News Update

Welcome back to the world of Mike Holman.

If this is your first stop, here’s what you need to know: Mike Holman is the independent journalist, podcaster, and inveterate maker-of-enemies at the center of Scott McKay’s bitingly satirical thriller series — four novels (so far) chronicling one man’s habit of ending up in the middle of the very stories the rest of the media is too scared, too compromised, or too incurious to tell. Catch up on the whole series, read past episodes, and find links to every book at “The Mike Holman Novels at The American Spectator” and soon, see the video-novel version of this and the previous books at MikeHolman.com.

We’re now serializing the fourth Mike Holman novel, The Necessary Men, right here at The American Spectator — new episodes dropping every Wednesday and Saturday. The full book goes on sale September 26th at Amazon and the new MikeHolman.com site, and you can pre-order a signed copy right now.

Where we left off: The mask has come off, and the “friendly invasion” of Cuba is revealed as an American enterprise. Now comes the true test of whether this is going to work.

Here are Chapters Eleven and Twelve of The Necessary Men.

Chapter Thirteen

Gibara, Holguin Province, Cuba — September 3, 2026

 

It turned out that Peter Chang was actually fine. That was due solely to the resourcefulness of Peter Chang.

For three days after that press conference, and two days after Simon was murdered, Peter was missing. And given that he’d spent the past six months going on TV and giving that stupid “Hands Off Cuba” speech that virtually everyone in the Democrat Party was giving, and holding himself out as proof that “true socialism” was being tried in Cuba and winning, the media really, really wanted to talk to Peter about how his operation was merging with a Pierce Polk-funded, explicitly capitalist incubator of culture and industry.

None of that made sense to the political and media establishment in Washington and elsewhere, because none of them could process the idea that the whole lot of them had been taken for a ride. Especially not by Peter; Peter was a hero even after all the terrible stuff that he’d done.

They liked the terrible stuff that he’d done, of course. But this? How could you, Peter?

So interestingly enough, when he did turn up, he was in Cancun. And I was the one he called.

“You motherfucker!” he screamed when I answered the phone. I was at the house, sitting in the comfy chair in PJ’s spinning studio with Little Mike in my lap watching her navigate the Mojave desert on her Peloton. She watched me hold the phone away from my ear.

“Dad must be OK,” she said, turning back to her California wasteland.

“Well, hello Peter,” I said. “We’ve all been worried about you.”

“You set me up. You fucking shitheads and Simon Lim…”

“He’s dead, Peter.”

“I fucking KNOW that. I’m lucky I’M not dead. You know that Candela was trying to have me arrested? I had to hide out for two days and finally I got a boat to Cancun. But YOU did this. You vengeful asshole!”

“Actually, Peter, it’s you who did this. What you’re angry about is that the evil shit you thought you were doing turned out to be absolutely noble shit you had to be tricked into.”

PJ was laughing, listening to me as she pedaled that bike.

“The fact is that you never had to go on TV and say all that ‘Hands Off Cuba’ bullshit. Nobody told you to say that. You might actually have turned up the temperature so high that you’re the reason your Chinese friends killed him.”

“Don’t put that on me. You’re the one who killed him with this… this ruse that you pulled.”

“Peter, the ruse was Simon’s idea. He’s the one who approached Pierce. And it was his idea to bring you in as the American face of the operation, at least when it was supposed to be Chinese.”

“You’re saying he used me?”

“Of course he used you. But what he said was that he hoped you would take advantage of the opportunity this gave you.”

“He never said that.”

“Oh, yes, he did. He said it at Lyford Cay in the Bahamas back in July. That was the last time I saw him. He said this would be your opportunity to recover your moral credibility, but that he was concerned you wouldn’t take it. And you didn’t. But I guess you have the opportunity again. You should go public and denounce Beijing for Simon’s murder, and you should go public with the confession that LCTC was a ruse all along and that you were in on it.”

“But that would be a lie!”

“Probably so, but it would be the truest freaking thing you’ve said this year.”

Honestly, we expected a whole lot worse reaction to the flip than we got from the regime. Candela gave a speech denouncing the specter of international capitalism and its threat to la revolucion, but he didn’t order PGFI out of the country.

And we didn’t give him an opportunity to do that. We fired all of Peter’s Chinese employees and kept the Cubans on staff, and Trent sent an email to Cabrillo telling him that the new management at the TODO Corporation – LCTC had now officially become TODO, SA – valued his services even more than his previous employers had, that his efforts had been invaluable to date, and that PGFI saw him as a vital, central cog in the continuing effort to bring Cuba back into the world community and provide prosperity for its people.

So far as we could tell, that was enough to keep him on board, and we got word back that Cabrillo had managed to keep Candela from doing anything rash.

But we figured that would change soon. In fact, we had a surprise in the works which was designed to increase the velocity of the TODO project.

I mentioned the Plaza da Silva before. It’s about the size of a city block, and it’s a big square which sits a little north of the big fishing pier on the far eastern end of the downtown area in Gibara. Just to the east is the Bateria Fernando VII, which is the old Spanish fort that guarded the city, and to the south there’s a restaurant – which once they started getting their ingredients from the TODO supply chain actually became really good; our guys were there every other night – and a little cocktail bar.

But to the southeast of the Plaza da Silva is a building…

No. Let me stop myself. It’s not a building. It used to be a building. What it was now was a ruin. They called it El Almacén, which means “the warehouse,” because that’s what it was before the roof and a big chunk of the walls had caved in.

And for a time, they were using the ruins of the warehouse as a sort of outdoor events facility. They had the big canvas sail umbrellas and the barstools and bar tables, the whole bit. I was told that was the idea – there was a sign in front of El Almacén calling it a “Proyecto Municipal de Desarrollo Local.”

