I met Ann Louise Bardach at her home in Santa Barbara one afternoon in early January. I was running late because of traffic and just before I arrived, she called to inform me that I had missed something “very big.” As she breathlessly led me into the kitchen of the modest-sized bungalow she shares with her husband, the actor Bobby Lesser, Bardach, a small, wiry woman with auburn hair and large brown eyes, attempted to explain at breakneck speed the startling events of the past hour. In between letting out several yelps of glee accompanied by what is best described as a little jig, she announced that a U.S. representative was launching a congressional investigation into the government’s relationship with Luis Posada Carriles, the notorious anti-Castro militant on whom she had been reporting for years and the reason she is currently facing a federal subpoena (“I’m just trying to stay out of jail one day at a time.”). Dressed in black leggings and a red hooded sweatshirt, Bardach ran around the kitchen in an aimless frenzy, talking nonstop—about the wires she’d read that morning, the sorry state of press freedom, The Miami Herald’s reluctance to cover controversial Cuban issues, and a deal with Scribner’s to write a book about Castro’s later years and the U.S. government’s recent entanglements with Cuban exile militants.

Bardach is widely considered the go-to journalist on all things Cuban and Miami, a niche she began carving out for herself more than fifteen years ago when, as a contract writer for Vanity Fair, she got a phone call from a woman named Marita Lorenz, who claimed to be an ex-lover of Fidel Castro. Long inured to such unsolicited pitches, Bardach, a veteran crime reporter, was skeptical. “I think I said something like, ‘Well that’s not...

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