Before anyone jumps on the zoological inaccuracy of having what is clearly a jaguar on the cover of a book entitled The Tiger, allow me to clarify. In Venezuela, these elusive, spotted big cats are referred to as tigres. But the ‘tiger’ in Lisa St Aubin de Terán’s novel is really a metaphorical presence. Both demon-remnant of a savage grandmother clinging to the back of the protagonist, and the all too real burden of asthma in the tropics.

It was in was in the late 1960s when I first went to Cuba, drawn by the history of Cuban tobacco and tobacco workers as well as its young revolution. For years I delved deeper into how those working in tobacco agriculture and industry experienced change under colonialism, independence and revolution, influenced though never entirely convinced by the classic Cuban Counterpoint of Tobacco and Sugar by Cuban ethnographer Fernando Ortiz.

There is an ancient Japanese art called kintsugi. In this, shards of broken pottery are carefully pieced back together, and their cracks filled with gold. In the process, what might otherwise have been drab, mundane, simply discarded and ignored, becomes a thing of beauty. Its very flaws the source of its value.