For some time, Cuban writer Leonardo Padura has been exploring his disenchantment with many of the realities of his beloved county through his novels about detective Mario Conde. But it is in his The Man Who Loved Dogs, just published in English, where his social and political reflections about socialism and freedom — in Cuba and beyond — reach their greatest depth.

Padura intertwines the stories of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his assassin, the Catalonian Communist Ramón Mercader, whom he brings together through the lens of a Cuban narrator, a journalist fired from his job for political reasons and forced to work as a proofreader for a veterinary journal.

The historical fact that, for about four years at the end of the seventies, Mercader lived in Cuba, working as an adviser to the repressive Ministry of the Interior (and that his mother Caridad worked for seven years as the functionary in charge of public relations at the Cuban embassy in Paris in the sixties), gives Padura the means to connect the assassin with the journalist. They meet one day when Mercader, accompanied by a bodyguard, is walking his beloved dogs on the beach of Santa María del Mar where the journalist had gone to watch the sunset.