title: After Havana: A Novel
author:  Charles Fleming 
description: Set in Cuba during the final months of the Batista regime, Fleming's densely populated second novel is packed with color, violence and history, but the action is sporadic and the narrative meanders. In 2002's The Ivory Coast, a white jazz musician named Deacon ran into some trouble in Las Vegas; now, three years later, he's going by the name of Peter Sloan, working at the Tropicana Hotel in Havana and mooning after his lost love, the beautiful Anita. Coincidentally, Anita is visiting Havana with her current paramour, real estate magnate Nick Calloway. Other characters from The Ivory Coast, including Sloan's benefactor, casino owner Mo Weiner, an associate of mobster Meyer Lansky, mingle with numerous new characters, among them conflicted Luis Cardoso, a Cuban security agent repelled by his government's cruelty; enigmatic Scarfioti, an American government informer; and many revolutionaries, including saintly Carlos "El Gato" Delgado, an associate of Castro, and Nilsa, a female freedom fighter. When Anita is kidnapped by the revolutionaries, Sloan, Calloway and Cardoso set out for the Sierra Maestra with the ransom. A climactic airport gunfight seals the fates of the entire cast. Double crosses and misunderstandings drive this many-layered novel, which is an ambitious near miss. Fleming's evocation of sultry Havana, insight into Cuban politics and society, and exhilarating action scenes are overwhelmed by all the characters who muse and reminisce too readily. As Delgado notes, a "certain amount of self-reflection was a fine thing.... Too much reflection made for poor revolutionaries." It makes for uneven novels, too.<br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  The Victoria da Vinci novels:
  
  
  
  Book I — Dicing Time for Gladness
  
  
  
  Book II — Crass Casualty
  
  
  
  Book III — Hate’s Profiting
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  www.AustinScottCollins.com
  
    
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ###  Dicing Time
  
  ###  for Gladness
  
  
  
  Austin Scott Collins
  
    
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  For Trish
  
    
  
  
  
  “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my
  enemies ridiculous.’  And God granted it.”
  
  — Voltaire (1694 - 1778)
  
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  #  PROLOGUE
  
  
  
  Havana Harbor, Cuba
  
  Tuesday, February 15th, 1898
  
  9 P.M.
  
  
  
  A man in a dirty brown stevedore cap stood in the dockyard shadows.  He wore
  suspenders and a pair of heavy rubber boots.  He loitered among a jumble of
  crates on a dark quayside cluttered with lobster traps, cast nets hanging out
  to dry, empty molasses casks, glass floats, burlap sacks of flour and sugar,
  and twine-tied bales of dried tobacco leaves on pallets.  Coal dust covered
  his trousers.  He raised a hand-rolled cigarette to h