In 2004, Eban, the owner of a modest veterinary clinic in Havana who dreamed of becoming a writer, recalled a chapter in his life that occurred in 1977, when he met a mysterious man he saw strolling along the beach with two Russian hunting dogs. He met this man several times, and he was privy to intimate details about Ramón Mercader, Trotsky's assassin. He revealed unique secrets about the assassin's personality. Thanks to these confessions, Eban reconstructed the lives of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, or Trotsky, and Ramón Mercader, also known as "Jacques Mornard," and how the two became victim and executioner in one of the most significant and shocking crimes of the twentieth century. Their lives intertwined, beginning with Trotsky's forced exile in 1929 and his arduous journey there, and Mercader's childhood in bourgeois Barcelona, ​​his romantic adventures, and his suffering during and after the Civil War, in Moscow and Paris, before the two met in Mexico. The two stories complement each other as Eban adds to their stories his personal and intellectual life in contemporary Havana and his destructive relationship with "the man who loved dogs."