See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Cuba. 

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

From now on, I intend to add numbers from Storygraph to the numbers from LibraryThing and Goodreads. It didn’t change the top eight in this case, though it did bump Our Man in Havana to third rather than second.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
The Old Man and the Sea	Ernest Hemingway	1,316,371	34,464	88,298
Next Year in Havana	Chanel Cleeton	147,809	1,115	18,080
Our Man in Havana	Graham Greene	41,277	5,871	3,937
When We Left Cuba	Chanel Cleeton	46,335	496	6,264
Dreaming in Cuban	Cristina García	12,445	1,681	1,978
Before Night Falls	Reinaldo Arenas	7,410	1,206	800
Waiting for Snow in Havana	Carlos Eire	7,664	1,165	579
Havana Bay	Martin Cruz Smith	8,563	1,587	332

This week’s winner is an epic but short story about a Cuban fisherman. It’s Hemingway’s second win after, oddly enough, Tanzania; he also had a book on the Italy list and two on the Spain list. Strictly speaking, most of The Old Man and the Sea is set, well, at sea, but it’s clearly meant to be in Cuban territorial waters, so I’m giving it the win. It has the highest rankings on both GR and LT of any book since Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl back in September.

All of the above are in dialogue with the US-Cuba relationship. I was not entirely sure about the two Chanel Cleeton novels – and I did disqualify a third by her, The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba, which is clearly mainly set in the USA. Though born in the USA, Cleeton identifies as Cuban-American. I also wasn’t completely sure about Dreaming in Cuban, but on balance it seems to be mostly set on the island.

I disqualified a lot of other books which are only partially set in Cuba, or not at all. Works by and about Che Guevara figured in the list. I did pagecounts of two more Hemingway books, Islands in the Stream and To Have and Have Not, but concluded that neither qualified.

Next up is Tajikistan; then Papua New Guinea, and after that a run of European countries starting with Sweden and Czechia.

Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE | Tajikistan
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras | Cuba
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium | Sweden
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea