His Man in Havana
King Bongo
Thomas Sanchez
Knopf
Thomas Sanchez’s 2003 novel King Bongo is a kaleidoscopic portrait of pre-Revolutionary Havana, which shared with all pre-Revolutionary capitals, from Paris to Petrograd, an ineffable decadence and corruption to the bone and, to the revolutionaries waiting in the wings, a crying need to be cleansed of its sins. As the novel opens on New Year’s Eve, 1957 (two years to the day before Castro took over), the eponymous hero, bongo-playing, womanizing King Bongo, a Cuban-American nightclub musician, private shamus and insurance investigator—“a little man, but he had a big plan”—is driving his snazzy Studebaker Rocket along the city’s waterfront promenade, the Malécon, to the fabled Tropicana nightclub, where he is to meet his girlfriend, Mercedes, and watch his twin sister, an exotic dancer known as “The Panther,” perform onstage. Right away, with a vivid but economical sketch, Sanchez ushers us into the Havana that was:
"He loved this drive out of Havana headed for the Tropicana, past the centuries-old mansions facing the sea, fanciful three-story palaces with gaily colored facades of pillars and balconies, cheek by cheek with each other, like old tarts posing for a group reunion shot in the glare of tropical sunlight, shining with a glamour that refused to fade away."
Shortly after he arrives at the Tropicana, however, Bongo narrowly escapes being blown to bits by a terrorist bomb. He loses Mercedes in the explosion and in the ensuing confusion his sister disappears. Bongo doesn’t know if she’s dead or alive, or who planted the bomb, or why; the revolutionary barbudos (bearded ones) are suspected, of course, but Bongo discounts this, as there were too many obscure hints and discreet warnings at the time, and anyway the “revolutionaries” have become convenient straw men for every screwball with a grudge in Havana.
Bongo is a memorable character. Half American and half Cuban, he knows both languages, both cultures, both sides of life. He can eat rice and beans and play music in the slums at night and the next day hobnob with rich Americans and their Cuban cohorts in the orgy-palaces of Batista’s modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah. Most of Bongo’s insurance business comes, of course, from the rich, whom he knows by their scent: the scent of money: The rich smell different from you and me.
"[T]he lush smell of success, the fragrant scent of a new stack of peso bills. He knew the look of well-fed cologne-slapped cheeks, the faces of those who held those stacks of cash in their tight fists. Cash was piled up in the Capitolio, in the casinos, in the fancy Art Deco office buildings and banks of Vedado, in the beach mansions of Miramar, in the four-hundred-year-old palaces of Old Havana."
But as the son of a mixed-race marriage himself Bongo’s deep sympathies are with the wretched mestizos and blacks of Havana’s overflowing slums. This is not overstated, nor is the reader harangued; it is just a fact. Bongo knows the score.
"[He] understood those who tried to crawl out of it by any means possible, to claw their way to a wage one inch over the poverty line. This was the tropical truth for most of those whose skins were black—African black, slave black, bondage black, sugarcane-cutting brute animal black, disposable black . . . A man was either holding the shit end of the stick or someone else was."
Like Bongo’s Rocket (with “two hundred horses” under the hood, it is much coveted by Havana’s demimonde), once it gets going the plot roars into action and doesn’t let up for 300 pages. Bongo wants answers, and the ones with the answers are bad guys indeed, but behind them are even worse guys, many in uniform, and some bad (if alluringly bad) gals, as well. We are in the rank heart of Noir; only Bogart and Greenstreet are missing. Everywhere Bongo turns there are smoldering sexpots and murderers and perverts and hit men and conspiring Americans…well, you name it. Havana in the ‘50s was a wide-open town. The Mafia virtually ran the place in Batista’s name with Meyer Lansky as proconsul, as anyone who’s seen or read The Godfather knows. Hollywood was there: an Errol Flynn type, referred to as “The Bad Actor,” pops up in the novel, face-lifts, teenage mistresses, yacht and all. Baseball stars and famous crooners put in appearances, and in one of the many expertly interwoven subplots the dictator himself, Fulgencio Batista, is glimpsed through the crosshairs of a gun aimed at him by a revolutionary sympathizer. (Note: Batista died in luxurious exile on Spain’s Costa Brava, many years later). There’s even a Fu Manchu-like all-knowing Chinese, Mr. Wu, king of Havana’s Chinatown, who shares with Bongo a passion for orchids. Through this teeming labyrinth the cunning Bongo makes his way, picking up a clue here, a hint there, and having to double back on his tracks time and again to evade an increasing number of pursuers, the most relentless of whom is his longtime nemesis, Humberto Zapata, a member of Batista’s secret police. Zapata himself, it turns out, is nursing an old emotional wound, as well as a shocking secret, and a surprising link emerges between him and Bongo, via the missing Panther. Slowly the two men grope their way through the shadows toward each other for an entirely satisfying and dramatic denouement that leaves our otherwise shrewd and prescient hero King Bongo none the wiser about the way things in Cuba are headed in general: “Havana is the future,” he confidently declares, toward the end. Nice touch, that; an authorial reminder that no matter how inevitable historical retrospect big events seem to have been in, people at the time just don’t have a clue how things are going to turn out.
That there is something rotten in the state of Cuba today is undeniable, but under Batista in the 1950s things were corrupt to an almost ludicrous degree. It is a testimony to Sanchez’s skill that in this riveting, tightly-crafted novel he makes the revolutionaries’ case subtlely, by implication, but so thoroughly that by the end the reader fully appreciates how deep was the desire for change, how awesome the extent of the corruption, and why so many living under Bastista’s regime, which maintained power through assassination, martial law, and routine brutality, longed for revolution for revolution’s sake, no other reason being required. (In fact, there was nothing overtly communistic in the 26th of July Movement, Fidel Castro’s original political party; that came later, with power, when he needed Soviet aid.) With Cuba living through the autumn--and winter--of its patriarch, it is a vivid reminder that today’s corrupt, ailing old tyrant, now succeeded by his slightly-less-corrupt brother Raul, was once the vital, charismatic leader of a band of idealistic guerrillas who represented liberation for an entire oppressed nation. Sic transit gloria mundi, eh? After all, Lenin, Hitler, and Mao—and Batista--were once beacons of hope to their people, too.
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