Cuban period under the Castro regime

The Cuban period under the Castro regime gives the novel a political setting in which public authority, clandestine opposition, and the pursuit of a supernatural object converge. The regime, established in 1959, is shown not only through its repression of dissent but also through covert networks within its own institutions and foreign intelligence operations working around them.

Regime and clandestine opposition

The novel presents senior figures within the Cuban government as participants in hidden opposition. Two dissidents, holding high positions in the regime, establish a discreet Masonic lodge in Havana and take care to keep it beyond police infiltration. Their network reaches Cuban Freemasons in Florida and elsewhere in the United States, associated with the Grand Lodge of Cuba in Exile. Their stated political purpose is to prepare for a government that might follow Castro’s rule.

This underground organization is not portrayed as merely political. After learning that a jewel had caught fire in Cárdenas and was connected to a man’s death, the two Masons seek to seize it and direct its supposed supernatural powers against the regime. Political change and the occult therefore become entangled: the cameo is imagined as both a dangerous relic and a possible instrument of resistance.

Intelligence operations and the cameo

The Central Intelligence Agency is also pursuing the jewel. An agent attached to the United States diplomatic mission in Havana recruits a Spanish intermediary with access to the Castro government. Through this network, the agency traces the cameo from its purchase in Kansas City to the babalao Rodrigo Lerbier, who has it in Cuba. Octavio, an associate of one of the covert dissidents, follows Lerbier in Cárdenas and later tries to determine whether the jewel is displayed in a Havana Yoruba temple, preparing for its seizure.

The agency’s pursuit collides with the dissidents’ separate plan. The CIA intends to hand the cameo to the Federal Bureau of Investigation once it has recovered it, but the jewel suddenly disappears before the agency can take possession. Unable to explain the loss, the CIA attributes it to the Cuban government’s sweeping purge of dissidents. The crackdown thus offers the agency a public explanation for its failure while making its agents’ work inside Cuba more precarious.

Cuba’s Black Spring in 2003

In March 2003, Manuel learns that the government has arrested dozens of dissidents, including journalists he knows and friends of his. The number is not yet clear, and the arrests have not entered the news; he withholds the information, particularly from the tourists Loïc and Laurence. The later name for this wave of arrests is Cuba’s Black Spring, described in the novel as one of the harshest repressions since the regime’s establishment.

The political crisis remains largely outside the tourists’ view as they travel to a Yoruba ceremony in Havana. At the cemetery meeting place, Manuel invokes Oya, the deity associated with guarding cemetery gates, before taking them onward. The same night, March 20, 2003, the narrative sets their encounter with ritual dance against the opening of the United States bombing of Baghdad. The juxtaposition places religious life and concealed political danger within a wider landscape of state power and violence.

Narrative significance

The period’s political chronology shapes the cameo plot rather than serving as background alone. The purge both intensifies the risks faced by dissidents and creates cover for the CIA’s loss of the jewel; the reader sees intelligence services, underground Freemasons, and religious practitioners converging on the same object for different purposes. By keeping Manuel’s news of the arrests private while Loïc and Laurence proceed as visitors, the novel also marks the divide between the country’s public presentation and the perilous political realities its inhabitants navigate.