Purvis was a British architect who moved his family to Havana in 2000 and spent over a decade as a fixture of the expat business community, working on hotels, factories, and a container port. In 2012, during Raúl Castro's purges, State Security arrested him at home, and the book recounts the roughly fifteen-month ordeal that followed: interrogation at the notorious Villa Marista center, imprisonment without charge, a secret trial, and abrupt release. The accusation, initially, was selling state secrets.
Chief among those projects was the restoration of the Hotel Saratoga, the faded Havana Vieja landmark that Cuba Journal profiled a decade ago; Purvis was COO of Coral Capital, the firm behind the $28-million revamp, and the dispute over it sat near the center of the "economic" purge that sent him to Villa Marista. There is a bleak coda the book could not have known: in May 2022 the Saratoga was destroyed by a gas explosion that killed more than forty people — the building he'd rescued from ruin returned to ruin, in a city that keeps proving his thesis.
What makes it more than a captivity narrative is the register. It works as part thriller, part comedy, and part morality tale — and the comparison reviewers reach for, repeatedly, is Graham Greene by way of a cast Hemingway would have admired. Purvis carries a dry British wit through genuinely grim material, which keeps the book from collapsing into misery memoir even as it documents real repression. The trial itself he framed as a Stalinist purge fundamentally about who controls the economy, and the book's sharpest material is its incidental portrait of daily Cuban life: pervasive pilfering and corruption, a health system far from its propaganda image, and a legal concept of "moral conviction" that lets a prosecutor convict without evidence. It won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction in 2017.
The Villa Marista that swallowed Purvis is not an aberration; it is the regime's signature export turned inward. For sixty years the Cuban Revolution's most successful product was never sugar or nickel but tradecraft. The Dirección General de Inteligencia trained, armed, and ran insurgencies across the hemisphere — Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, El Salvador — while Cuban expeditionary forces fought as far away as Angola and the Horn of Africa. At home, the DGI's interrogation methods were built to Soviet and East German specification, the same apparatus Purvis describes from inside a cell. Havana spent decades penetrating its principal adversary, from the Ana Montes case at the Defense Intelligence Agency to the Wasp Network in Florida, and offering safe harbor to fugitives the United States still wants returned. Most consequentially, Cuba's intelligence services became the operating system of Chavismo: the Venezuelan security state that just collapsed with Maduro's capture was, in large part, a Cuban franchise. The island that could not keep its own lights on remained, until very recently, the most capable exporter of repression in the Western Hemisphere.
That sentence now reads in the past tense, and that is the point. As of mid-2026 the regime is in the worst crisis of its existence. A U.S. oil blockade begun in February — the first effective one since the Missile Crisis — has run the country dry of fuel and diesel, with CEPAL forecasting a 6.5% GDP contraction and Havana enduring blackouts of up to twenty hours a day.
Washington has stated openly that regime change is its goal by year's end; the OAS has unanimously declared for the restoration of democracy and labeled Cuba a "failed state." Dissident leader José Daniel Ferrer has predicted the communist regime will end before 2026 is out. Whether or not he is right on timing, the apparatus that put Purvis in Villa Marista — the State Security officers who ran the interrogations, the architects of the show-trial machinery, the ministers sanctioned by name for the regime's brutality — is exactly what any honest transition will have to reckon with. There would be a hard, Greene-worthy justice in those men answering for what they did from inside the same building they designed for everyone else. A reckoning that jails the torturers and the jailers, not abstractions, is the one a free Cuba could actually defend — and the one Purvis's diary, more than any indictment, makes the case for.
Simons Chase is the Editor of the Cuba Journal.
