CUBA LIBRE

Blindfolded and hearing this story read, I should guess it to be an early Hemingway. It has that same sense of the tropics that he reveals occasionally, that same cryptic, illusory vein, that sense of seizing bits here, bits there, and fitting them, almost unconsciously, into a pattern as the story progresses. There is none of the directness, the realism of most of Kantor's work. This is almost too oblique, and yet somehow it suits the brief tragedy of the scene in Havana. Longer than Bugle Ann or Valedictory, but at that not a full length book. It is a moving story, vividly told, ""of a Cuban patriot who sacrificed all for his cause.