'Cuba Straits' by Randy Wayne White: Baseball, history, love triangle

Cuba Straits

By Randy Wayne White

Putnam. 320 pp. $26.95

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Reviewed by Oline H. Cogdill

With the easing of relations between the United States and Cuba, Randy Wayne White's 22d Doc Ford novel couldn't be more timely.

Cuba Straits delivers a rip-roaring plot filled with baseball, history, lost treasure, and, just for good measure, a love triangle - all wrapped in politics.

Doc Ford quietly is going about his business as a marine biologist whose home and lab are in a marina on Sanibel Island. He is contemplating a relationship with a woman who is spending the season in one of the tourist cabins. Workwise, he focuses on his sighting of a rare species of turtle not found in the Gulf Coast. But Doc's former life as a government agent always interferes.

Gen. Juan Garcia, Doc's old acquaintance - be careful whom you call a friend - wants his help. The former dictator of Masagua, "a tiny [fictional] country that exported bananas and revolution," Garcia now makes a tidy profit smuggling Cuban baseball players into the United States and selling historical treasures.

Garcia needs Doc's help in finding a runaway baseball player who may have absconded with a briefcase filled with letters written to a secret girlfriend in the early 1960s. Garcia also wants Doc to go to Cuba with him because he knows where a cache of highly prized classic Harley motorcycles and several solid-gold machine guns is buried.

A trip to Cuba isn't a good idea for Doc. He barely escaped a firing squad decades ago, and the government there has a long memory. But as Doc investigates, he learns that those letters may contain codes that reveal secrets about the United States and Cuba. A Russian spy, a killer on the loose in Key West, and the sometimes misguided politics of Doc's sidekick, Tomlinson, add to the tightly coiled plot.

White deftly moves Cuba Straits from Florida's West Coast to Cuba itself, where "political extortion," as Tomlinson says, lies around every corner.

White continues to find fresh ways of bringing Doc into the chaos of world politics. While Cuba Straits focuses more on Tomlinson, Doc is not some avenging angel but, rather, a trained agent who knows how to maneuver in unfamiliar terrain. Whom Doc decides to save - and why - showcases White's storytelling at its best.