The Faraway War: A Novel

By Enrique Clio

Henry Reeve was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1850. At fifteen, too young to join the military, he enlisted in the Union Army as a drummer boy. Three years later, he went on an expedition to Cuba to join the Cuban insurgents fighting the Spanish Army. In his first battle, Reeve and other rebels were captured and executed by firing squad. Miraculously, the Brooklynite survived his wounds, was rescued by Cuban rebels, and joined their fight. By the time he was killed in battle, he was a brigadier general in the Liberation Army. Today almost no one in the United States knows who Henry Reeve was, but just about every Cuban knows his story and admires him.Amusingly, Reeve is known in Cuba as "the Young Englishman," because he spoke the English language. But Henry Reeve was an American, and a Brooklyn boy all the way.The Communist dictatorship in Cuba has gone to great lengths to conceal from its people the role that many Americans played in the liberation of Cuba from Spanish colonialism. The story of this one brave man, the most respected American hero in Cuban history, is an engaging, enthralling read.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312379587
• ISBN13: 9780312379582
• Release Date: April 2009
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.87 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.6" x 1.0" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

A page turner- both fact and fiction

As an author who has also written about Cuba, I welcome the addition of Enrique Clio's novel THE FARAWAY WAR, as it covers an island whose people had risen to throw off their colonial oppressors. We are treated to page turning fiction, as the protagonist is immersed in the steaming heat and zipping bullets of a foreign war. Clio quoted E. L. Doctorow in his preface.. .".what's the difference between a historian writing history and a novelist? ...The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like." For THE FARAWAY WAR, Enrique Clio has searched the records of Henry Reeve, a Brooklynite who went to Cuba in 1869 as a messenger boy in the early days of the Cuban revolution, and who died there seven years later, a respected hero who had risen to the rank of Brigadier General. Clio's research gives us glimpses of the uniforms worn, weapons carried, and the sometimes conflicting tactics of General Maximo Gómez, and General Ignacio Agramonte whose aggressive style inspired his mambises to fight so bravely. Reeve, dubbed El Ingeisito by the Cubans, was a feared swordsman as he fought as hard as anyone. The author could have been more convincing of Reeves motives for joining the Cuba Libre movement, and a fictional leap could have helped drive the story from time to time. Yet,I enjoyed THE FARAWAY WAR for what it is - a story that puts us in the first decade of the war against Spain when the Cuban insurrectionists fought virtually alone. -Al Gowan, author SANTIAGO RAG, a novel of the Spanish-Cuban-American War