Which means Municipal Local Development Project. At some point they figured they’d take the ruins of an industrial building which was functional when there was industry and tried to turn them into a tourist trap. If that wasn’t Cuban communism in a nutshell, nothing was.

But half the facility was still used as storage of some kind, even though there was no roof on the place. It made no sense – but then again, this was Candela’s Cuba; you’d drive yourself crazy trying to figure out how things got as fouled up as they were.

We decided that we were going to use El Almacén as a reception area for the big event we had planned, put a tent over the place, and set it up as a really cool hospitality center. To do that correctly, we needed to clear out all of the crap that was sitting under several very large red tarps on the south side of the ruined warehouse.

And we didn’t want to use any Cubans for that project. They were busy rebuilding their homes following the storm, which became considerably easier seeing as though the Army was no longer enforcing any stupid rules about the clay on the hillsides or the ubiquitous rubble in the streets.

So that left us with the Omobba Brigade and my buddy Trevor. Hal called him and asked if he could bring his 12 commies to help clear out El Almacén, and he said he was pretty sure that was a project they could handle without catastrophe. We did the call from my office at the hotel; Trevor was on speaker from the Hostal Ultramar, a youth hostel by the water which was… perfectly suited for the lodging of young communists.

“And they need something to do,” he said, “because they’re bitching up a storm about the flip.”

“Did you give your speech yet?” I asked him.

“Not yet,” he said. “I’m just heading off a mutiny at this point. But I did have to invoke Fidel and Che.”

“Oh yeah?” asked Hal. “What did you tell them?”

“I actually brought them to that mural by the water. You know the beat-up thing with the quote from Fidel?”

“‘The achievements of our times and the hope of all times depends on us,’” I chuckled. “You showed them that?”

“Of course I did. They ate that shit up. And I told them that now is the time we can show the capitalists that their exploitation can’t match the volunteer spirit of the committed revolutionary.”

Hal was doubled over in his chair laughing. I scowled at him, mostly to keep myself from doing the same thing.

Trevor really deserved an Oscar. He carried that fake communist persona all the way to the hilt. And those kids bought it hook, line, and sinker when everybody else in Cuba knew what time it was.

So he marched the Omobba Brigade kids down to the ruined warehouse, and they started pulling those tarps away to reveal stacks and stacks of brown cardboard boxes. Everything on the bottom of those stacks was waterlogged and mildewed beyond recognition; the stuff above it looked somewhat intact.

So we set up a chain, and the kids were passing those boxes to a few trucks parked in the plaza, including my F-250. We were going to bring them up to the landfill area north of town where we’d set up a trash incinerator.

And the project was moving along nicely, until Harvard Girl tried to carry one of the bottom boxes in a stack by holding it from the top. She didn’t want to get mildewy wet cardboard on her little hands.

Which I guess is a natural reaction.

Except that box disintegrated on her, and the contents of it spilled out.

She looked down.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, NO!”

Hal went over and looked at the contents of that box.

“Oh,” he said, laughing. “I need to get a video of this.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Come look.”

So I did.

“This can’t be one box, can it?” I asked.

“Let’s find out,” Hal said, panning his phone camera to the stacks.

Trevor saw the spilled contents on the floor and enthusiastically began ripping open the stacked boxes.

“Wait,” he said. “Is all of this…”

“Oh NO! Oh NO!” said Harvard Girl.

I picked PJ up at PCIA. She did what I would call performative whining over the idea that she’d have to come to Gibara, but I wouldn’t take no for an answer. I told her she was going to see history that she was connected to, and besides, she needed to see what I’d been working on while she was raising my first kid and incubating my second.

Finally, she broke down and agreed to come, and so the King Air 350 deposited her at the airfield. I was holding up a sign that said “PJ Holman” as I stood on the tarmac near the terminal building as the plane taxied close, and she got out, one of five passengers on the flight from Palm Beach International Airport, and she gave me a sarcastic look.

“Really?” she said.

“I mean, you’re a pretty major celebrity,” I said. “So you should get the celebrity treatment, don’t you think?”

“What, like a limo ride to the hotel?”

“Yeah! Something like that.”

And I grabbed her bags, which the porters had laid down on the tarmac for me, and lugged them to the truck. PJ followed along.

“Wait, this is your limo?” she said.

“It literally does not get better than this thing here, PJ. You will thank me once we get on the road. Though the road is far better than it was when we got here.”

She gave me the side-eye as I dropped her bags in the bed of the truck and opened the door for her. We set off down the access road to the 221, and halfway down she made me stop the truck.

She’d seen the sign, with Peter’s goofy, oversized smiling head poking out of the plane and saying “Hands Off Cuba!” in the quote bubble.

And she gave me a scowly, scoldy look.

“I had nothing to do with that,” I said, accelerating past the sign.

PJ just broke out in a laugh.

I pointed out various landmarks along the road as we headed for the hotel, and she couldn’t believe all the construction that was going on. There were people everywhere, carrying wheelbarrows, laying down bricks and mortar, repairing roofs, hanging sheetrock… the entire southern half of Gibara was one big construction site.

“This is really impressive, Mike,” she said. “Who’s in charge of this?”

“A guy named Jason Belcher is the head of operations for us and he’s amazing,” I said. “He’s an ex-Marine, he was at Liberty Point and he’s a VP at Sentinel Ports Management. You’ll meet him. But most of this is actually local.”

“Wow.”

“What we’ve done is to hire all the construction workers in town, train them on Sentinel Construction’s methods, including those big 3D construction printers they use and the RKTech app, and have them run crews. The fun part is they’re all learning how to spin off and start their own construction companies.”

“When is that going to happen?”

“The first three? End of the month.”

I explained a little about how the TODO app and card were set up to have a small business incubator function, making it so you could run your whole business on your phone. And we’d brought in lots of equipment these guys had access to whenever they wanted to rent it, which eliminated their need for capital or to take on debt. Of course, we were spinning off the equipment rental operation as a small business, too – the guy who was running that was getting trained up for his new status as an entrepreneur.

