Charras is the true story of Efraín “El Charras” Calderón Lara, a twenty-six-year-old union leader and student activist, and the Yucatean government’s successful plot to kidnap and murder him. Acclaim...

Charras is the true story of Efra n "El Charras" Calder n Lara, a twenty-six-year-old union leader and student activist, and the Yucatean government's successful plot to kidnap and murder him. Acclaimed Mexican novelist Hern n Lara Zavala combines real-life newspaper articles and interviews with renderings of key events, laying the state-sanctioned narrative of Charras's death beside the actual experiences of those involved. To kaleidoscopic effect, Zavala enters not only the mind of the hero but also those in his orbit: the governor of the Yucat n, Charras's bureaucrat brother-in-law, even the mercenary hired to carry out the kidnapping--the chilling "you" whose point-of-view the reader must inhabit to unravel what took place during that fateful spring of 1974.

José Martí, Margarita Engle, and the San Isidro Movement have contributed, over the course of a century, to the long tradition of writing about a free Cuba through poetics. The government knows the re...