https://www.ft.com/content/735635b0-f5fe-422e-b5d1-54e5372ed882

The second novel by the New York-based Cuban writer deals with issues of exile and dissidence through the eyes of several émigrés

Ángel Gurría-Quintana

September 23 2025

Born in 1989, Carlos Manuel Álvarez belongs to the generation of authors for whom the ideals of the Cuban revolution turned sour. His debut novel, The Fallen (2019), paints a bitter portrait of family life in rural Cuba, where revolutionary dreams are dead, freedoms are curtailed, and opportunities are scarce.

False War, his follow-up, published in Spanish in 2021 and now in a magisterial translation by Natasha Wimmer, examines the destinies of some of those Cubans who have fled the embattled island. It is a sprawling, polyphonic novel, fuelled by fury and empathy. There is no overarching plot, no central narrative stitching together these vignettes of émigré life in Miami, New York, Mexico City, Paris and Berlin. Instead there are the common themes of loss and longing, of lives uprooted and grafted elsewhere, borne on oceanic currents of escape and return.

Most of the characters in the novel don’t even have a name. Instead, we are introduced to “the Barber”, “the Instrumentalist”, “Client”, “Adolescent”, “the dissident”. Every one of these voices could have been an anonymous cipher, a simple stand-in, but in Álvarez’s hands they embody a painfully specific aspect of the Cuban (and Latin American) diaspora.

“You don’t belong to a place until you despise it,” says one of those characters, reflecting on his relationship with his former island home. “Exile meant the perpetuation of a country, not the renunciation of it, and hatred became a travelling practice.”

While some washed up in Florida fleeing oppression, others are fleeing the ruins of their previous lives. “I was a sad man, a genuinely devastated man”, explains another narrator. “The Mexico City earthquake had destroyed part of my building and practically my whole apartment . . . Lots of things had gotten buried under the rubble. Clothes, dishes, the art on the walls — my youth, too, in a way. And my fiancée. I’d been about to get married.”

At the heart of the book — literally and figuratively — is a meditation on the (im)possibility of return. A mid-novel interlude focuses on an unnamed Cuban dissident in Berlin, pondering the uncomfortable ethics of being feted abroad for being persecuted at home.

Soon enough “the dissident” has become “the exile”, and finds himself travelling back to Cuba after his sister’s death. “I’m still young, thinks the exile, and already people are dead, people whose faces I’ve seen many times.” The island that was once home is now an island of ghosts. The crumbling Cuban capital, meanwhile, comes sharply into focus as a place of despondency, “a city of many stray sadnesses” where everyone has a hustle.

This failed homecoming allows the exile to reflect movingly on the fate of the ones left behind. Walking past a park where people are making satellite video calls, he notices a grandfather talking to grandchildren across the sea: “The grandfather can see them clearly, but it’s night now and the grandchildren can’t see him at all. You’re a dark shadow, Grandpa, they say, and the grandfather is upset . . . The exile understands this man, who just wants to be seen. After a while, you’re less interested in seeing the person who left than in having them see you.”

Time is compressed and stretched in this novel, which seems more determined to explore the disjointedness of expatriation than to pursue the conventions of linear storytelling. It is impressionistic and disorienting, but thrums with the truth of lived experience. After all, says one of the novel’s more garrulous voices, “immigrant time is different”.

“In this country there’s a treasure for everyone,” someone else remarks excitedly about life in the US. If False War teaches us anything it is that emigration often means replacing one deep disillusionment with another.

False War by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, translated by Natasha Wimmer Fitzcarraldo £14.99/Graywolf $17, 268 pages

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False War by Carlos Manuel Álvarez — a meditation on migration