Mrs Gargantua deals with towering figures – both human and non-human – and ambitions which have left their mark on Cuba, the distorted means by which the island is often presented to the outside world. From Columbus and the conquistadores, Ptolemy to Paris Hilton, Hemingway, nuclear warheads and the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, from a nationalist sparrow ‘martyred’ during Cuba’s independence wars to Fidel Castro’s genetically modified super-cow, this non-fiction work exposes the country’s status as a social and biological testing ground and resource to be mined by larger nations.The book’s title comes from an account of Maria Hoyt, a US heiress who raised a gorilla in Cuba (one of the first to do so beyond Africa). Later her pet was sold to a circus in the United States where she became a celebrity: the famous ‘Mrs Gargantua’. Her story is directly linked to Hoyt’s predecessor in monkey and ape husbandry, the Cuban Rosalia Abreu; reputedly the richest woman in Latin America and a legendary recluse, Abreu became the first person in history – at her mansion in Havana – to breed a chimpanzee in captivity, with unexpected and far-reaching consequences.