“Wait, the government lets you do all this?” she asked. “I mean, it’s Cuba. It’s a dictatorship.”

“Well, it was. The thing is, the economic activity that’s going on here and in the two dozen other places we set up is literally keeping the regime from falling apart. They’re sort of paralyzed. They can’t kick us out because they’d get a revolution for their trouble and honestly, I don’t know that if Candela gave the order that anybody would follow it.”

“But if they don’t kick you out…”

“What’s happening here will just continue to expand. And after tomorrow’s show…”

“OK,” she said, as I parked the F-250 in front of the hotel; there was a very official-looking sign on the curb which read Reservado exclusivamente para Mike Holman. “I want to know what this show is that you had to drag me down here for.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “That’s a state secret. I definitely can’t tell you that.”

Which earned me another scowly, scoldy look, but PJ knew I wasn’t going to budge.

Claudio came out from the concierge desk – the ground floor doors were open, catching the surprisingly pleasant breeze off the ocean, so he could see my truck park in its spot – and grabbed the bags from the truck bed.

“Señor Mike,” he said, “it is a pleasure to have your…”

“Claudio, meet PJ Holman,” I said. “She’s my wife. PJ, meet Claudio Fuentes, the concierge of the Hotel Ordoño.”

“Nice to meet you, Claudio,” she said.

“And you, señora. Señor Mike, she’s very beautiful! We knew there was someone, but… ¡La mujer supera todas las expectativas!”

“Yeah,” I said. “She does all right.”

So I held out my arm and she took it, giving me a kiss on my cheek.

As we followed Claudio up to the room, we passed four of the hotel staff. I gave them smiles, but not like they were giving PJ and me.

“These people really love you,” she said as we joined Claudio in the elevator.

“I know, right?” I said, laughing.

Claudio was beaming at both of us.

And then we were at the room. Claudio opened the door and deposited the bags on the bed.

“Oh my God!” she said when she saw it. “This is exactly like I designed it!”

“PJ, I sent you pictures of the place. You knew what it looked like.”

“Yeah, but… seeing it in person is actually really cool.”

Claudio looked at both of us and smiled. I smiled back, and he shut the door behind him.

“You aren’t going to tip him?” she asked.

“Of course I am. That’s not how we do it here, though. Giving him cash is just giving him a headache. I bump him on his TODO card using the app.”

“What, like you’d tip an Uber driver?”

“Exactly. Everything he’d want to buy he’d buy through the app anyway.”

“This place is pretty cool, Mike.”

We’d stationed ourselves on the rooftop terrace of the Renacimiento El Faro, which was one of my favorite success stories in Gibara.

When we’d first gotten there, the building closest to the Batería Fernando VII was a hostel. It was called the Hostal El Faro, and it was… disgusting. There was a restaurant in the building which wasn’t any better.

We had a consultant in Miami who was building a master plan for the town, and she’d identified the El Faro building – El Faro is Spanish for “lighthouse,” but there was no lighthouse in Gibara – as the first place that needed a total rebuild. And her suggestion was to knock out all the walls, replace them with big plate-glass windows on all four sides, and move the restaurant to the roof.

Which we did.

We kept it as something like a Spanish colonial building, except you could see through it. And then we set it up almost like a WeWork, in that it was an office hub for all of LCTC’s different operations in Gibara.

The El Faro building was directly northeast of the Plaza da Silva. So when the big event came, and all of the PGFI people came in – Stan, Trent, Melissa, Pierce, a bunch of others – that’s where we had our big VIP area. Right there on the rooftop, with the bar cranking out pina coladas (PJ’s was a virgin colada, which she said was actually better) and mojitos as we watched.

And around 11:00, on a gorgeous early September day, the yacht from Miami motored into the bay and docked on the big, refurbished eastern pier, which was decorated with Cuban flags and palm fronds. I thought that was a bit over the top, but Marisol insisted that the symbolism would make for impenetrable mojo.

It was Diego on the yacht. When it moored at the end of the pier, and the big TV screens set up all around the Plaza da Silva showed him, ten thousand people went wild. The little Cuban band set up on the stage – we’d built a concert stage to cover the little built-in stage on the plaza – started playing a samba rendition of “Take Me Out To The Ballgame,” and the folks were dancing to it. The La Bala beer truck was back, there were a few thousand Cuban sandwiches flown in from Café Versailles in Little Havana, where they were live-streaming this from cameras we’d set up on the rooftop of Renacimiento El Faro – and there was a very large block party in the big parking lot across the side street on Calle Ocho where practically all of the Cuban community in Miami had turned out to watch, and Marisol was beaming at me.

She’d organized the whole thing. And she’d gone way beyond what I’d expected.

The Manolo Pendejo song had, by that point, gone viral beyond anybody’s imagination.

The corporate record industry wouldn’t touch it. It didn’t matter. The song had topped 100 million views on YouTube; it was the top download on iTunes, and Con Fuego had begun to supplant Bad Bunny as the top act in reggaeton.

Marisol’s cousin Nestor wasn’t exactly their manager, but he’d done a little bit of everything for them, and it was through Nestor that she did something I thought was nuts.

Which was to book them for Diego’s homecoming.

“If you really want to make this a happening, then we should get Omar and his band down here and have them play,” she said while we were planning this event.

“Yeah,” I said, “and then we can all stand up against a wall and ask for a blindfold and a cigarette before we get shot.”

She gave me a confused look.

“What?” I asked her.

“I understand the getting shot part,” she said. “Blindfolds and cigarettes?”

“I’ll have to show you some old movies.”

“OK, whatever. But seriously, Nestor says they would absolutely come, and you need to give me the go-ahead to book this. Otherwise, they’re going to go on Fallon, because they got invited to go out to L.A. for that.”

