SACRIFICIO: A Cuban Literary Masterpiece About Queerness, Espionage, and Revolution

In his first two novels, Ernesto Mestre-Reed captivated critics as an original new voice in Cuban American literature with his “symphonic imagination” (The New York Times Book Review) and “dazzling word portraits” (Francisco Goldman). Now, in Sacrificio—a spellbinding novel that evinces its ten-year investment of artistry in stunning poeticism, intricate storytelling, and a discerning balance of intimacy and expansiveness—Mestre-Reed delivers a sensational moment in contemporary literary fiction on the level of Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers, cementing his place as an essential novelist of the Cuban diaspora.

 
Set in 1998 Cuba during an economic crisis known as the “Special Period,” Sacrificio is both a sweeping portrait of a nation in slow collapse and a profoundly moving story of a young man, Rafa, finding himself as he searches for his missing friend, Renato. The novel is as informative as it is marvelously imaginative, delving into a complex historic moment when the Cuban government forced HIV-positive citizens into lifetime quarantines in sanitariums, unintentionally creating a space for queer culture to thrive. As Rafa searches for Renato through various haunts in Havana—from a mostly abandoned AIDS sanitarium to a phantasmagorical slum on the outskirts of the capital—Sacrificio depicts Cuba’s underground queer culture in fascinating detail and, taking it one step further, makes it a birthplace of revolution. Through a group of young HIV-positive counterrevolutionaries planning to overthrow the Castro government, Mestre-Reed turns a deadly disease into a fount of community, power, and resistance against an oppressive government.