This review was written for the Texas Observer, which decided not to publish it on the provincial grounds that it wasn't Texan enough. Indeed, on close inspection, it isn't Texan at all. But it sure strikes a chord in this ex-Miamian. Good book, too.
His Man in Havana
King Bongo
Thomas Sanchez
Knopf
Thomas Sanchez’s 2004 novel, King Bongo, is a
kaleidoscopic portrait of pre-Revolutionary Havana, which shared with all
pre-Revolutionary capitals, from Paris to Petrograd, an ineffable decadence and
corruption to the bone and, to the revolutionaries waiting in the wings, a
crying need to be cleansed of its sins. As the novel opens on New Year’s Eve,
1957 (two years to the day before Castro took over), the eponymous hero,
bongo-playing, womanizing King Bongo, a Cuban-American nightclub musician,
private shamus and insurance investigator—“a little man, but
he had a big plan”—is driving his snazzy Studebaker Rocket along the
city’s waterfront promenade, the Malécon, to the fabled Tropicana nightclub,
where he is to meet his girlfriend, Mercedes, and watch his twin sister, an
exotic dancer known as “The Panther,” perform onstage. Right away, with a vivid
but economical sketch, Sanchez ushers us into the Havana that was:
He loved this drive out of Havana headed for the
Tropicana, past the centuries-old mansions facing the sea, fanciful three-story
palaces with gaily colored facades of pillars and balconies, cheek by cheek
with each other, like old tarts posing for a group reunion shot in the glare of
tropical sunlight, shining with a glamour that refused to fade away.
Shortly after he arrives at the Tropicana, however, Bongo
narrowly escapes being blown to bits by a terrorist bomb. He loses Mercedes in
the explosion and in the ensuing confusion his sister disappears. Bongo doesn’t
know if she’s dead or alive, or who planted the bomb, or why; the revolutionary
barbudos (bearded ones) are suspected, of course, but Bongo discounts
this, as there were too many obscure hints and discreet warnings at the time,
and anyway the “revolutionaries” have become convenient straw men for every
screwball with a grudge in Havana.
Bongo is a memorable character. Half American and half
Cuban, he knows both languages, both cultures, both sides of life. He can eat
rice and beans and play music in the slums at night and the next day hobnob
with rich Americans and their Cuban cohorts in the orgy-palaces of Batista’s
modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah. Most of Bongo’s insurance business comes, of
course, from the rich, whom he knows by their scent: the scent of money: (The
rich smell different from you and me.)
[T]he lush smell of success, the fragrant scent of a
new stack of peso bills. He knew the look of well-fed cologne-slapped cheeks,
the faces of those who held those stacks of cash in their tight fists. Cash was
piled up in the Capitolio, in the casinos, in the fancy Art Deco office
buildings and banks of Vedado, in the beach mansions of Miramar, in the
four-hundred-year-old palaces of Old Havana.
But as the son of a mixed-race marriage himself Bongo’s deep
sympathies are with the wretched mestizos and blacks of Havana’s
overflowing slums. This is not overstated, nor is the reader harangued; it is
just a fact. Bongo knows the score.
[He] understood those who tried to crawl out of it by
any means possible, to claw their way to a wage one inch over the poverty line.
This was the tropical truth for most of those whose skins were black—African
black, slave black, bondage black, sugarcane-cutting brute animal black,
disposable black . . . A man was either holding the shit end of the stick or
someone else was.
Like Bongo’s Rocket (with “two hundred horses” under the
hood, it is much coveted by Havana’s demimonde), once it gets going the
plot roars into action and doesn’t let up for 300 pages. Bongo wants answers,
and the ones with the answers are bad guys indeed, but behind them are even
worse guys, many in uniform, and some bad (if alluringly bad) gals, as well. We
are in the rank heart of Noir; only Bogart and Greenstreet are missing. Everywhere
Bongo turns there are smoldering sexpots and murderers and perverts and hit men
and conspiring Americans…well, you name it. Havana in the ‘50s was a wide-open
town. The Mafia virtually ran the place in Batista’s name with Meyer Lansky as
proconsul, as anyone who’s seen or read The Godfather knows. Hollywood
was there: an Errol Flynn type, referred to as “The Bad Actor,” pops up in the
novel, face-lifts, teenage mistresses, yacht and all. Baseball stars and famous
crooners put in appearances, and in one of the many expertly interwoven
subplots the dictator himself, Fulgencio Batista, is glimpsed through the
crosshairs of a gun aimed at him by a revolutionary sympathizer. (Note: Batista
died in luxurious exile on Spain’s Costa Brava, many years later). There’s even
a Fu Manchu-like all-knowing Chinese, Mr. Wu, king of Havana’s Chinatown, who
shares with Bongo a passion for orchids. Through this teeming labyrinth the
cunning Bongo makes his way, picking up a clue here, a hint there, and having
to double back on his tracks time and again to evade an increasing number of
pursuers, the most relentless of whom is his longtime nemesis, Humberto Zapata,
a member of Batista’s secret police. Zapata himself, it turns out, is nursing
an old emotional wound, as well as a shocking secret, and a surprising link
emerges between him and Bongo, via the missing Panther. Slowly the two men
grope their way through the shadows toward each other for an entirely
satisfying and dramatic denouement that leaves our otherwise shrewd and
prescient hero King Bongo none the wiser about the way things in Cuba are
headed in general: “Havana is the future,” he confidently declares, toward the
end. Nice touch, that; an authorial reminder that no matter how inevitable
historical retrospect big events seem to have been in, people at the time just
don’t have a clue how things are going to turn out.
That there is something rotten in the state of Cuba today is
undeniable, but under Batista in the 1950s things were corrupt to an almost
ludicrous degree. It is a testimony to Sanchez’s skill that in this riveting,
tightly-crafted novel he makes the revolutionaries’ case subtlely, by
implication, but so thoroughly that by the end the reader fully appreciates how
deep was the desire for change, how awesome the extent of the corruption, and
why so many living under Bastista’s regime, which maintained power through
assassination, martial law, and routine brutality, longed for revolution for
revolution’s sake, no other reason being required. (In fact, there was nothing
overtly communistic in the 26th of July Movement, Fidel Castro’s
original political party; that came later, with power, when he needed Soviet
aid.) With Cuba living through the autumn of its patriarch, it is a vivid
reminder that today’s half-mad, corrupt old tyrant was once the vital,
charismatic leader of a band of idealistic guerrillas who represented
liberation for an entire oppressed nation. Sic transit gloria. After all,
Lenin, Hitler, and Mao—and Batista--were once beacons of hope to their people,
too.
