This Prize Finalist is a Political Thriller
Review of Alexander Sorondo's CUBAFRUIT
Judging for the Samuel Richardson Award
As a judge for the Samuel Richardson self-published fiction prize cooked up by Naomi Kanakia, I’ve spent the last several weeks reading outside my usual preferences — which, it turns out, was a very clarifying experience. My task was to choose one finalist from the seven book-length works of self-published fiction in my pile and review it for my newsletter subscribers. All the judges will do the same, then we’ll all read the selected finalists to choose a winner.
Given all the discourse about how contemporary publishing has doomed literature by focusing on the market and pandering to readers, I was curious about what I might be missing. I had hoped I might be wowed by some unsung talent. In reality, I spent a lot of time bored or confused by what I was reading. I began to feel truly worried about wasting your time with my commitment to this contest and about doing a disservice to the writers as well. As one of my favorite Merve Emre maxims goes, “It’s not challenging to get people to not read something. People are not reading things all the time.”
My pick for finalist: Cubafruit by Alexander Sorondo
That said, the book I’ve selected as a finalist, Cubafruit by Alexander Sorondo, is worth talking about. It’s a sprawling, genre-blurring political thriller that argues with itself about history, double-dealing and storytelling. From the epigraph, which takes the editorial license of plugging the fictional name of the novel’s island of San Mara into a John Quincy Adams’s quote about his famous theory of Cuba, this book caught my attention with its ambition:
…and if an apple severed by the tempest from its native tree cannot choose but to fall to the ground, San Mara, forcibly disjoined from its own natural connection with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only towards the North American Union, which by the same law of nature cannot cast her off from its bosom.
Here is an author who will take some liberties with history and text, to create something new.
A cinematic political thriller
Cubafruit gets going with a cinematic hook. It’s 2022. An eminent biographer based in a neighborhood resembling Little Havana, Miami, receives a call from an anonymous woman minutes before a live telephone interview on national TV. She says, “I’m looking at you through a rifle scope.” The reader should know she means business, as we’ve just seen her shoot an innocent bystander. From there, the story lunges into a cat-and-mouse game between a the biographer and the caller, who insists she knows about his complicity with his subject, a former VP to a Caribbean dictator, and with a past still unfolding in real time.
The book weaves a minute-by-minute unfolding of that drama with multiple 20th century timelines in an alternative history of Cuba, constructing a web of political violence. At its heart is the uneasy triangle between the people who make history, the people who try to survive it, and the people who live to tell about it.
A sprawling cast of characters develop and switch allegiances, offing each other on the regular as the island nation of San Mara tries to find a way to deal with its legacy of enslavement, embargo, exile and spies. The narrative ricochets in a new direction with each bloody shootout as this process of elimination leaves the only victors—is the dictator alive, or is that a video of a convincing avatar?— the complicit, and those motivated for revenge.
Fantastical flourishes
I really enjoyed the fantastical elements of this world. Across timelines and borders, characters of all stripes enjoy a tropical beverage called cubafruit: it sounds like its half smoothie, half kava, and half cocaine. (Yes, I know that’s three halves, but that’s the energy of this book: excessive and fully committed to its own intensity.) A wolf dog appears at moments of moral ambiguity; vampiric fish and some rather muscular spiders torment the characters and contribute to the overall horror of their experiences.
A maximalist gambit
The chapters featuring a CIA agent called Pavel Bender feel like an escape from the agitation of the rest of the characters— quieter, more psychological, and grounded in duty regardless of the machinations around him. You can feel the author placing the whole political cosmos in his hands.
Cubafruit is baggy at 530 pages, and several of the characters seem to exist only to suffer in gruesome detail that made me wish someone—anyone—had suggested cutting 20% of the gore and made Sorondo choose which one character would get to shit his pants in the final draft. As is, Cubafruit is a maximalist gambit, with some threads left dangling and some scenes that feel like they came straight from the unfiltered id.
Why it matters
What makes Cubafruit feel relevant in 2025 is the way it depicts circumstances that are playing themselves out right now: operatives of the government disappear people from our streets. Boats in the Caribbean, and their passengers, have been obliterated with impunity. Someday, some whistleblowers and journalists will write volumes explaining the dealings undergirding these horrors and perhaps the victims’ family members will wonder what they— like the biographer at the center of this novel— were doing while this happened.
Sorondo’s candid Acknowledgments address his grief and shame over failing to sell the novel. His decision to self-publish it anyway with the encouragement of his partner gives the project a moving sense of integrity. It takes self-awareness and courage to stand by an effort that has fallen short of one’s own standards, without placing the blame on the publishing industry or suggesting readers just don’t know what’s good. And without giving up.
A writer to watch
Sorondo writes a thoughtful newsletter, big reader bad grades, (this post about the phone wallpaper he has seen while working as a cashier was featured by Substack and I personally loved this post about an argument with his manager). He’s a writer to watch in the future and I’m glad to recommend Cubafruit as a finalist for the Samuel Richardson award.
I know what you went through while reading a bunch of self-published books. I spent a year and a half reading and reviewing such books and it's either a hit or miss game, with nothing in between. But even in the worst ones, one could find glimpses of original thoughts. To point them out to the potential readers is something I genuinely enjoyed. Kudos for you for your work.
The book seems really intriguing.
I'm glad CUBAFRUIT is getting so much attention, because it's a really enjoyable read on a page-to-page level (even the lurid violence feels like the right kind of pulpiness! ymmv obviously), and the tripartate structure (rise of Basto / fall of Basto / biographer at gunpoint, all interwoven brilliantly) is fantastic too. My only point of frustration was with the fast-and-looseness of the alternate history here -- took me way too long to figure out, wait, who's the US President in this timeline? Is San Mara literally replacing Cuba in this timeline or is it a related nation?
But yeah, Sorondo has a lot on his mind here about the relationship between politics and the media, even on the meta level -- note the way that so many characters in the book go unnamed for hundreds of pages, until the exact moment they lose their power. (I was struck by the very cagey, very deliberate description of the biographer as "bilingual" -- I'm sure a lot of readers assumed he's a white guy in the Robert Caro mold, but explicitly giving him ANY race or ethnicity would get in the way of his self-proclaimed neutral observer status... very canny on Sorondo's part...)