Considering its serious thesis-that history is as effervescent as any fiction-Lee Williams' novel offers a bitingly funny snippet of Cuban American life in Miami. Just scan the novel's cast of characters: Lean, a post Cold War spy working for a newspaper; Viviana, a Russo-Cuban waiflet looking to spring her Russian general dad from prison; her brother Boris, a bouncer at the Yalta Agreement, a strip joint; Dell, an academic rougue who specializes in ghostwritting anything from a term paper to a dissertation; Zorn, a sculptor hopelessly in love with the Guapa, a young woman he met years before in Spain; and Rool, a . . . well, you'll just need to decide who Rool and Number One might be on your own. Oh, and the grand Cubano General Ochoa himself-he's dead . . . isn't he? . . .