The Lonely Crossing of Juan Cabrera

Three men flee Castro's Cuba in 1990 on a makeshift raft bound for Florida in this harrowing, taut yet lyrical first novel. Fraxedas, who escaped Communist Cuba at the age of 10 and now practices law in Orlando, has flown rescue missions to pick up Cuban raft people, and he puts his firsthand knowledge to good use. The protagonist, physics professor Juan Cabrera, watches helplessly as gunmen on a Cuban patrol boat fatally shoot one of his two companions; later, his other mate is devoured by a shark in a terrifyingly real scene. Other scenes introduce Juan's girlfriend Carmen, an artist who once worked for Castro's propaganda machine but recently defected to Miami, where we are introduced to an assortment of Cuban exiles aching with longing for their homeland. The main focus, however, is on Juan's inner struggle to overcome his massive guilt for decades of silent accommodating a tyrannical regime. Flashbacks graphically reenact the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, showing how CIA officiers' condescension toward Cuban recruits contributed to disaster. A Spanish-language edition, La Traversia Solitaria de Juan Cabrera ($18.95 *