THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN CUBA is a novel in which the lives of three women become entwined through a variety of circumstances across 2 nations between 1896 and 1898.

Grace Harrington is a young woman from Gilded Age New York society who has ambitions of becoming a journalist with one of the 2 major newspapers in the city. The year is 1896 and in New York, there is Joseph Pulitzer's The New York World vying with the upstart William Randolph Hearst's The New York Journal for readers and market dominance. The competition is cut-throat, so much so that it wasn't unusual for a journalist to leave one paper to work for another, with the promise of higher pay and a bigger profile as a journalist. Grace goes first to the World, where she interviews with Pulitzer himself for a job. Pulitzer views her skeptically, but is open to making a place for her on the paper, provided that she's willing to go over to his competitor Hearst for a job there and act as a spy for Pulitzer, as a way of garnering any possible scoops as far as news stories are concerned. Grace is unsure of this. But she goes across town to apply for a job with Hearst. Unlike Pulitzer, Hearst is willing to give Grace a chance to prove herself as a journalist. Grace is grateful for the opportunity and admits to Hearst that Pulitzer his rival had earlier offered her a job, but only if she would spy on Hearst. This she had qualms about doing. Hearst expressed to her his appreciation for her candor, which makes him more willing to give Grace a chance.

Grace's place in the Journal is hardly ideal, being often tasked with what could best be described as writing "puff pieces" for the paper as well as stories crafted along with other journalists on the Journal, without attribution. But she is determined to be a serious journalist, which Hearst gradually comes to recognize and appreciate over the next 2 years, during which time Grace is put on a story that puts her in touch with one of the Cuban exile groups in New York engaged in fighting the Spanish forces in Cuba, who are set on suppressing the Cuban revolutionaries in their efforts to win independence for Cuba. 

The second woman is Evangelina Cisneros, daughter of a Cuban revolutionary whom the Spanish had imprisoned on the Isle of Pines, a small island off the coast. There she ekes out a threadbare existence with her younger sister. The two sisters voluntarily chose to live there, so as to be close to their father. Unfortunately for Evangelina, she runs afoul of the Spanish military commander through no fault of her own. Consequently, she is imprisoned at the woman's prison, the Casa de Recogidas, on the Cuban mainland in Havana. 

The news of Evangelina's plight becomes known in the U.S., where Hearst begins to highlight Evangelina's story as characteristic of the brutality of Spanish rule in Cuba. A photo of Evangelina has been smuggled out of Cuba and comes into Hearst's possession. Evangelina is a strikingly beautiful woman and Hearst plasters her image in his paper and throughout New York. All this is part of his ongoing efforts to elicit U.S. support for the revolutionaries by going to war against Spain. This marks the beginning of what later came to be known as "yellow journalism." Evangelina comes to occupy center stage in Hearst's efforts to win sympathy from the American public for Cuba. 

The third woman in this drama is Marina Perez. Though hailing from a very privileged background, she leaves it all behind to marry a poor revolutionary she had loved from the time they were children. At the time, the reader is introduced to Marina, she has an 8-year old daughter (Isabella) for whom she has assumed sole responsibility after her husband Mateo had gone off into the countryside to serve with a small force of revolutionaries fighting the Spanish. The Spanish supreme military commander in Cuba, General Weyler, has set up a system of 'reconcentrados' or concentration camps (the first in recorded history) in which many Cubans are forced to live, so as to deprive the revolutionaries of material support. (This attempt by the Spanish to confine the Cubans to certain designated areas serves only to impoverish Cuba.) Marina, Isabella, and Marina's mother-in-law are compelled in live in one of these camps, where disease and starvation are rife. To survive, Marina takes on a job as a laundress throughout Havana. And at the same time, Marina, like her husband fully committed to the establishment of a free and independent Cuba, serves as a courier, conveying secret messages to revolutionaries as part of a clandestine network. 

By 1898, the paths trod by the 3 women will bring them together both indirectly and directly when the United States declares war on Spain following the destruction of a U.S. battleship in Havana harbor earlier in the year. 

I very much enjoyed this story and the way it played itself out. What is even more amazing is that this novel is loosely based on a true story, thus giving credence to the saying "Truth is stranger than fiction."