"But, unfortunately, such is Havana. It is impossible to change its condition as a port, as a crossroad, or its cosmopolitism, its vicious immigration, its propitiatory hiding places, its mixture of races, its fiery sun, all that diabolical entanglement of factors and circumstances that is here, amongst us, the board where the shady games of love and hatred are played"(Ruben Martinez Villena, 68). Throughout 1926, the literary journal Social publishes the detection narrative Fantoches (Puppets), a collective endeavor of eleven writers and eleven illustrators associated with the Grupo Minorista. Halfway between a Surrealist collective improvisation and a British detective novel, Fantoches 1926 is a unique creation, a confluence of intellectual currents that combine the innovations of the European avant-grade and autochthonous socio-political movements during the early Cuban Republic. An irreverent work influenced by the British sensation novels and the French romans a clef,...