What Lies Across the Water

Is the man who blows up an airplane and kills dozens of civilians a murderous terrorist… or a valiant freedom fighter? Is the man who tries to stop the bomber a threat to national security… or a hero of the people?

It depends.

What Lies Across the Water is a narrative nonfiction thriller. About terrorists who blow up airplanes and try to overthrow governments. About intelligence agents who try to stop them.

The twist is that these terrorists are not Muslim. They’re Cuban exiles. And the men trying to stop them? Cuban intelligence agents.

What Lies Across the Water examines the post-9/11 Bush doctrine—“Any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime”—by focusing on what happened in Miami and Havana in the 1990s when the American government—and Miami’s Cuban violent exile community—ratcheted up their attacks against Cuba.

Cuba responded by sending intelligence agents to South Florida to penetrate the plotters.

What Lies Across the Water uses an in-the-moment narrative to tell the parallel, converging, diverging stories of the exile militants, Cuban intelligence officers and FBI agents as they clash in Havana, Miami and the Straits of Florida. The story moves from the streets of Little Havana to real Havana’s Tropicana nightclub, from the hotel bar at the Copacabana Hotel to the inner sanctum of the White House—and back.

What Lies Across the Water climaxes when Cuba’s intelligence agents—the Cuba Five—are arrested and sentenced to long prison terms while the exile terrorists go free.

Who’s really a terrorist and who’s really a freedom fighter?