Salsa dancing left you breathless. Cigar smoking produced the same effect.

Facing a Cuban crisis?

Resolve it with a reading of Anacaona: the Amazing Adventures of Cuba’s First All-Girl Dance Band, a beautifully illustrated memoir of Alicia Castro who was, along with her sisters, the starlet of the Cuban music scene.

When 12-year-old Alicia joined the band in 1932, women didn’t play music in Cuba — and they certainly didn’t bang out the lively jazz and mambo tunes popular at the time.

As the Castro sisters do it for themselves, Anacaona takes you from the steamy streets of Havana and the sizzling beaches of Brazil to the jazz bars of Paris and New York, via several scorching love affairs and a few short stops at the heartbreak hotel.

Sound hot? No doubt it’ll leave you panting.

For more, that is.

Available online at amazon.co.uk or your local bookstore.