Havana Year Zero [Paperback]

Sex, lies, and scientific history collide in 1993 Havana.

It was as if wed reached the minimum critical point of a mathematical curve. Imagine a parabola. Zero point down, at the bottom of an abyss. Thats how low we sank.

The year is 1993. Cuba is at the height of the Special Period, a widespread economic crisis following the collapse of the Soviet bloc.For Julia, a mathematics lecturer who hates teaching, this is Year Zero: the lowest possible point. But a way out appears: the search for a missing document that will prove the telephone was invented in Havana, secure her reputation, and give Cuba a purpose once more.?What begins as an investigation into scientific history becomes a tangle of sex, friendship, family legacies, and the intricacies of how people find ways to survive in a country at its lowest ebb.

It all happened in 1993, Year Zero in Cuba. The year of interminable power cuts, when bicycles filled the streets of Havana and the shops were empty. There was nothing of anything. Zero transport. Zero meat. Zero hope. I was thirty and had thousands of problems. Thats why I got involved, although in the beginning I didnt even suspect that for the others things had started much earlier, in April 1989, when the newspaperGranmapublished an article about an Italian man called Antonio Meucci under the headline The Telephone Was Invented in Cuba. That story had gradually faded from most peoples minds; they, however, had cut out the piece and kept it. I didnt read it at the time, which is why, in 1993, I knew nothing of the whole affair until I somehow became one of them. It was inevitable. Im a mathematician; method and logical reasoning are part and parcel of my profession. I know that certain phenomena can only manifest themselves when a given number of factors come into play, and we were so fucked in 1993 that we were converging on a single point. We were variables in the same equation. An equatiolÃ%