“Fallon? What?”

She just looked at me.

“Marisol, I don’t think you can book them. We are still in Cuba, and we don’t have an army here.”

“Would you stop? They’re not gonna play Manolo Pendejo. They’ll play something else.”

“They play something else?”

“Of course they do.”

“All right,” I said.

But I was terrified, because when that yacht docked, Omar Duran and his band were on it. Omar was a guy I was worried the DSE would arrest on sight, and then I’d be groveling in front of Pupo or Hamza or Candela himself trying to untie that knot.

The TV’s showed a close-up of Diego and Essie getting off the boat, and the roar of the crowd was utterly deafening.

I’m a sports guy. I’ve been in football stadiums with 100,000 people hollering at the top of their lungs trying to disrupt a snap count. I’ve been in Yankee Stadium and seen Derek Jeter knock it out of the park in the bottom of the ninth.

But for raw emotion, I’ve never seen anything top the reaction when Diego appeared on those cameras.

And when he and Essie walked on those palm fronds up the pier and onto the stage where the people gathered in the plaza could see him, it was…

…love.

I don’t know how else to describe it. This guy was the favorite son of a town which had been in existence for more than 200 years, and he’d been gone for a quarter century. He was never celebrated, officially, because he’d defected and his name was mud as far as the regime was concerned. So you had 15,000 people in Gibara, and another 50,000 outside the city, who were largely forbidden from publicly showing him loyalty or respect.

And here was that wall crumbling in real time.

Diego was on that stage, waving to the crowd, and I was watching him through a pair of binoculars, and I could see the emotion on his face. I gave the field glasses to PJ, and she watched it for a few seconds.

“Wow,” she said. “Just wow.”

She put the binoculars down and looked at me.

“Thank you,” she said.

“For what?”

“For making me come here. You were right. This is history.”

Diego was telling the people that he was setting up in El Almacén and that there were refreshments in the warehouse, and if they wanted to come and say hello, just join the receiving line. And that there would be entertainment and food, and the best beer in the world free for everybody but the kids.

If nothing else, La Bala was the consummate beer salesman.

So he ducked into the El Almacén tent, and the line formed, and for a couple of hours Diego was communing with his people. It was all on the TV’s, and it was all amazing.

A young father had brought his son to see La Bala; the kid ended up on his shoulders as he greeted the townsfolks. An old abuela who he’d known in his youth came up to him, and he recognized her immediately, giving her an embrace which brought tears to the eyes of the folks watching. An old man he’d known came up, shaking with emotion; Diego touched foreheads with the man for several seconds. The priest at the church came up to him and gave him a high five.

It was powerful.

He must have greeted five thousand people.

And while it was happening, the little Cuban band gave way to Omar Duran and Con Fuego. The crowd didn’t actually know who they were, and they played six or seven songs that – I’m not a big reggaeton guy, but hey – they were good.

Marisol and PJ were laughing and dancing with each other. Stan came up and asked me if Frank Taylor, who ran Sunshine Records for us under the Blockbusters umbrella, was going to sign Con Fuego.

“After today I think he should,” I said. “Though I probably know more about reggaeton than Frank does.”

Trent was smoking a cigar, which he said was a prototype of his new Colon brand from just up the hill. He asked if I wanted one. I’m not a cigar guy, but I hated to turn him down.

“Maybe later,” I said.

The receiving line was starting to wind down. I could see that Essie was working the room and Diego was greeting the last of the folks.

And then I heard it.

“Oh, shit,” I said. “We’re dead.”

It was that dembow beat. Unmistakable. Boom-badaba, boom-badaba.

I looked at Marisol, furious. She just smiled.

“It’s going to be fine,” she said.

So the English translation of the lyrics to the Manolo Pendejo song goes like this…

Boom-badaba

Boom-badaba

Boom-MA-NO-LO

PEN-DE-JO

No power, no power, say it again / “Country or Death” — but what do you give us? / Not a candle, not a fan / Manolo shouts but he turns off the sun

The land’s the best, but the plate is empty / The beaches are gold, but they’re not mine / The doctor smiles while you die on the floor / That’s the revolution — welcome to paradise

Cuba on its knees for Venezuela / And Venezuela on its knees for Trumbull now / The Castros lied, you’re their lackey / And you won’t even let them sing about your failure

Candela in the street means “what a disaster,” “what a mess” / Candela is your name, candela is your job / You burned the country and called it revolution / They named you well — you ARE the destruction

Then there’s a call-and-response…

Who turned off the light? — Manolo! / Who stole our bread? — Manolo! / Who’s afraid of a song? — Manolo! / That coward, that coward, that coward!

And a slower, stripped-back bridge…

I buried my grandmother without a single candle lit / I prayed for her in the dark, that was my whole offering / Sixty-seven years and we’re still waiting / Manolo, tell me — waiting for what?

It was a brutal takedown of the Candela regime, and there were thousands of people who’d been taken away for playing it.

So when that beat dropped, that crowd of people – by that point it was probably more than ten thousand in and around that plaza – went from jubilant to utterly silent.

Except when Omar began singing, the lyrics were different. The English translation of what he sang was…

Boom-badaba

Boom-DI-E-GO

Boom-MA-CE-O

LA-BA-LA

Gibara watched him born with nothing in his hands / From poor ballplayer to Hall of Fame, brother / A hundred miles an hour, everybody on their feet / He came back for his people — that’s never seen

He didn’t come with a weapon, he came with the light / With the port, with the ship, with honest work / Cuba Libre isn’t a dream anymore, you see it / The Bullet arrived and no one runs this time

He hung up the spikes but never hung up the hunger / Mercedes in the driveway, it’s not a lie / He’s got the land, he’s got the movies, he’s got the dollar in his hand / That’s what happens when a Cuban lives free

And the call-and-response…

Who came back for us? — The Bullet! / Who brought light and work? — The Bullet! / Who said no more fear? — The Bullet! / Diego, Diego, Diego, Diego!

