4 ideas
In the summer of 1989 Alexis Arayán, the young son of a well-placed Cuban diplomat, is found strangled in Havana's woods wearing a red dress and makeup. To find the killer, Lieutenant Mario Conde must enter the gay and theatrical underground his own police culture despises, and his main witness is Alberto Marqués, an aging dramatist the regime silenced.
In the early 1970s Cuban cultural bureaucracies applied 'parameters' of ideological and sexual conformity to artists. Those who failed, especially homosexuals, lost their jobs, publication rights and stages. The mechanism is civil erasure rather than physical elimination: the person stays alive but is removed from public existence, so their talent withers in enforced obscurity while the state can deny that anyone was persecuted.
The novel treats drag and theatrical disguise as a key to the whole society. Under surveillance and ideological pressure, officials, parents and citizens all perform approved identities over their private selves. From this angle the openly costumed transvestite is the least masked person present, and the respectable are the real impersonators.
Conde can only solve the crime by recognizing his own homophobia and the reflexive contempt of his police milieu, and then setting both aside. The book argues that an institution's prejudices act as blind spots in its detection work: the facts it refuses to see about marginal people are the facts that solve the case.