’s Last Days” is close but no cigar -- and, certainly, not a Habana.

--

timothy.rutten@latimes.com