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Fidel's Last Days: A Novel

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In the Godfather Part II, the Corleones pay a visit to Havana at the very moment that Castro is overthrowing Batista. The film director, Francis Coppola, captures a chaotic, frenzied nation, desperate for political change. Swirling Caribbean colors, hot Latin passions, intrigue, treachery ... he captures the pulse of the island nation in turmoil, in some of the most memorable cinematic moments of all time.

In Fidel's Last Days, Roland Merullo, hastily re-creates some of this temper as a similar modern day coup d'etat is hatched against the Cuban, self-appointed Maximum Leader. Merullo paints a good picture of a chaotic Havana, an impoverished nation and failing Communist dictatorship.

But the book is no thriller. As spy fiction goes, the plot is mundane and predictable. Twist ending? Hardly. Merullo hints at the ultimate resolution multiple times throughout. The main action revolves around two characters: one, Carolina, a female ex-CIA operative who now works for an anti-Castro organization, but who is little more than a carrier pigeon. She makes plane flights, and changes clothes a lot. The second is Carlos, the Cuban Minister of Health, who duels with Castro's henchman, the head of the dictator's security forces. The main action in which these two heroes are involved seems to be sweating, nervous twitching, and adopting disguises. The Health Minister is forced to prove his loyalty to the Castro regime, and one gruesome scene ensues, but otherwise the story is devoid of action. No car chase, no computer codes cracked, no rooftop races, very little steamy romance ... this story cannot be headed for the Cineplex. An assassination attempt with topical cream?

And my pet peeve: a paragraph-long discussion of the greatest boxers of all time - in a book about Cuba - and no mention of Teofilo Stevenson.

I read this novel straight through, in two sittings, and I only stopped because I had to go to work. But it is compelling, well written, fun, and literate, too. The characters are intriguing, the set up is great, and it couldn't be more timely. Merullo is a fine writer, fully in charge of his material and his language, and one of the pleasures of reading this book is watching him at work. Not one false step. Frankly, I am amazed that this book isn't climbing the Best Seller Lists. And maybe it will yet.

A stunning ending! Suspenseful and yet not a "cheap" thriller. A good evocation of Cuba and the many and complex issues that country faces.

A secretive non-governmental organization called the Orchid has undertaken the Havana Project--an international conspiracy to remove Fidel Castro. Ex-CIA agent Carolina Aznar Perez, recruited seven years before, has been assigned to smuggle the weapon into Cuba. She is well-suited to the role. Not only is she a onetime spook; she is also the daughter of fugitives from Castro's island paradise. Her uncle Roberto Aznar, or "as he was known in émigré circles, the Grand One," is an anti-Castro leader of the "Miami Diaspora." Carolina has been raised on the belief that "[i]f what you did ultimately helped people--the Cuban people especially--then it had God's blessing."

In Cuba, meanwhile, Carlos Arroyo Gutierrez has been selected to carry out the murder. Minister of Health and Castro's personal physician for six years, Carlos is well-placed to realize the long-deferred dreams of the anticastroistas. Not only do monthly checkups leave him alone with el Comandante; he too has become an opponent of the regime. An "enormous hatred" has been growing in him compounded of horror, the murder of dissidents and suspected counter-revolutionaries, "the constant fear, the cascade of lies," with Castro's secret police "at the center of it all."

Merullo stitches the two panels of the plot tightly together, alternating between Carolina's and Carlos's part in it while turning aside occasionally to glance at a Communist official, another conspirator, or a traitor. If there are no pleasingly round characters the reason is that Merullo has rejected E. M. Forster's famous advice in "Aspects of the Novel" "to pot with plot, break it up, boil it down." He has written a thriller precisely because it is one of the few contemporary genres that relies upon plot in the old sense of a scheme to achieve some unwelcome end. Character is reduced to drama rather than drama (whatever drama there is) rising like waves of heat from character.

But why a political thriller? If a political novel is one in which ideology plays a dominant role then "Fidel's Last Days" is not a political novel. It is Merullo's conviction that men and women are motivated not by ideology but by concrete experience.

Representative of the novel's tone is Carlos's lover Elena: "Here, in Cuba, the people have made a life, in spite of everything, against the greatest odds. You're going to destroy that now? And build what in its place? Do you even know?" This is the voice of whatever is the opposite of ideology--call it the anti-politics of unexceptional life. The difference between Elena and her beloved Carlos, who misses her warm presence in bed and breakfast with her in their apartment after she leaves him, is that life under totalitarianism, which teach the Cubans to trust no one, which causes the officials to become the men they once cursed, which turns the faces of ordinary citizens self-protectively away from them, is for him "no way to live."

Merullo's true subject is what becomes of men and women when they commit themselves to a cause greater than themselves, sacrificing personal integrity, ambition, close relationships, even their lives. A political ideology, as Merullo knows, is merely one variety of such a cause. An assassination conspiracy is for him just one corner of the usual politics, which denies "the mystery of the human personality," burying it under title and office. History, he knows, is the sum total of those mysteries.

Merullo has great insight into the emotional, intellectual and spiritual nature of mankind and does a fine job of infusing this into his writing. "Fidel's Last Days" conveys the complexity, tension, mistrust, passion and conflicting goals of the people who work to protect the status quo in Cuba and those who desire to unseat it.

"Fidel's Last Days" is a departure for author, Roland Merullo. I read whatever I can about Castro and there have been a lot about the myriad attempts to prematurely end his life. I liked this one, but not as much as "The Castro Gene" by Todd Buchholz. The Castro Gene