Havana: A Novel

Havana, Cuba in 1957 was the original gambling sin city. The haunt of the wealthy and famous offering gambling, sex, and drugs in an exotic Caribbean setting only 90 miles from Florida. Luxury casinos with five-star hotels, fine dining, and elaborate floorshows with scantily clad beautiful women. A corrupt dictatorship inviting investment by the American Mafia fuels Havana's hospitality industry success. Cuban-American Bart Landeira resigns from the CIA in disgust after working as a field operative following service in WWII. Havana is to be a new beginning. He returns to journalism and unexpectedly becomes involved with the family rum business. Reconnecting with his estranged father, he learns disturbing details of his father's involvement with the American Mafia and Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Landeira's father is a lawyer with a consulting practice in Tampa, Florida and Havana. The elder Landeira is also chief financial officer of the family corporation invested in sugar cane, tobacco, and rum. His father's consulting work centers on creating shell companies to enable money laundering and conceal Mafia investment in Havana. Batista's corrupt partnership with the Mafia fuels a growing leftist insurgency resulting in violent attempts at repression by the Cuban Army. Events interact to push Landeira into active political resistance against the Mafia and the Batista regime.