This moody Cuban novel opens in the shade of the casuarina trees by a sleepy cove near La Finca Vigia, Ernest Hemingway’s home in Havana. Mario Conde, eight years off the police force ...

In the same year, the English writer W. Somerset Maugham published “The Casuarina Tree,” a book of six short stories. Maugham was at the height of his success, as a great, and greatly ...