By that point the crowd was in ecstasy, because they all knew they’d beaten the regime. This wasn’t a protest song anymore. It was an anthem.

I noticed, as I looked around the plaza with my binoculars, that Cabrillo was standing on the far side of the plaza with Lido, the skinny thug he went around with. He looked like the only guy at that whole scene who wasn’t happy.

But then there was a big roar from the crowd, and I panned back to the stage. Diego was there. And Omar gave him the mic, and then it was Diego who sang the bridge…

My grandmother also died in the dark, I wasn’t there / But I swore the next grandmother would have her candle / I didn’t come to be a king, I came to pay a debt / This isn’t charity — this is what’s owed to Gibara

I looked at Marisol. She was beaming.

“It’s Diego’s song now!” she shouted.

I smiled at her, and then I put the binoculars back on Cabrillo, who was screaming at Lido. That seemed a little strange, but then I saw him pointing at something.

In the direction of the stage, but maybe not at the stage…

And then I saw it.

It was a go-fast boat.

And the guy driving it was…

Pupo?

It had to be. White seersucker suit, wispy combover hair flapping away in the breeze, four large suitcases on the deck behind him. Heading flat-out into the bay and beyond.

I panned back to Cabrillo. He was done yelling at Lido. He was looking at…

…me.

And not with anything like a friendly face.

Chapter Fourteen

Gibara, Holguin Province, Cuba — September 8, 2026

 

Diego’s homecoming in Gibara lasted for basically three days. He held court on the yacht, and people from all over Cuba came to see him. There was talk Candela was going to come and do a photo op with him, which Diego couldn’t exactly say no to while he was on Cuban soil, but he really didn’t want to do it.

“Mike, Hal, keep that pendejo out of Gibara,” he said.

“That’s a bit of a tall ask,” said Hal. “His army is bigger than ours.”

“Today it is,” said Diego. “Tomorrow? Who knows?”

“That’s the point,” I said. “We have to string enough tomorrows together that when the frog notices the pot’s boiling it’s too late for him to jump out.”

“Your man Pierce wants to move faster,” he said.

“I know he does. And we’ve got a big move coming. But you’re going to need to make sure you have a power base at least on this side of the country before we do.”

Diego knew where I was going with that, which I’ll explain in a bit.

The immediate item which needed addressing after the homecoming was Trevor’s Omobba Brigade, because they were threatening a full mutiny and making demands.

The first was that I address them. The second was that they get to go home. That latter part was pretty common; the Omobba Brigade kids were almost all heading back to the States, and back home it was a pretty controversial thing.

On the Left, those kids were victims; they’d been catfished into providing free labor for one of the world’s richest men. And on the Right, they’d gotten everything they deserved and more; volunteering to defend a tyrannical communist regime and an enemy of the United States was basically treason, and as it turned out, the humanitarian effort they were actually joining, which people expected would ultimately turn the regime over, was a pretty noble project.

James O’Keefe had dropped a video on YouTube outing Helping Hands Cuba’s subcontractor, an organization called International People’s Humanitarian Auxiliary, as a Candela regime front. The rather misshapen young woman who ran IPHA was on camera glibly confessing that she had a handler who was being paid by the Cuban government and that IPHA was funded out of Havana through a bank in Barbados.

Which should have been a big deal. That Trumbull’s Department of Justice announced it was opening an investigation of the International People’s Humanitarian Auxiliary should have made it a bigger deal.

And yet it barely made A-20 at the Times and the Post. Nobody was surprised. I’m not sure how many people would have noticed or cared if it had made the front page. Still, the messages I was getting from my folks at Holman Media told me ordinary Americans were both horrified and greatly amused by the Omobba Brigades, and that gave me an idea.

Which was to record the little town hall I let them have with me in the Hotel Ordoño ballroom the day after Diego’s homecoming.

And what I told them was that they were lucky they did get catfished, because what they thought they’d signed up for would have been something they could have legitimately been prosecuted for.

“Instead,” I said, “you got an education you’ll take with you. How many of you saw what you expected when you came here?”

Nobody raised their hand.

“How many of you got an awakening when you started interacting with the folks here and found out what they thought of the regime you volunteered to help out?”

“But that’s because of the embargo,” one of the useless Oberlin kids said.

“There’s a coffee shortage here,” I said. “You guys are all complaining that you can’t get coffee in town. You know that south of here in the Sierra Maestras they used to have one of the most productive coffee-growing territories in all of the Western Hemisphere? Now? It’s pretty much all gone. Sugar? Cuba was pretty much it. That’s gone. They still do some tobacco, but Cuban cigars are less and less of a thing. None of that has to do with the embargo. Tell me how the U.S. embargo keeps rain from falling on mountainsides and keeps people from harvesting coffee beans.”

Nobody had a comeback to that.

“The fact is,” I said, “if your mind was open when you got here, and you saw how fouled up this place was, when you can go everywhere else in the Caribbean other than Haiti, and it’s markedly better than here, you already knew this revolution of theirs is a disaster.

“And your whole argument about this being America’s fault? Why is it America’s fault? I told these guys I was Canadian, and it was fine for me to be here. British, Australian, French, Japanese, Nigerian, Mexican – everybody else in the world could travel here, invest here, do business here. The U.S. is one country. And yet the U.S. is responsible?”

I could see the Omobba Brigade kids shifting uncomfortably in their seats. Nobody said anything.

“Where is all the investment from Spain? From Norway? Have you ever stopped to think the rest of the world ignores Cuba because this regime is a terrible investment and owes money all over the world? Other than those fancy-ass five-star hotels for the rich foreigners in Havana, that is.”

Harvard Girl was in tears. “You lied to us,” she said. “You told us we’d be helping the Cuban people fight tyranny.”

