El Comandante, an aging Castro-like dictator shambles about his mansion in Havana, visits a dying friend, tortures hunger strikers in one of his prisons, and grapples with the stale end of his life that is as devoid of grandeur as his nearly sixty-year-old revolution. Across the waters in Florida, Goyo Herrera, a Miami exile in his eighties, plots revenge against the very same El Comandante whom he blames for stealing his beloved, ruining his homeland, and taking his father's life. Shifting between the two men with great resonance and humour, and peppered with the rabble of other Cuban voices to create a patchwork of history's unofficial stories, Cristina Garcia's novel plumbs the passions and realities of these two Cubas - on the island, and off. Writing with wit and insight, and very much at the top of her form, she returns to the territory of her Cuban homeland.