BOOKS FROM CUBAOutcast
by José Latour
Description:
U.S., Outcast is a smart, multi-voiced, savagely unsentimental tale that blends cultural critique, personal discovery, and explosive violence to reveal the callous, impersonal dysfunction of both contemporary Cuban socialism and its self-congratulatory free-market alternative in Miami. The son of a Cuban mother and a U.s. laborer stationed on the island before the revolution, the novel's protagonist, Elliot Steil, is a down-and-out school teacher in Havana. Quietly resigned to the tedium and simplicity of his life, Elliot has, like many of his fellow Havanans, systematically distanced himself from all aspirations for a better future. Elliott's hopes suddenly resurface when he is offered a "once-in-a-lifetime" chance to escape his current situation by a mysterious visitor to the island who claims to be a friend of Elliot's late father. When the stranger quickly turns from savior to would-be assassin, Elliot finds himself perilously immersed in the waters of the Florida Straits and in the images of a past that he had spent most of his adult life trying to forget. Elliot survives the ordeal, but his journey to find the man who betrayed him and to discover the mystery of his bicultural past lure him into a tangle of deceit and corruption in ther underworld of Miami