“Well, that wasn’t a lie at all, Jourdyn,” I told her. “You’ve seen how these people live. You don’t think the regime is tyrannical?”

“I’m talking about Trumbull!” she whined, and two of the Reed College kids voiced their agreement with militant “Yeahs!”

I looked at the Bethune-Cookman kid, and I asked him what he thought.

“I think you and Pierce Polk can probably do more for these people than the Chinese could. I mean, I guess you had to say you were with the Chinese in order to get in, so…”

“But they lied to us!” said Harvard Girl.

“Everybody lies,” said the Oberlin girl who didn’t stink at her job.

“What do you think, Trevor?” I asked.

“I think everybody needs to quit whining,” he said.

“How can you say that?” whined Harvard Girl.

“Because you came here utterly useless and now you have life experience. You’re at one of the most expensive colleges in the world getting a degree in, what? Gender Studies? Except last week you got certified as a forklift driver from helping out at the port this summer, didn’t you? Go home and get a job. You’ll start at 80K a year, and you’ll pay off your student loans. I don’t know what the fuck you’re complaining about.”

“Oh, Gaia,” said Harvard Girl.

“Trevor,” said one of the Reed College kids, “are you saying you’re not down with the struggle?”

“I’m saying the struggle is against the pigs who keep the people down. You tell me who those are.”

“How many of you have been able to get the internet while you’re here?” I asked.

Nobody raised their hands.

“Exactly,” I said. “You want to defend a government that won’t even let you go on TikTok? Why?”

“But that doesn’t give you the right to just… use us,” said Harvard Girl.

“But it was OK for the Chinese to use you? For Candela to use you?”

She didn’t have an answer for that. And PJ, who was standing behind me, let out a barely audible grunt.

I knew that grunt. It was PJ’s I’m-not-gonna-say-anything-and-you’d-better-be-glad-I’m-not grunt.

The meeting broke up shortly thereafter, and the Omobba Brigade kids got on the King Air 350 and flew off to Miami.

All except the Bethune-Cookman kid, who asked Trevor if he could get a job working for TODO. The answer was yes, and Trevor introduced him to Diego. Diego liked him and hired him as a gopher. Bethune-Cookman Kid ended up transferring to Florida Atlantic and taking classes online and got a degree in communications a year later.

I mentioned that Stan and Trent had come on the yacht with Diego. I didn’t convey the full dynamic of these two knuckleheads.

Stan was absolutely beside himself with envy over Trent’s deal with the Colon Cigar Company getting into Che Guevara’s cotton yarn factory. Trent wasn’t helping; he was rubbing it in with all the relish he could muster.

I hadn’t really noticed the way these two rich Wall Street rejects carried on with each other where it came to who had the coolest toys. My standard for that was so high in the stratosphere, seeing what Pierce was constantly picking up, that it didn’t even occur to me that Trent and Mariano going into the Cuban cigar business would eat Stan up the way it did.

But at dinner the night of the homecoming at the Restaurante Río de Mares, it came to a head.

“Goddammit, Stan,” Trent said, after Stan had gone into a long discussion of how they’d never let him export his cigars to the States and he was going to lose all his money, “that’s enough. You’re a rum guy, not a cigar guy. Stop acting like a fuckin’ six-year-old and go do rum.”

“For your information, that IS what I’m gonna do,” said Stan. “I’m just not jumping the gun and doing it in a war zone, or whatever this is right now.”

“Guys,” I said, “can we turn the temperature down?”

“I’d love to,” said Trent, “but I’m sick of listening to this rich prick pissing on my dream.”

“Stan, stop pissing on his dream with your rich prick,” I said.

There was laughter around the table.

“I’m just saying,” said Stan, but he knew he’d lost.

Normally, Stan was a pretty easygoing guy. But for some reason he was different about this.

So I asked him about it the next day.

“Because I want to be involved,” he said. “I mean, I helped put all this together. You know that. I helped Pierce and Simon set up the financial piece; I got the supply chain worked out; it was my legal guys who set up the shell companies and all that shit. Pierce and Simon put the muscle in. You actually came down here and ran an operation on the ground, for Chrissake. And now Trent just shows up, Johnny Come Lately, and he gets to be the first American business guy to put in an investment and get cool Cuban shit out of it? Really?”

“I hope you realize how petty that sounds.”

“Don’t you dare call me petty. I’ve put in a lot of work on this deal.”

“Yeah, Stan, and look at the difference it’s made. There are 24 other places like this one and life is suddenly pretty bearable here. And you’ve been a big part of that.”

“I still want in,” he said.

“Well, do the rum distillery then.”

“It’s too soon.”

“I don’t know why you’d say that. Do you not think Candela’s going down? I mean, we’re standing on a street in Cuba in broad daylight, and nobody is surveilling us, shooting at us or arresting us.”

“Yet,” he said.

I just shrugged. I didn’t expect I’d get arrested standing in front of the hotel.

But he got in the truck with me and we drove all through Gibara and some of the area around it. It was just Stan and me; PJ and Marisol were getting a spa treatment at the hotel that morning.

Stan noticed how much sugar was being produced in the fields south and east of the city.  And also how much of that sugarland was lying fallow.

“Jesus,” he said after a while. “The opportunity… I mean, look at all this. This is… holy shit, this is agricole!”

“I don’t know what that means,” I said.

“So French rum, like they make in Martinique and Guadeloupe, is different from regular rum. Rhum agricole is made when you cut the sugar cane and basically immediately bring it to the mill where you press the cane juice out. Like, you have to do that within three hours after you’ve harvested. Then you ferment the cane juice, and for your basic product you don’t even have to age it.”

“Have I ever had that?” I asked him.

“You ever drink a caipirinha?”

“Oh, yeah. Like at Texas de Brazil?”

