A Hundred Fires in Cuba

John Thorndike

ago 2018 · Beck & Branch

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In the spring of 1956, a young American photographer falls in love with a Cuban line cook in New York. They have a ten-week affair which ends when Immigration arrests and deports him, and by then Clare Miller is pregnant. Few Americans know the name Camilo Cienfuegos. All Cubans do. He was the most charismatic of Castro’s rebel commanders. But Clare, who never hears from him after he’s deported, believes he has died in Fidel’s invasion of the island. She marries a wealthy Cuban businessman and moves to Cuba with her two-year-old daughter—only to discover that her first love is not only still alive, he’s head of the Cuban Army. Clare already knows that Camilo likes to dance and drink. He likes women, and too many women like him. Though his courage is legendary, when he comes to visit Clare at night, he’s afraid of his daughter’s moods. Clare worries that he’ll never make a good parent, but she cannot resist him.

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John Thorndike grew up in New England, graduated from Harvard, took an MA from Columbia, then lit out for Latin America. He spent two years in the Peace Corps in El Salvador, then married Clarisa Rubio and moved to a backcountry farm in Chile, living beyond the reach of cars, telephones and electricity. After several years in Chile and Central America, he returned to the U.S. with his son and settled in Athens, Ohio. For ten years his day job was farming. Then it was construction. His first novel was Anna Delaney’s Child, and his second The Potato Baron. His third book was a memoir, Another Way Home, about raising his son after his wife was overtaken by schizophrenia. A second memoir followed: The Last of His Mind, about his father’s descent into Alzheimer’s. A Hundred Fires in Cuba is his latest novel, and he’s at work on the next one, a half-fictional evocation of his mother’s life.