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1992-08-28
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BOOKS, Page 67Fantasy Island
By AMELIA WEISS
DREAMING IN CUBAN
By Cristina Garcia
Knopf; 245 pages; $20
What most Americans know about Cuba is Fidel Castro in
fatigues and Ricky Ricardo singing Babalu. Its geography is
Havana, a bad movie starring Robert Redford, and -- somewhere
on the coast -- something called the Bay of Pigs. Add memories
of big cigars, and white su gar, which now poses a greater
threat to American health than communism. Otherwise, Cuba has
been a closed port 90 miles off the U.S. coast, the plague
island of the Caribbean.
For the children of gusanos (worms) -- Castro's
vilification of the Cubans who fled the revolution -- it's a
hard exile. First-generation Americans, they live cut off from
a homeland their parents cannot forgive and their new country
forbids them to visit.
In her impressive first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, Cristina
Gar cia takes back her island. A former TIME correspondent and
Miami bureau chief, Garcia left Havana with her family when she
was two. Her story is about three generations of Cuban women
and their separate responses to the revolution. Her special
feat is to tell it in a style as warm and gentle as the
"sustaining aromas of vanilla and almond," as rhythmic as the
music of Beny More.
Dressed in her best housedress, Celia del Pino, a
63-year-old revolutionary, sits in a wicker swing "guarding the
north coast of Cuba." She wears the drop pearl earrings left by
her departed Spanish lover and dreams of being honored by Fidel
Castro -- "El Lider himself" -- on a red velvet divan. Instead,
before dawn, she sights her dead husband, iridescent blue and
"taller than the palms, walking on water in his white summer
suit and Panama hat."
Celia's children live in cold countries. Her son has
immigrated to the East bloc. Her daughter Felicia is mad. And
her eldest daughter Lourdes -- a ferocious anticommunist who
scans the newspapers for signs of leftist conspiracies -- owns
the Yankee Doodle Bakery in Brooklyn and sells apple pie to
Americans.
Lourdes loves the cold. She relishes "the ritual of
scarves and gloves, hats and zip-in coat linings. Its layers
protect her." Raped by revolutionaries who afterward carved
"crimson hieroglyphics" into her soft belly, she wants "no part
of Cuba, no part of its wretched carnival floats creaking with
lies, no part of Cuba at all." But her Americanized daughter
Pilar, born in Cuba when the revolution was 11 days old, misses
her abuela: "Every day Cuba fades a little more inside me, my
grandmother fades a little more inside me. And there's only my
imagination where our history should be."
Garcia's imagination is ambitious. Not only does she
reunite Pilar with her grandmother; she also claims her own
aesthetic identity. Like a priestess, in passages of beautiful
island incantation, she conjures her Cuban heritage from a land
between "death and oblivion," so that she too can fasten on
Abuela Celia's drop pearl earrings, sit in a wicker swing by the
sea, and watch as the radiant spirits of her fore fathers
"stretch out a colossal hand."