“Exactly. That’s made with cachaça, which is Brazilian cane-juice rum. And you can make cachaça, or blanc rum without even aging it. You just distill it and bottle the stuff and ship it. But with all this sugarland… holy shit. I need to call my guy Ferdinand. You know, my rum guy who has Bar 1959 in West Palm? He used to manage at Café La Trova on Calle Ocho. Guy’s a walking encyclopedia where rum is concerned.”

“All right,” I said.

“Ferdy is convinced that cane-juice rum is going to take off. It’s more like tequila than ordinary rum is; it just hasn’t had a Margaritaville moment yet.”

“OK,” I said.

“And all of this… damn.”

He started doing the math out loud. An acre of sugar yields 30 tons, give or take, and that translated to three barrels, or 150 or so bottles of finished product, and there was what looked like a virtually unlimited amount of acreage of sugarland here that was all owned by a regime about to go out of business.

“They’d lease us the land, you know,” he said. “We wouldn’t even have to buy it.”

“I hope this ‘we’ is the royal we,” I said. “I’m not getting into the rum business.”

He just looked at me.

I was taking us back west toward Gibara, and I put us on the 221, the road into town. But I took a detour, because I wanted to check on Belcher and his latest project.

So after a half-mile on a newly-cut dirt road we found him at the asphalt batch plant they’d set up alongside the highway construction. Road graders were pushing dirt around for almost two weeks, and there had been a ton of progress.

“What’s this?” said Stan.

“This is the highway I told you about, Stan. Don’t you read those progress reports?”

“Must have missed this,” he said.

“Hop out. I’ll make Belcher tell you about it.”

And we found Jason, who told Stan what was happening, about the port at Vita and the road connecting it because the existing network was terrible.

“Wait, there’s gonna be an expressway through here?” Stan asked.

“Well, yeah,” said Jason. “I need something we can move freight on, and they’re letting us build this thing so long as we also build it to Holguin. Got another plant like this in Vita and we’re working from both directions. We’ll be done in 10 weeks, weather permitting.”

“Wait, so I could have an interstate-quality road, and I build the mill along it, and it runs through the middle of the sugarland, and…”

Before he finally shut up, Stan had designed the largest agricole rum operation in the world in his head. He’d stopped looking at fallow sugarcane fields, and instead he was looking at a logistics problem he already knew how to solve. He’d even built, mentally, a conveyor bridge from a catch-station across the road into the mill so that the harvest trucks from the fields opposite the road could just deposit there and have the conveyor bring the cane into the press without having to wait on the highway traffic.

“The three-hour window from harvest to mill isn’t a constraint, right?” he said. “It’s an engineering spec. You design the field sections, you build the dedicated roads in a spoke pattern radiating out from the central mill, you harvest in rotating sections so the mill runs continuously through the season. And… Oh, Jesus, the bagasse from the cane you just toss into your incinerator as biofuel so you don’t even need to pull from the power grid to run your mill.”

“That’s smart,” said Belcher.

“This is supply chain management, Mike. And it’s a greenfield opportunity. It’s… wide open. Vertical integration from dirt to dock. At a cost no competitor can match.”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “At least, I guess so.”

“No, you don’t get it. This is a mostly brand-new product, culturally tied to a place everybody associates with the product class, and it’ll come from land that nobody is currently doing anything with. On an island that’s about to open to American capital for the first time in sixty years. Where there’s labor so cheap that even half-assed wages will get you the best employees you could imagine. And with a port 15 minutes away once Belcher finishes in, what, three months?”

“Maybe less,” said Belcher.

Stan was looking at me with an enthusiasm that I found almost off-putting.

“Stan, you might be getting a little ahead of yourself,” I said.

“Cuba Rica!” Stan said. “That’s what I’m gonna call it. Cuba Rica.”

“What, like Cuba Libre?” asked Belcher.

“It’s already gonna be libre,” said Stan. “This is gonna make it rica.”

Stan was on a cloud that night at the big party TODO threw for Diego’s Cuban exile pals at the rooftop terrace at the Hotel Ordoño. So much so that Trent came up to me asking what accounted for his 180.

“Ohhh,” I said, “let’s just call it a bout of enthusiasm.”

“Oh yeah? He’s gonna do his rum project?”

“In his head he’s already done it. And his is a lot bigger than yours.”

Trent laughed.

“Well, good for him,” he said. “I was still first.”

“Yes, you were, Trent.”

Among the Cubans at that party were the Uribes, who were a family from Little Havana. But there was nothing little about the Uribes. These were folks who’d been Big Sugar in Cuba – in Holguin Province, I’d heard, so it was a big deal that they’d come in with Diego – before the revolution. And then they’d moved to Florida and became Bigger Sugar. And branched out into lots of other businesses. In fact, Sam Uribe, who was 40-ish and who had been on the yacht with Diego sailing down to Miami, actually owned a Cadillac dealership in Coconut Grove.

Sam’s parents, Reynaldo and Consuela, flew into PCIA that afternoon. They were at the party. Essie introduced them to Stan.

And a little later, I noticed Stan talking to Reynaldo. I knew he had to be geeking out in front of the old man talking about rum. I figured it would be worth listening to, so I sidled up to him. Trent and Sam were standing there.

“Hey, Mike,” said Sam. “Thanks for putting this together.”

“Actually, Marisol did it. She’s great.”

“So anyway,” Stan said, “it’s a fantastic opportunity and I’m really excited about it.”

“None of that will happen,” said Reynaldo. “And you shouldn’t say another word about it.”

“Wait,” said Stan. “Why?”

“Because that land you like so much is not yours, Mr. Lynch. It’s ours. My family was growing sugar and making rum here when your people were just getting off the boat from Ireland. That port? Ours. One hundred thousand acres of sugar. Ours. The Santa Cruz rum brand, distilled just a few miles away in Vita before the revolution. Also ours. And we will have it all back.”

