I, CHE GUEVARA

Blackthorn’s second political thriller, a marked improvement over Sins of the Fathers (1998), is about what happens in Cuba when there’s a vacuum that everybody wants to fill. Without warning Fidel Castro announces midway through 1999 that he’s stepping down. Apparently there’s been a deal. In return for his resignation, he gets US recognition, plus the lifting of the 40-year-old embargo. To lock the deal in place, however, Cuba must hold a for-real election—to be overseen by a coterie of —objective— (read: American) observers. Meanwhile, down from the remote mountains descends a Gandhi-like figure, Ernesto Blanco, talking populism in a low-key but highly effective way. His theme is small d democracy: It takes the villagers to run a village, not those fat-cat Havana pols. Ernesto is skinny, in his 70s, entirely unprepossessing physically, but his message electrifies rural Cuba. Maybe Che Guevara didn’t die in Bolivia in 1967, people begin to tell each other. Maybe that was a mistake, or a case of deliberate misdirection, and Ernesto is actually Che returned from self-imposed exile to lead another, more authentic revolution. Back in Havana, Castro’s second tier, the incumbent radicals now named the Cuban Social Democrats, are forced to take notice. In Miami, the US-backed wannabes, the Free Cuba Party, also grow restive. As Ernesto’s True Republic movement gathers steam, his enemies turn desperate. Assassination plots abound, thick as cigar smoke, but Ernesto’s a savvy old survivor and not easy to catch off-guard. Finally, in Havana on election day, as bullets and ballots are cast with equal abandon, everything is resolved with a tidiness you—re not going to see in real-life geopolitics for a long, long time. Too many pages, too full of pace-killing digressions, but the people are livelier than in Blackthorn’s debut, and Ernesto is especially compelling. A step forward by this pseudonymous political figure, whose name, we’re told, “is known in international capitals.”