Ernesto Mestre-Reed was born in Guantánamo, Cuba. He is the author of the novels The Lazarus Rumba and The Second Death of Única Aveyano. A Guggenheim fiction fellow and a MacDowell fellow, he has also translated many novels from Spanish, including Laura Esquivel’s Malinche. Sacrificio: A Novel (Soho Press) is set in Cuba in 1998. Rafa, an Afro-Cuban orphan, moves to Havana with nothing to his name and lands a job at a café. He soon falls into a web of entanglements with his boss’ son, the charismatic Renato, leader of the counterrevolutionary group “Los Injected Ones,” which is planning a violent overthrow of the Castro government during Pope John Paul II’s upcoming visit. When Renato goes missing, Rafa’s search takes him from an AIDS sanatorium and tourist hotels to the outskirts of Havana. There he enters a slum cobbled together from the city’s detritus by Los Injected Ones. Sacrificio captures the fury, passion, fatalism, and grim humor of young lives lived at the margins of a society they desperately wish to change.
