Now that we’ve finished our November Cuban book (A Planet for Rent), it’s time to check out reads related to Cuba. We weren’t surprised to find many books about the country, but we were surprised to see so many with great reviews!
Below are 11 related reads we think you’ll love. All are about Cuba written by Americans (or in one case, a British-American) so while they won’t make it into our official reading list, they are fantastic in their own right.
And we’re also pleased to tell you we added 9 new purely Cuban books written by native Cubans to our reading list as well.
That’s a lot of fantastic Cuban fiction & nonfiction we think you’ll enjoy.
Happy reading!
Written by an American about Cuba:
“It’s hard to imagine that any [Cuban history] is as enjoyable as Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba by Tom Gjelten. His book is as smooth and refreshing as a well-made daiquiri.” - The NY Times
“In this widely hailed book, NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten fuses the story of the Bacardi family and their famous rum business with Cuba's tumultuous experience over the last 150 years to produce a deeply entertaining historical narrative.
The company Facundo Bacardi launched in Cuba in 1862 brought worldwide fame to the island, and in the decades that followed his Bacardi descendants participated in every aspect of Cuban life. With his intimate account of their struggles and adventures across five generations, Gjelten brings to life the larger story of Cuba's fight for freedom, its tortured relationship with America, the rise of Fidel Castro, and the violent division of the Cuban nation.”
Written by an American about both Cuba & the US:
“Instant NY Times bestseller!
In 1960s Florida, a young Cuban exile will risk her life—and heart—to take back her country in this exhilarating NY Times bestselling historical novel from the author of Next Year in Havana, a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick.
Beautiful. Daring. Deadly.
The Cuban Revolution took everything from sugar heiress Beatriz Perez—her family, her people, her country. Recruited by the CIA to infiltrate Fidel Castro's inner circle and pulled into the dangerous world of espionage, Beatriz is consumed by her quest for revenge and her desire to reclaim the life she lost.
As the Cold War swells like a hurricane over the shores of the Florida Strait, Beatriz is caught between the clash of Cuban American politics and the perils of a forbidden affair with a powerful man driven by ambitions of his own. When the ever-changing tides of history threaten everything she has fought for, she must make a choice between her past and future—but the wrong move could cost Beatriz everything—not just the island she loves, but also the man who has stolen her heart.”
Written by an American about both Cuba & the US:
“The Red Umbrella is a moving tale of a 14-year-old girl's journey from Cuba to America as part of Operation Pedro Pan—an organized exodus of more than 14,000 unaccompanied children, whose parents sent them away to escape Fidel Castro's revolution.
In 1961, two years after the Communist revolution, Lucía Álvarez still leads a carefree life, dreaming of parties and her first crush. But when the soldiers come to her sleepy Cuban town, everything begins to change. Freedoms are stripped away. Neighbors disappear. And soon, Lucía's parents make the heart-wrenching decision to send her and her little brother to the United States—on their own.
Suddenly plunked down in Nebraska with well-meaning strangers, Lucía struggles to adapt to a new country, a new language, a new way of life. But what of her old life? Will she ever see her home or her parents again? And if she does, will she still be the same girl?
Written by an American about Cuba:
“In modern-day Havana, the remnants of the glamorous past are everywhere—old hotel-casinos, vintage American cars, & flickering neon signs speak of a bygone era that is widely familiar & often romanticized, but little understood. In Havana Nocturne, T.J. English offers a multifaceted true tale of organized crime, political corruption, roaring nightlife, revolution, & international conflict that interweaves the dual stories of the Mob in Havana & the event that would overshadow it, the Cuban Revolution.
As the Cuban people labored under a violently repressive regime throughout the 50s, Mob leaders Meyer Lansky & Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano turned their eye to Havana. To them, Cuba was the ultimate dream, the greatest hope for the future of the US Mob in the post-Prohibition years of intensified government crackdowns. But when it came time to make their move, it was Lansky, the brilliant Jewish mobster, who reigned supreme. Having cultivated strong ties with the Cuban government & in particular the brutal dictator Fulgencio Batista, Lansky brought key mobsters to Havana to put his ambitious business plans in motion.
Before long, the Mob, with Batista's corrupt government in its pocket, owned the biggest luxury hotels & casinos in Havana, launching an unprecedented tourism boom complete with the most lavish entertainment, the world's biggest celebrities, the most beautiful women, & gambling galore. But their dreams collided with those of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, & others who would lead the country's disenfranchised to overthrow their corrupt government & its foreign partners—an epic cultural battle that T. J. English captures in all its sexy, decadent, ugly glory.”
