The Cuban Affair by Nelson DeMille

Sunday, July 12, 2020

5:49 AM

I had a real love/hate relationship with this book.  That doesn’t usually happen with me.  To explain, let me first tell you the four rankings that I give books:

Ranking #1 – Loved it right from the beginning.  I slow down to savor it.  Anyone who enjoys reading knows how this feels – you just are blown away from the start, and you don’t want it to end.  It stays with you for a long time, and you can’t wait to review it or recommend it – so shout it from the rooftops! (and yes, I have been known to hug the book when done).

Ranking #2 – Kind of “meh”.  I stick with it because I want to see how it ends.  There is nothing wrong with it, but it just didn’t grab me like some do.  I sometimes find myself rolling my eyes and speeding through. It doesn’t stay in my mind – other than to remember it wasn’t a favorite.  When I run out of shelf space it’s the first to get donated.

Ranking #3 – Not my cup of tea.  I don’t finish it.  I don’t take giving up on a book lightly, so sometimes I read well beyond where I should just trying to squeeze something out of it to like.  When I decide I’ve had enough, I put it back on the shelf for another day.  Sometimes it’s just my mood, so I might try to give it another shot. 

Ranking #4 – How did this get published!  It’s so bad that I’m screaming “you’ve got to be kidding” or “what the ever loving f*ck”, and want to throw it across the room! It makes me angry that I wasted my time.  It’s donated as well.  Why keep something you hate.

That brings me to “The Cuban Affair”.  Parts of it fit into each one of those rankings.  As I go through my thoughts on this book I’ll tell you where some of those parts fit.

The book opens with the main character recounting the story –

“I was standing at the bar in the Green Parrot, waiting for a guy named Carlos from Miami who’d called my cell a few days ago and said he might have a job for me. Carlos did not give me his last name, but he had ID’d himself as a Cuban American. I don’t know why I needed to know that, but I told him I was Scots-Irish-English American, in case he was wondering.”

“My name is Daniel Graham MacCormick — Mac for short — age thirty-five, and I’ve been described as tall, tan, and ruggedly handsome. This comes from the gay clientele in the Parrot, but I’ll take it. I live here on the island of Key West, and I’m the owner and skipper of a 42-foot deep-sea fishing charter boat called the Maine, named for my home state — not the American battleship that blew up in Havana Harbor, though some people think so.”

This hooked me right away.  It reminded me of some of those old film noir movies that I love so much. In fact, the first thing that popped into my mind was  Fred MacMurray in “Double Indemnity” – classic film noir narration.

And so begins the story of how Mac is recruited to steal millions of dollars that has been hidden away in a cave in Cuba. 

Mac meets Carlos, an attorney, who wants to hire Mac’s boat for a fishing tournament under what is known as the “Cuban Thaw” – the warming of U.S. and Cuba relations. 

But Mac’s no dummy, he knows that Cuba is a country that doesn’t take too kindly to Americans, and he’s not quite convinced that Carlos is giving him the entire story.  Carlos is undeterred and convinces Mac to take him and his clients on an evening cruise on Mac’s fishing boat.  He wants Mac to hear the whole story, and believes that his clients can persuade him.

Enter the beautiful Sara Ortega, and an older gentleman, Eduardo Valazquez.  Sara explains that her grandfather managed an American bank in Cuba, and was able to hide sixty million American dollars in a cave before he fled Castro’s revolution. Eduardo, the mysterious Cuban exile,  has other reasons which mostly revolve around his hatred of the Castro regime and longs to someday return to a free Cuba.

The plan on paper is pretty simple, Mac and Sara will join a group from Yale on a cultural tour to Cuba.  There they will pretend that they don’t know each other, but then later fake a “holiday romance” so that when they disappear from time to time no one will question it.  I mean, who would question two lovers who sneak off for a little romance.

The second half of the plan is how they are going to get all of that cash off the island – and that’s where Mac’s boat and the fishing tournament comes in.  Once again, on paper, it looks pretty simple.  Mac’s cut of two million dollars is nothing to sneeze at, but is it worth risking his life, or even worse, living the rest of his life in a Cuban prison.  

Of course we know that Mac takes the job, and also recruits his first mate, Jack, or there’d be no book.  But as we also know, plans don’t always work out and this plan starts to nose dive quickly. 

Okay, so let’s stop here and take a look at my ranking system.  So far it’s Ranking #1.  I love the premise, and it promises to be a great adventure. I enjoyed the description of Key West and that easy-going lifestyle.  It made me want to live there.  I thought Mac was an interesting character, and there was a little about his background and his time as a soldier in Afghanistan.  Just enough to give me an idea of how he wound up in Key West.

Moving on —

So now we have Mac and Sara in Cuba and things get off to a rocky start.  They’re not sure who to trust – and the police may be suspicious of Sara, a Cuban American, who they know visited the year before.  They stick with the plan and slowly begin their “fake” romance.  But of course the romance becomes real and that’s where I move to Ranking #2. 

I didn’t buy the relationship.  I found the characters to be annoying and there didn’t seem to be any spark.  Their “witty repartee” was at times painful, and not very witty.  The narration that I loved at the beginning was gone, and Mac’s recounting of the story started to sound more like a 13 year old who just discovered that women had boobs.  You know when you read a book, and two characters are just meant to be together and you keep waiting through the slow burn for them to finally get there – well this didn’t happen. In fact, I kept thinking the story would be so much better if they just went their separate ways. 

And then there are some of the ancillary characters.

Jack, the first mate.  Jack was great.  I’d want him on my side if I ever needed a grizzled old Vietnam vet.  He’ll have your back.

Eduardo, the Cuban exile.  His only role as a character was for his connections, and how DeMille was able to get some of the implausible pieces of the story to fit.

Antonio, the tour guide.  What a weasel, but their encounter with him was one of those implausible pieces that just didn’t fit.  I guess it was thrown in for some drama, but it fell flat. 

Filipe, who I can’t say anything about at his point without spoiling something later in the book.  Just know that I wanted to slap the crap right out of him.

And that’s how I get to Ranking #4.  Eduardo, Antonio, and Filipe.    

So to sum it up, the adventure part of the book was very good; the romance left a lot to be desired; some of the dialogue was very juvenile; and some of the characters were awful.  That’s why I have a love/hate relationship with this book.

Lastly, I do want to mention something that I did like about the book, and that is Cuba as a character.  I did some additional reading on Nelson DeMille and how this book came about.  It seems that when DeMille was a child his neighbors were Cuban refugees, and it sparked an interest.  It must have been something that he thought about throughout his life, and in 2015 he was able to visit Cuba on one of those cultural tours.  It was at that time that he scouted locations for this book.  His descriptions of how people live in such a closed society, under a communist regime, are vivid.  It paints a very bleak picture.  I’m going to do some research myself because I’m curious about how such a beautiful and prosperous country can get so caught up in corruption that a communist dictator can take over – and before they knew it, the people of Cuba went from one corrupt government to one that was even more deadly.  It’s a valuable lesson. 

Postscript – I’m sure most of you are too young to remember the old movie “Double Indemnity”, but it’s a classic and stars not only Fred MacMurray, but my all-time favorite actress Barbara Stanwyck. Check it out – it pops up on Turner Classic Movies from time to time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Indemnity_(film)