Comrades in Miami

by José Latour

Book Overview

Only ninety miles of open water separate Florida from Cuba. But after more than forty-five years of Communist rule, the two tropical paradises couldn't be more different. Jos Latour, who has been lavishly praised by Martin Cruz Smith, brilliantly brings both worlds to life in Comrades in Miami . In Havana, spymaster Victoria Valiente, head of Cuban Intelligence's vital Miami Desk, and her husband, Manuel Pardo, a computer expert, are tired of their...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802142796
• ISBN13: 9780802142795
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Cuban terror

Latour tells a fast action, interesting story set in the Cuban intelligence in Castro's Havana and Miami. It is a good read and conveys Latour's first hand experiences and impressions of Cuba and Florida. This and his other books are well worth the read. Enjoy.

"Thirty-five years have persuaded even the mentally handicapped that [Communism] doesn't work."

Often called a "master of Cuban noir," Jose Latour writes his darkest novel yet, a "Cold War" novel of espionage and suspense written long after the conclusion of the war between the major players, the US and the USSR. Here the "Cold War" exists between Cuba and the US, two patently unequal adversaries, with the Cuban intelligence services working even now to protect their borders from US influence, dissuade their people from seeking independence, and prevent their country from imploding through lack of financial resources. Elliot Steil, a former teacher in Cuba, is now working for IMLATINEX, a Florida-based company which trades with Latin American countries, including, covertly, Cuba. Taking his first vacation to Cuba in many years, he is "persuaded" by representatives of the FBI and Treasury Department to report on any contacts Cubans from Cubans and any messages from strangers. Within Cuba, Victoria Valiente, working for the general director of Intelligence, is a colonel and the most respected member of the directorate. Like the femme fatales of noir cinema, Victoria Valiente has a voracious sexual appetite, and Latour's graphically depicted scenes of her sexual experimentation turn this plain woman into an alluring siren of the first magnitude. Both complex and vulnerable, Victoria elicits some sympathy from the reader, despite her tunnel vision and lack of feeling for humanity at large. Her husband, Manuel Pardo, works for XEMIC, a front for counterintelligence, for which he has set up a data processing bureau to deal with everything from accounting to decryption. When Pardo is infected with the "virus of freedom," which he passes on to Victoria, he experiments with money laundering, setting up untraceable offshore accounts, eventually stealing almost two million dollars and threatening the stability of the Cuban economy. As the US and Cuba conduct their cloak and dagger war, Steil is caught in the crossfire. IMLATINEX, the company he manages, has a history of which he is unaware, involving Victoria Valiente and Manuel Pardo, along with the deceased head of IMLATINEX and his widow, Maria Scheindlin, a woman who emigrated from Poland thirty years ago. As in other noir thrillers, the main characters are all alienated from society, paranoid and on the run. Violent actions take place, and the reader is not always sure why these events occur since important information is sometimes withheld regarding the true identities and loyalties of some of the players. A devastated Cuban society, held to a failed communist agenda by Castro, elicits much sympathy, and the Cuban and the American intelligence communities are equally culpable in matters of treachery and single-minded action. As the dying embers of a dying regime become the focus of this complex novel, relationships between the US, Poland, Israel, Cuba, and other Latin American countries are subjected to the spotlight. Exciting, but ultimately downbeat, the novel is a thriller