"Who killed JFK?"
The thought had never even entered Nelson’s mental universe until that day...
Inspired by factual events, The Cuban Scar begins when a young New York musician, Nelson Montes, discovers an old videotape recording made by his deceased father, a former intelligence agent, detailing his participation in “The greatest unsolved crime of the 20th century;” the John F. Kennedy assassination
From then on, Nelson’s life is forever changed.
Unbeknown to him, his father’s twin brother, his mysterious Uncle Reynaldo reappears in his life and submits him into a process of indoctrination, similar to the mind control techniques used in the classic novel The Manchurian Candidate and TV Homeland series. In time, Nelson is persuaded to go public with his father’s video confession, something he swore never to do. It plunges him into the shadowy world of Miami's Cuban exile power-players and into a web of deception that builds up into a crescendo of violence and betrayals that endangers the life of the woman he loves and threatens to turn him into another patsy in the historic assassination conspiracy.
Set mostly in the 1980s, and similar in approach as Don DeLillo’s Libra and Stephen King’s 11/22/63, this novel switches between the protagonist’s music world and the memories of his father’s secret underworld and the Cuban diaspora, using the Kennedy assassination as a haunting metaphor to describe Nelson’s ancestral past and the dark aura it casts on his unsuspecting psyche.
Ultimately, The Cuban Scar is really an American tale of self-rediscovery with its heart in two cultures, a novel of intrigue, death, and deception, a thriller.
Genre: FICTION / Thrillers / PoliticalThe initial sales in amazon.com were few. Because of the Latin themes and settings of The Cuban Scar, in addition to my (the author's) public recognition as a former TV performer in Spain, I believe a Spanish translation of this book will be of much interest to publishers in the Spanish-speaking world and will find a much larger audience among book-buyers in Spain and Latin America.
THE CUBAN SCAR
The instant they handed me the phone and I heard his wife sobbing into it, I knew I would never see my father alive again. Earlier, before the equipment arrived and the soundcheck began, I had called the Jackson Hospital and spoken to Uncle Beny. He said my father’s condition had deteriorated overnight and should consider flying to Miami right away, instead of waiting until morning as I had planned. Uncle Beny did not insist, but I could sense the urgency in his old Cuban voice, strange-sounding in the midst of the loud chaos of a Buffalo punk rock club. Now it was too late.
I hung up the telephone but could not let go of it. Sure, I felt guilty. I did, in spite of my unwavering conviction that I owed my father nothing. I had seen him a total of five times since I was six years old when he put my mother and my brother and me on a flight to New York with the promise of meeting us the following month—a month that lasted ten years. Then, when he finally came to us, he stayed only long enough to tell us he had a new life. I was under no moral obligation to him, none at all. My sudden need to go to him was an involuntary impulse, something like guilt itself, too compelling to try to reason with it.
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Italian
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Already translated.
Translated by Matteo Serrago
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Spanish
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Already translated.
Translated by Stefanie Munguia
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