Grand Lodge of Cuba in Exile

The Grand Lodge of Cuba in Exile is part of a clandestine network connecting Cuban opponents inside the country with prominent Freemasons among Cuban emigrants in Florida and elsewhere in the United States. The novel links this political project to a parallel pursuit of a cameo believed to possess supernatural power, bringing competing plans for Cuba’s future into contact with the object’s mysterious history.

Exile Network and Political Purpose

The Lodge’s network includes prominent Freemasons among Cuban exiles, who maintain underground ties with two dissidents holding high positions within the Castro regime. One of the dissidents has established a distinctive Masonic lodge in the suburbs of Havana, taking care to keep it from being infiltrated by the police. The account presents the Lodge as part of a cross-border political network rather than describing its internal organization or membership in detail.

The network’s stated ultimate purpose is to prepare for the period after Castro: to lay the groundwork for the government that might succeed four decades of socialist dictatorship. Its work therefore looks toward a political transition, although the evidence does not specify the institutions or policies the proposed successor government would adopt.

The Cameo and the Dissidents’ Aim

The cameo enters the network’s concerns after the two dissidents hear by chance that it had caught fire in Cárdenas and that a man had died in an unusual case of spontaneous combustion. The account identifies the dead man as Cardoso and says the jewel, which he had bought in Kansas City, had passed into the hands of Rodrigo Lerbier, a Yoruba officiant known as a babalao.

The two Freemasons then make acquiring the cameo an objective of their own. They intend to harness its supposed supernatural powers against the Castro regime. The narrative thus connects the Lodge’s political horizon to an occult claim about the jewel, without establishing that the Lodge as a whole directed the planned seizure or endorsing the cameo’s powers as fact.

Narrative Significance

The organization’s role lies in the overlap between political preparation and the pursuit of a charged object. Its exile connections reach into the Cuban state through dissidents who hold senior positions, while the cameo offers those dissidents a means they believe could be turned against the regime. The result is a covert network with two linked but distinct ambitions: preparing for a successor government and obtaining the jewel for its imagined power.