Written by an American about Cuba:
“A wild ride through Cuba during the Spanish-American War.” - Miami Herald
“Not only his finest novel, but one that transcends the limits of its genre and is worthy of being evaluated as literary fiction.” - Houston Chronicle
“Before Grand Master Elmore Leonard earned his well-deserved reputation as the ‘best writer of crime fiction alive’ (Newsweek), he penned some of the finest western fiction to ever appear in print. (The classics Hombre, Valdez is Coming, and 3:10 to Yuma were just a few of his notable works.) With his extraordinary Cuba Libre, Leonard ingeniously combines all of his many talents and delivers a historical adventure/caper/western/noir like none other. The creator of U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, star of Raylan, Pronto, Riding the Rap, and TV’s Justified, spins a gloriously exciting yarn about an American horse wrangler who escapes a date with a Cuban firing squad to join forces with a powerful sugar baron’s lady looking to make waves and score big in and around Spanish-American War-torn Havana in 1898. Everything you love about Leonard’s fiction—and more—is evident in Cuba Libre. No wonder the NY Times Book Review enthusiastically declared him ‘a literary genius.’”
Written by an American about Cuba:
“Granted unprecedented access to travel throughout the country, this lively travelogue presents us with rare insight into one of the world's only Communist countries.
‘Havana knew me by my shoes,’ begins Tom Miller's lively and entertaining account of his sojourn for more than eight months traveling through Cuba, mixing with its literati and black marketers, its cane cutters and cigar rollers. Its best-known personalities and ordinary citizens talk to him about the U.S. embargo and tell their favorite Fidel jokes as they stand in line for bread at the Socialism or Death Bakery.
Miller provides a running commentary on Cuba's food shortages, exotic sensuality, and baseball addiction as he follows the scents of Graham Greene, José Marti, Ernest Hemingway, and the Mambo Kings. The result of this informed and adventurous journey is a vibrant, rhythmic portrait of a land and people too long shielded from American eyes.”
Written by an American about Cuba:
“Acclaimed around the world and a national best-seller, this is the definitive work on Che Guevara, the dashing rebel whose epic dream was to end poverty and injustice in Latin America and the developing world through armed revolution. Jon Lee Anderson’s biography traces Che’s extraordinary life, from his comfortable Argentine upbringing to the battlefields of the Cuban revolution, from the halls of power in Castro’s government to his failed campaign in the Congo and assassination in the Bolivian jungle.
Anderson has had unprecedented access to the personal archives maintained by Guevara’s widow and carefully guarded Cuban government documents. He has conducted extensive interviews with Che’s comrades—some of whom speak here for the first time—and with the CIA men and Bolivian officers who hunted him down. Anderson broke the story of where Guevara’s body was buried, which led to the exhumation and state burial of the bones. Many of the details of Che’s life have long been cloaked in secrecy and intrigue. Meticulously researched and full of exclusive information, Che Guevara illuminates as never before this mythic figure who embodied the high-water mark of revolutionary communism as a force in history.”
Written by an American about Cuba:
“What’s it like to live in a modern city where water and electricity, soap and paper are rationed? How do you find a pop-up restaurant in the depths of the countryside?
Among Friends: Travels in Cuba is an account of one person’s discovery of Cuba as it moves towards a more open economy. With an eye for the telling details of daily life, Murray first explores Havana and then other provinces to the west and east in visits spread over a period of eight years. We meet Julian, her Cuban guide and friend, Magdalena, landlady and untiring critic of the Castro regime, Ernesto, taxi driver and mountain guide, and an entertaining cast of naïve Canadian tourists, enterprising peasants and perspiring bicitaxi drivers. Besides probing the Cuban psyche, Murray’s explorations highlight the unique scenery of Cuba from the elegant center of old Havana to the mogotes of the Vinales valley, and from the pristine beaches of the northern keys to historic Trinidad and the Escambray mountains with their lakes, waterfalls and jungles.
A humorous and sympathetic portrait of Cuba as it emerges from over half a century of privation and isolation, this book will appeal to future as well as former visitors.”
