Florida serves as both a refuge and a point of departure in the novel. Cuban exile networks gather there, covert intelligence follows trails that lead through Miami, and Aurelio reaches Key West while fleeing a satanist sect before attempting a dangerous crossing to Cuba. The state is therefore less a settled home than a borderland: a place where hidden affiliations converge and where escape can begin, but not yet be completed.

Miami and the networks of exile

Florida’s political significance is tied particularly to Miami and its Cuban exile community. In the account of covert opposition to the Castro government, two dissidents inside Cuba maintain secret links with important Freemasons among Cuban émigrés in Florida and elsewhere in the United States. Those exiles form the Grand Lodge of Cuba in Exile. The network’s stated purpose is to prepare for the period after Castro and lay groundwork for a successor government. Florida thus appears as part of a transnational political field: opposition activity inside Cuba is connected to people who have escaped the country and built relationships abroad.

A separate intelligence account also draws Florida into the pursuit of Ramondo Cardoso and the cameo. The United States chargé d’affaires in Havana has a Central Intelligence Agency agent as an adjunct. That agent recruits a Spaniard with access to the Castro government, and the resulting intelligence trail establishes that Cardoso died suddenly in Cárdenas under unexplained circumstances. The jewel he had bought in Kansas City is then traced to Rodrigo Lerbier, a Yoruba priest in Cárdenas, who is placed under surveillance. Florida is not the scene of Cardoso’s death or the jewel’s discovery, but its networks of exile and intelligence form part of the broader apparatus through which information travels between Cuba and the United States.

When a crackdown threatens the CIA’s Cuban associate, he escapes to Florida and blends into the Cuban exile community in Miami, using relationships developed there. The move gives the novel’s account of Florida a practical dimension: exile is not only a political identity but a means of concealment and survival. The same community that sustains opposition planning also offers a place to disappear from the reach of Cuban authorities.

A setting entangled with the sect

Florida is also connected to the hidden world Aurelio eventually rejects. He has been involved for years with a satanist sect, whose members and associates overlap with influential people beyond the sect itself. On an island in the Caribbean south of Cuba, a wealthy businessman hosts prominent guests from politics, finance, and entertainment; young people taken from poor countries are exploited at these gatherings. The host and select guests have close ties to the sect, placing its activities within a wider network of power rather than isolating them as the work of marginal fanatics.

One evening in Florida, Aurelio overhears a conversation between a sect leader and a masked initiate. The exchange expresses the sect’s reversal of conventional religious terms: Lucifer is presented as the god of good and truth, while Adonai is cast as the opposite. Aurelio already knows and has accepted the teaching, but this time he seems to understand it fully. The moment becomes a turning point. He instinctively calls on Jesus Christ and resolves to escape, transforming Florida from a place implicated in the sect’s world into the setting for his inward break from it.

Key West and the crossing

After escaping the sect’s installations near Miami, Aurelio travels for days and nights while avoiding major roads and contact with others. In September 2014, he reaches Key West, the furthest point of Florida in the account, and finds an old boat that appears to have been left on the beach. At night he pushes it into the water and sets out across the Straits of Florida toward Cuba, about 150 kilometres away. He has no assurance that he will reach the other side and uses a piece of rotten board to row.

Aurelio’s crossing is not a triumphant voyage but a desperate extension of his escape. The narrative places his fragile boat between the United States and his Cuban homeland, with no certainty that he can complete the journey. Pleasure-boat navigators eventually find him adrift and tow him to the maritime boundary between the United States and Cuba. He then reaches a deserted shore near Varadero, exhausted but alive. Florida is the final point of departure in a passage whose outcome depends on chance and assistance from others, as well as on Aurelio’s determination not to return to the sect.

The cameo trail and a shifting point of departure

Miami also marks a change in the cameo’s whereabouts in the later recovery plot. Jeff, who knows where the jewel is being displayed, discovers that it is no longer there. He wonders whether it might have been moved to a satanist lodge in Washington, but the possibility is uncertain, and the jewel’s absence complicates the operation. The search must first establish where it has gone and then allow time to examine the new location. Months and years pass before the planned theft proceeds in Washington in April 2019, with Jeff and Maggie keeping watch while John Robbart enters the building and substitutes a counterfeit.

This shift matters to Florida’s place in the story: Miami is a point from which the jewel’s trail can be lost, not the confirmed site of its final recovery. The novel repeatedly makes Florida a threshold for movement—of exiles, intelligence, fugitives, and objects—while withholding the promise that arrival there will resolve the danger. For Aurelio, Key West opens a route out of the sect’s reach; for the investigators of the cameo, Miami’s empty display marks another disappearance and another uncertain passage.