In a wealthy Havana household, three orphaned siblings and cousins are drawn from their quiet world by Victor Hugues, a merchant sailor whose Caribbean tales carry the fever of the French Revolution. Soon they're swept into insurrection brewing as far away as Port-au-Prince, caught between liberation and its costs.
An empire can carry out conquest while calling it liberation, so that freeing people becomes the tool for using them. Enslaved people declared free can be put straight to work fighting the liberator's war for control of the colony. The language of freedom and the practice of domination can sit in the same act.
A place judged by a short visit shows its colour and good humour. Living there for a year reveals the slow damage underneath. Brief exposure gives you the surface, while lasting exposure shows the wounds that the festive appearance hides.
Only a thin line separates the one who frees from the one who enslaves, and the pull of power can carry a person across it. A revolutionary's idealism and his appetite for power can live in the same person from the start. When power arrives, the appetite tends to win.
Revolutionary ideals carried from where they were born into a colony do not arrive whole. Mixed with the ambition and bloodlust that travel with them, they can die in violence and end in a return to slavery and the old order they promised to abolish.
A magnetic stranger carrying new ideas can pull sheltered, comfortable people into the upheavals of their age. Drawn in by his spirit, they do not see the consequences of their attachment or the corruption it will let loose.