“Well, fine,” said Stan. “But you know…”

“And we will certainly not waste that sugar on trash agricole rum! An abomination!”

And Reynaldo stormed off.

“We’ll just see about that!” Stan hollered at Reynaldo as he walked away.

Sam held his hands up to Stan, in sort of a silent “calm down, I’ll handle this” gesture, then he went to chase after his father.

And the crowd, which had been riveted by the exchange, went right back to whatever animated discussions they were having.

I looked around that party and realized a couple of things.

First, there were no Cubans on that terrace who weren’t bartenders or wait staff. They were all Americans, though sure, most were Cubans by ethnicity.

And second, I was the only person in the room who wasn’t trying to get rich off Cuba. Trent had his cigar factory. Stan wanted the rum. The Uribes wanted their land back and their port and sixty years of compound interest on top. Even Diego, God bless him, was going to sell a lot of beer.

I was just writing a book.

Well, fine. I guess that’s me making money off Cuba. And I imagine that sounds hypocritical coming from me.

PJ had been talking to Essie while I was watching Stan square off with Reynaldo Uribe. She sidled up to me as the confrontation receded.

“What was that about?” she asked.

“Well, Stan wants to buy up all this sugarland and make caipirinha rum with it,” I said.

“Mmmm, caipirinha. You have to take me out somewhere and get me one when I’m not pregnant anymore,” she said.

“It’s a date. But Old Man Uribe is not very pleased with Stan’s plan.”

“Why? Because he wants the land too? Or because he doesn’t want caipirinha rum?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, I guess it wouldn’t take long before people would be fighting over Cuba.”

“This is going to be Diego’s number one thing he’s going to have to navigate if he wants to run this place,” I said.

“Oh my God, you aren’t kidding.”

“Oh yeah?”

“So I was just talking to Essie, and she was saying that it was kind of a disaster that they brought all these Miami Cuban bigwigs on the yacht. She and Diego figured it would be like a full day of everybody getting a chance to really plan out what the next Cuba would look like, except, like, nobody agreed on anything. They all just looked at Diego and said ‘you want to be president, you fix this.’”

“Yikes,” I said.

“And you know what’s funny? The masseuse at the spa spoke really good English, and we talked for a long time about, y’know, everything here. She was ecstatic. She said this is the first chance in her lifetime not to live in a country everybody is ashamed of. Everybody’s either got a TODO card, or they’re getting one; people who used to just sit around all day are now coming up with business ideas and taking on work, like, she said the whole country is being turned on like a light switch. It sounds like the actual Cubans aren’t fighting. They’re fired up to do great things.”

“And the Americans are the ones fighting,” I said.

“I guess that’s just who we are now,” said PJ, fretting.

The next day Diego’s buses rolled off the ship in Vita, and his tour of Eastern Cuba was set to begin. PJ and I walked all over Gibara; she made it a point to buy something from every street vendor we passed, and she laughed every time I rolled my eyes at all of her new crap.

“Oh, come on,” she said. “Thirty years from now we’ll have a whole bookcase full of this stuff and we’ll tell the grandkids about how you saved Cuba and this will be the evidence.”

“You think I’m still gonna be around in 30 years, huh?” I said.

She lowered her sunglasses and looked at me seriously.

“You’d better be.”

We were greeted over and over again by people who knew me, or knew of me. “Señor Mike!” they’d say, coming up and shaking my hand and introducing themselves, showing me their TODO cards and giving me big smiles. I’d introduce PJ to them and they’d immediately give her hugs. By the time I got her back to the hotel room, she was bubbling over.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Has there ever been a better day?”

“The day I married you would probably be up there,” I said. “And then there was the day Little Mike was born…”

“Oh no. Not with the 16 hours of labor. Sorry, Little Mike. This one was painless. Though I think it was probably a mistake not to wear my Hokas today. I might need a foot rub.”

“Sure, why not?” I said. “Do I get anything like a reward for that?”

“We’ll see how you do,” said PJ.

But she never got her foot rub. At least not in the room.

The TV was on, and because we’d managed to hook the hotel up to the Blockbusters system, they had access to practically every news outlet imaginable; I had Fox News pulled up.

Sean Hannity was talking about Naomi Yanko-Munsch and how nuts she was, and then she appeared on a video clip.

“I’m calling on President Candela to arrest Mike Holman,” she said. “He has defrauded the Cuban regime. It’s unconscionable, and…”

Off went the TV. I looked at PJ, who had the remote in her hand.

“I mean, really?” she said.

Just then there was a knock on the door. It was Hal.

“Grab what you can carry,” he said. “We gotta go.”

“Why? What happened?”

“There’s a warrant out for your arrest. And mine. And Marisol’s. And Jack Gray’s.”

“What did Jack do?”

“They know he was CIA. Mike, there’s no time. We’re getting out on the boat. Now.”

I turned to look at PJ. She already had her sandals back on and grabbed her purse. “Can somebody pack up this stuff and send it to us?” she asked Hal as I packed up my laptop and the written notes and threw them in the backpack.

“I’ll work on that,” Hal said. “Come on. Now. Really. We gotta go.”

So we did, and Victor had the F-250’s engine running when we got to the lobby.

“Señor Mike,” said Claudio, as we blew past the concierge stand, “I’m so sorry. Everybody’s heard, and we don’t like it.”

I felt like MacArthur at Corregidor. And there was only one thing that was in my head.

“I shall return,” I said.

Claudio didn’t get it. That was OK. I waved to him and hustled into the truck.

Nobody arrested us. We got out on the boat with Marisol, Stan, Trent, and a few of the Cuban exiles who were already on it and didn’t mind taking a night ride to the Bahamas.

But on the way to Ragged Island, Hal relayed the news.

Jack had tried to fly out from PCIA. The Army stopped his plane, and they’d taken him.