When a drunken Fidel Pérez steps onto the creaky balcony of a Havana apartment building to lament his latest romantic loss, the railing gives way. His brother, in a last-ditch heroic effort to save Fidel, tumbles after him and soon the misinterpreted cry goes around the neighborhood: "Fidel has fallen! His brother, too!"
With this brilliant premise, Cuban-born Elizabeth Huergo launches The Death of Fidel Pérez, a provocative debut novel that is simultaneously a requiem for the lives destroyed under both the Batista and Castro regimes and a poetic imagining of what the cusp of a true Cuban liberation might look like.
Huergo introduces us to three Habaneros, each scarred by the revolution and needing release, who get caught up in the reckless, viral mood sweeping the city. There is a haggard street woman who lost her son and slips in and out of reality; a haunted professor who survived years of confinement and torture as a political prisoner; and a student ready to become an activist--if, indeed, the time of a new revolution is at hand. Gently uncovering the humanity of her characters while eschewing easy political leanings, Huergo shows us the burden carried by modern Cubans awaiting the inevitable fall of Castro and their unknown future.
With a writing style deeply influenced by the best of the Latin American magical realism traditions, The Death of Fidel Pérez is a lyrical and heartfelt fable--an optimistic, yet wise, ode to the possibilities and apprehension inherent in the words, "Fidel has fallen." --Cherie Ann Parker, freelance journalist and book critic