Chanel Cleeton’s novel The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba appeared in 2021. It’s the first book by Cleeton that I’ve read, so I was hoping to find a new author to follow.
The title and cover of The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba are a little misleading, however. The cover features a woman in a billowing white dress looking out over a harbor. This, when added to the title, gives the impression of romance. The book has some of that, but love isn’t the main theme of the book.
Instead, the historical setting of the book is Cuba’s war for independence from Spain. The book begins in 1896, with that war already in progress.
The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba Plot
The opening sentence of the Prologue says it well: “I am surrounded by forgotten women.” The story has three narrators, all women. Two are Cuban, one American. The event that kickstarts the novel is when one of the women, Evangelina Cisneros, is under house arrest and a Spanish officer tries to force himself upon her. Evangelina’s friends come to her rescue, but she’s imprisoned and blamed for attacking the officer by Spanish authorities.
That imprisonment brings her into contact with Marina Perez, a woman from a prominent family who was disowned by her prominent family for choosing to marry a farmer rather than a socially prominent man. (Social standing was a major part of the culture, more than in the U.S. at the time.) Sent to a concentration camp with her daughter, Marina delivers laundry as a cover for passing messages for Cuban revolutionaries.
The third narrator is Grace Harrington. Like Marina, she comes from a prominent family. Her sin is not marrying downward, however. She doesn’t want marriage of any kind. What Grace wants to do is be a news reporter, another Nelly Bly. This brings in the secondary plot of the book, the competition between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer for newspaper supremacy in New York City.
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Importance of the Historical Events
Unlike many historical fiction novels that just put characters into an era, this book centers around a historical event that was important in several ways. When Cubans started their revolution against Spain, they wanted independence for their island. The tactics used by the Spanish to put down the revolution, concentration camps especially, were really harsh. They helped shift American public opinion toward Cuba over Spain.
Conditions in the concentration camps horrified some Americans. They proved so horrified, in fact, that it would be an entire three years before they watched Americans do the same thing to people in the Philippines without being unduly horrified. (Sorry for the macabre humor. But this prior blog post will tell you more about those concentration camps.)
Mass-circulation newspapers, like those owned by Hearst and Pulitzer, also did a great deal to influence public opinion. Another key event in the novel is when Hearst sees a photograph of Evangelina Cisneros and realizes her attractiveness. Hearst makes her the symbol of his paper’s support for Cuba. He names her “The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba.”
Before the novel is over, the American military vessel Maine sinks in Havana’s harbor, and the U.S. is at war with Spain. Hearst’s “yellow press” journalism adds to the war fever. (These details aren’t spoilers, I hope. You can find them in any decent history book.) War, it turns out, sells a lot of newspapers. The story ends, however, before getting into all the questionable things the U.S. does after defeating Spain, the Platt Amendment especially.
Good Parts of The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba
I can think of several. The historical events used to push the plot were good choices. I also enjoyed the attempt to portray how revolution affects women, the forgotten women mentioned in the Prologue, who aren’t at the front lines fighting. The pacing of the story was good, and the portrayal of the personalities of the historical characters likewise a strength.
In general, I also appreciate books about events like this one. The Cuban attempt to throw off Spanish rule was a big deal in the 1890s. It tends to fly under the radar in the historical memory of most non-Cubans today, however. That makes a story bringing this revolution back to life doubly useful. The reader gets quality literature. Plus, they learn about something that was once important but not very many people know much about today.
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Parts I Liked Less
Although I enjoyed the book overall, some parts threw me off a bit. One interesting choice Cleeton made was that her narrative focuses tightly on the characters but gives little attention to the setting of each scene. One would think that a Havana mansion, a concentration camp, or a New York newsroom would be places the author would feed the reader all kinds of sensory detail and description. Senses like smell and sight should feast on places like that. The reader doesn’t get that in this story, however.
Cleeton’s editor also didn’t do her any favors. Some word choices were strange, and the language got a little lazy in places. She is also a huge fan of the generic rhetorical question. “Will I ever see my husband again?” Every woman married to a soldier at war wonders that. It’s such a banal statement that it adds little to the story and feels rather cliché.
Finally, I understand why Grace Harrington’s character was in the novel. She was in there to give the reader a feel for the newspaper rivalry in New York in the 1890s. Grace also makes a few attempts to question the male-dominated way of looking at the world in the 1890s and the reasons America went to war with Spain in 1898. But those attempts felt half-hearted and weak to me.
Another thing that struck me is that the rest of the novel would have been exactly the same without Grace in it. For someone who narrates one-third of the story, The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba could’ve been the same basic book without her. Grace meets Marina and Evangelina, but she has no influence on their actions or choices. She speaks with Hearst at times, but never in a way that changes his course of action, either. So, she’s really a superfluous character in some important ways.
Wrapping it Up
All in all, the book was a respectable story. If your focus is on characters driving the plot, you’ll like the story. Likewise if you enjoy settings in places like Cuba that feel semi-exotic to American audiences. The historical events pictured in The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba are important ones, another plus for many readers.
At least for me, however, it fell a little short of its intent to be a manifesto about forgotten women. When your lead sentence is a statement like that, the story needs to stay dedicated to that proposition in a tighter way.
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