Sacrificio

Mestre-Reed (The Lazarus Rumba) returns after two decades with a bold and suspenseful story of resistance in late 1990s Cuba. Orphaned Rafa finds himself in the midst of would-be revolutionaries in Havana when Nicolás offers him a job at his mother’s restaurant and the two become boyfriends. Already HIV-positive, Nicolás is soon sent to a sidatorio, a government-run sanitarium for people carrying the virus. There, Nicolás starts a group attempting to incite a counterrevolution by encouraging people to inject themselves with infected blood to initiate mass illness all over the island. After Nicolás dies, his brother Renato, also HIV-positive, is sent to live in the same sidatorio; there, the charismatic Renato takes up the helm as leader of his brother’s counterrevolutionary group. When Renato goes missing, Rafa and a German man with questionable allegiances named Steffen go looking for him. It turns out Renato’s group has big plans for the Pope’s visit to Cuba; with the visit fast approaching, Rafa scrambles to make sense of what is going on around him and find his place in it. Populated by vivid characters (comandante Juan, the “bloated old Revolutionary Army crook”; Inocente St. Louis, the fire-eating chef; nihilistic Nicolás; dutiful-student-turned-revolutionary Renato), this tautly plotted story keeps the reader guessing until the end. Mestre-Reed succeeds at capturing life on the margins of Castro’s Cuba in this stirring tale. Agent: Jesseca Salky, Salky Literary. (Sept.)