Sacrificio

Sacrificio is a triumphant and mesmeric work of violence, loss, and identity, following a group of young HIV-positive counterrevolutionaries who seek to overthrow the Castro government.

"Flourishing in its suspense and realism, the novel tells a story of recovery and resistance; Rafa puts his grief to work as he grapples with the political deeds of the deceased and the death-dealing of the state that looms over them all.”  -  Vulture

Rafa, an Afro-Cuban orphan, moves to Havana with nothing to his name and falls into a job at a café. He is soon drawn into a web of bizarre, ever-shifting entanglements with his boss’s 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 for his friend takes him through various haunts in Havana.

"Sprawling ... The [first] scene introduces several of the novel’s characteristic modes and methods, among them its mordant satire, its heavy reliance on flashback and its use of more than 1,000 Spanish words with no italics and rare translations. It also sets up one of the novel’s more lacerating remarks ... Perhaps more compelling than the plot and its tireless rum-soaked accounts is the novel’s symbolic framework ... What finally emerges is an argument for accepting revolutions as a cyclical feature, not an aberration, of political life."  -  Paul Festa, New York Times Book Review

A novel of cascading prose that captures a nation in slow collapse, Sacrificio is a visionary work, capturing the fury, passion, fatalism, and grim humour of young lives lived at the margins of a society they desperately wish to change.