The people of Gibara, a town on Cuba’s northern coast, have gone five days without running water. A main has broken, and the party bosses cannot produce the part it takes to fix it. A newly arrived crew of foreign contractors fixes it in three hours. With a simple clamp.

That repair is the hinge of Scott McKay’s The Necessary Men, a novel that imagines freeing Cuba without firing a shot. It is fast, funny, and hopeful, the rare political novel that shows what free people and free markets are for, not merely what they are against.

The man leading that crew is Mike Holman, a 54-year-old Florida media mogul with a young family and a restlessness he cannot shake. His old college roommate, billionaire Pierce Polk, calls with a proposition. Cuba’s communist regime is collapsing, and the question is what it falls into: a Chinese colony, a cartel narco-state, or both, ninety miles from our shores.

Polk’s answer: topple the regime by doing what it never could. Turn the power on. Get the water running. Pay an honest wage in money worth something. Under cover of a Chinese venture staffed by Canadian contractors, Holman dyes his beard black and slips into Cuba as Douglas Thibaud, a mild-mannered project manager from Winnipeg.

A different kind of hero

The hero of this book does not win with a rifle. He wins with a wrench.

From that first night in Gibara, the victories pile up: working pumps, streetlights, a modest debit card that lets a man spend what he earns on what his family needs.

The economics come from Simon Lim, a Singapore-based tycoon and the novel’s quiet conscience. The average Cuban earns about sixteen dollars a month because, as Lim explains, communist regimes are efficient at exactly one thing: making labor cheap. Offer a man four hundred dollars in a currency he can spend, and he shows up early and brings his brother.

That is the heart of the book. McKay doesn’t lecture; he lets you watch a broken town come back to life, pipe by pipe and paycheck by paycheck.

A Gulf story

Louisiana readers will feel at home here. When Hurricane Josephine bears down, McKay captures what every Louisianan knows: a storm means one thing to people with nothing to lose and another to people who have finally begun to build. Anyone who lived through Katrina, Rita, Laura, or Ida will recognize what follows.

There are fallow cane fields waiting to be revived for sugar and rum, and a deepwater port left to rot for sixty years. We are a state of cane fields and ports; we know prosperity is a ship at the wharf, a truck on a decent road, a family with a paycheck. Havana and New Orleans were once cousins across the Gulf. This book made me imagine what they could be again.

Characters worth knowing

McKay writes with a satirist’s ear and a novelist’s patience. Diego “La Bala” Maceo, a Hall of Fame pitcher who defected and got rich in Miami, becomes the reluctant face of Cuba’s future. His homecoming, with crowds waving palm fronds along the roads, is the book’s most moving passage.

Aldo Pupo, the local party boss in a sweat-stained seersucker suit, forever combing his few hairs across his scalp and lobbying for a new icemaker, is one of the funniest characters in recent fiction.

The villain, Col. Manuel Cabrillo, a retired Cuban officer with cartel ties and a Chinese paycheck, is no cartoon. As he grows suspicious of his “Canadian” partners, he becomes genuinely menacing.

Above all there is Lim, who gives the novel its title and its soul. The son of China’s communist elite and a quiet convert to Catholicism, he has waited decades to strike a blow for freedom, convinced that God raises up “necessary men” when history demands them. Faith here is not decoration; it is motive.

Funny, but serious underneath

McKay also skewers the regime’s longtime apologists. College activists who volunteer to defend the revolution get more education than they bargained for, and politicians chanting “Hands Off Cuba!” have no idea whose hands are at work.

Beneath the laughs, the book is serious. The closing chapters, which I won’t spoil, remind us that those who stand up to tyranny can pay a real price, and McKay deserves credit for not wrapping it in a tidy bow.

What we are for

In public life we spend most of our time on what we are against. This book is about what we are for: work, faith, family, private enterprise, and the God-given liberty to build a better life. It is also a pleasure to read.

Books like this do not find their audience on their own. Buy The Necessary Men, read it, and pass it along to a friend.