Written by the British-American son of a Cuban exile about Cuba:
“50 years after the Cuban revolution, the legendary wealth of the sugar magnate Julio Lobo remains emblematic of a certain way of life that came to an abrupt end when Castro marched into Havana. Known in his day as the King of Sugar, Lobo was for decades the most powerful force in the world sugar market. Born in 1898, the year of Cuba's independence, Lobo's life mirrors, in almost lurid technicolor, the many rises and final fall of the troubled Cuban republic.
The details of Lobo's life are fit for Hollywood. He twice cornered the international sugar market and had the largest collection of Napoleonica outside of France, including the emperor's back teeth and death mask. He once faced a firing squad only to be pardoned at the last moment, and later survived a gangland shooting. He courted movie stars from Bette Davis to Joan Fontaine, and filled the swimming pool at his sprawling estate with perfume when Esther Williams came to visit.
As Rathbone observes, such are the legends of which revolutions are made, and later justified. But Lobo was also a progressive and a philanthropist, and his genius was so widely acknowledged that Che Guevara personally offered him the position of minister of sugar in the Communist regime. When Lobo declined—knowing that their worldviews could never be compatible—his properties were nationalized, most of his fortune vanished overnight, and he left the island, never to return to his beloved Cuba.
Journalist John Paul Rathbone has been fascinated by this intoxicating, whirligig, and contradictory pre-revolutionary period his entire life. His mother was also a member of Havana's storied haute bourgeoisie and a friend of Lobo's daughters. Woven into Lobo's tale is her family's experience of republic, revolution, and exile, as well as the author's own struggle to come to grips with Cuba's, and his family's, turbulent history.”
Written by an American about Cuba:
“Our Woman in Havana chronicles the past several decades of US-Cuba relations from the bird’s-eye view of State Department veteran Vicki Huddleston, our top diplomat in Havana under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush. After the US embassy in Havana was closed in 1961, relations between the two countries broke off. A thaw came in 1977, with the opening of a de facto embassy in Havana, the US Interests Section, where Huddleston would later serve.
In her compelling memoir of a diplomat at work, she tells gripping stories of face-to-face encounters with Fidel Castro and the initiatives she undertook, like the transistor radios she furnished to ordinary Cubans. With inside accounts of many dramatic episodes, like the tumultuous Elián González custody battle, Huddleston also evokes the charm of the island country, and her warm affection for the Cuban people. Uniquely qualified to explain the inner workings of US-Cuba relations, Huddleston examines the Obama administration's diplomatic opening of 2014, the mysterious ‘sonic’ brain and hearing injuries suffered by US and Canadian diplomats who were serving in Havana, and the rescinding of the diplomatic opening under the Trump administration. Huddleston recounts missed opportunities for détente, and the myths, misconceptions, and lies that have long pervaded US-Cuba relations.
With Raúl Castro scheduled to step down in 2018, she also peers into the future, when for the first time in more than six decades no one named Castro will be Cuba's leader. Our Woman in Havana is essential reading for everyone interested in Cuba.”
Written by an American about Cuba:
"Fascinating" (Forbes), USA Today’s “New and Noteworthy,” & one of The Washington Post's “10 Books to Read and Gift in December”
”Fidel Castro is dead. Donald Trump was elected president. And to most outsiders, the fate of Cuba has never seemed more uncertain. Yet those who look close enough may recognize that signs of the next revolution are etched in plain view.
This is Cuba is a true story that begins in the summer of 2009 when a young American photo-journalist is offered the chance of a lifetime—a two-year assignment in Havana.
For David Ariosto, the island is an intriguing new world, unmoored from the one he left behind. From neighboring military coups, suspected honey traps, salty spooks, and desperate migrants to dissidents, doctors, and Havana’s empty shelves, Ariosto uncovers the island’s subtle absurdities, its Cold War mystique, and the hopes of a people in the throes of transition. Beyond the classic cars, salsa, and cigars lies a country in which black markets are ubiquitous, free speech is restricted, privacy is curtailed, sanctions wreak havoc, and an almost Kafka-esque goo of Soviet-style bureaucracy still slows the gears of an economy desperate to move forward.
But life in Cuba is indeed changing, as satellite dishes and internet hotspots dot the landscape and more Americans want in. Still, it’s not so simple. The old sentries on both sides of the Florida Straits remain at their posts, fists clenched and guarding against the specter of a Cold War that never quite ended, despite the death of Fidel and the hand-over of the presidency to a man whose last name isn’t Castro.
And now, a crisis is brewing.”