Cuban government under Castro

The Cuban government under Castro is presented as both a system of entrenched political control and the target around which clandestine plans converge. Its March 2003 crackdown drives a pursuit of the same supernatural cameo by rival covert actors, while the regime’s reach makes the circumstances of the jewel’s disappearance difficult to verify.

Political structure and clandestine opposition

The novel depicts opposition not as wholly external to the state but as operating within its own ranks. Two covert dissidents hold senior positions in the regime while secretly organizing against it. One establishes an unusual Masonic lodge in the outskirts of Havana and takes care to keep it from police infiltration. The pair also maintain underground connections with prominent Freemasons among Cuban émigrés in Florida and elsewhere in the United States.

Their stated aim is to prepare for the period after Castro: they seek to lay groundwork for the government that might follow four decades of socialist rule. Their covert activity therefore combines internal access with ties beyond the country, placing political succession—not merely immediate resistance—at the center of their project.

The crackdown and the cameo

The two dissidents learn of a jewel that had caught fire in Cárdenas and was associated with a man’s death by spontaneous combustion. Believing the object’s supernatural powers could be turned against the regime, they make acquiring it part of their political effort. Octavio, one of the pair, follows the trail of Rodrigo Lerbier, a babalao who has the cameo, and works to locate the temple in Havana where it might be displayed among sacred objects.

In March 2003, a wave of repression against dissidents and other refractory elements complicates the plan. At the same time, it brings another pursuer close behind Octavio. Their nocturnal movements reveal that they are pursuing the same object, turning the regime’s crackdown into the setting for a contest among clandestine forces rather than a straightforward state operation to recover the cameo.

Attribution and narrative significance

The CIA is on the verge of recovering the jewel when it disappears. To protect its credibility, the agency attributes the loss to the Cuban government’s purge of dissidents and refractory elements. The narrative presents this as an expedient explanation rather than established proof that the regime took the cameo: the purge provides cover for the agency’s failure, while the object’s actual whereabouts remain unknown.

The government’s role is thus defined less by a directly shown seizure than by the political conditions its repression creates and the uncertainty it enables. Its authority constrains open opposition, drives conspirators into covert networks, and supplies a plausible public account for an intelligence failure. The cameo’s disappearance leaves the competing plans unresolved and returns the pursuit to uncertainty.