percent of Cubans in the U.S. are over the age of sixty-five.

Cristina García’s intricate novel, The Agüero Sisters, examines four generations of a Cuban family and the secrets they have not shared. The most immediate question concerns the mysterious death of naturalist Blanca Agüero on an expedition in the Zapata Swamp, but as the novel progresses, larger questions arise: What is love? What is the nature of truth, and does knowledge change it? As in real life, not all of these questions are answered, but the important bonds of family are revealed through the healing influence of history, memory, and truth.

Like its acclaimed predecessor Dreaming in Cuban (1992), this book is set largely in the United States and Cuba during the years of communist rule under Fidel Castro. García, a former reporter and Miami bureau chief for Time magazine, once again employs a fluid structure teeming with flashbacks. The present-action chapters take place in the early 1990’s and are explored through Blanca’s daughters Constancia and Reina, the sisters of the title, and occasionally through a minor character. These chapters alternate with a first-person narrative written forty years earlier by Blanca’s husband, Ignacio.

The vibrant lead characters generate much of the power of the novel. Perhaps the most intriguing is Reina, a statuesque electrician who is nicknamed “Compañera Amazona” (Amazon comrade) by her male admirers. Reina travels through Cuba conducting seminars in her field and is frequently called on to install or repair all kinds of electrical equipment. She has always been comfortable with tools and machines; the presence of her toolbox intensifies her every pleasure. Men are dazzled not only by her strength and skill but also by her body, for she is a dark, magnificent woman without false modesty or shame. Dissembling is beyond her; she openly maintains a long-term relationship with her married lover.

Constancia, her older sister, is petite, pale like her mother, stylish, and self-disciplined. She climbs nine flights of stairs daily to keep her legs shapely and still speaks the Cuban Spanish of the late 1950’s, in use when she and her second husband, Heberto Cruz, fled as Castro seized power. After escaping Cuba, Constancia remained in genteel stasis in New York, where Heberto owned a tobacco shop, and where she was awarded a powder-pink Cadillac as “the top [cosmetics] salesperson in North America.” Following Heberto’s decision to retire at the end of 1990, they moved to Miami, where he prepares to “liberate” Cuba with a band of Cuban exiles. Constancia begins to manufacture her own line of cosmetics, Cuerpo de Cuba (Body of Cuba), in expensive blue glass bottles adorned with a cameo of her mother’s face.

The sisters share a sensitive digestion, ill-fated first love affairs (with capitalist Gonzalo Cruz, Constancia’s first husband, and the Cuban revolutionary who fathered Reina’s daughter), and willful, alienated children. Yet they are quite different in most other respects. After Reina joins Constancia in Miami, she mocks her sister’s enthusiasm for cosmetics: “Since when did cellulite ever deter passion?” She is also uncomfortable with the commercial use of their mother’s portrait on the blue bottles. Only six years old at her mother’s death, Reina now actively seeks further information about her parents. Constancia, on the other hand, tries to block her memories, but ironically her cosmetics have the ability to trigger nostalgia in her customers and herself, touching “the pink roots of their sadness.”

The two women unwittingly mirror their parents, as Ignacio’s narrative and their own accounts reveal. Ignacio was a true scientist: objective, methodical, concerning himself with things of the mind. He was also distant and cautious, like Constancia. The only child of a literary father and musical mother, he fell in love with the natural world of birds and other living creatures. On his thirteenth birthday his parents gave him a copy of Birds of the World and arranged for a solo expedition to the Isle of Pines. At sixteen he enrolled in the University of Havana on a scholarship and eventually became a professor of biology. Among his many projects were a complete catalog of ninety- six vanishing bird species in Cuba and a number of published studies.

His wife Blanca was in some ways his opposite. At first Ignacio’s student, she too became a scientist. After he hired her as his competent research assistant, he was smitten with her and at last proposed, unaware that her dedication to science masked a passionate nature (she wore a red suit for the wedding). On their disastrous honeymoon, Blanca urged him to yield to her completely, but he resisted. Later her ardor dimmed, so much so that when she became pregnant she announced she would prefer to lay eggs and be done with it. Following Constancia’s birth, Blanca entered a deep depression and then disappeared for two and a half years. When she returned without explanation, she was eight months pregnant with Reina.

While Ignacio accepted Blanca back into his life, he could no longer bring himself to show affection to her or the children, no matter how fond he was of Constancia. When Blanca insisted on sending Constancia away after she jealously threatened the new baby, he allowed it. Nevertheless, Constancia loved him even though he permitted her to return only upon the death of her mother. Two years later, Ignacio shot himself through the heart, and the estranged sisters separately mourned the loss of their parents, never speaking of it.

As a scientist of sorts, Constancia now painstakingly analyzes and experiments with the natural ingredients which she uses for her cosmetics. Like Ignacio, whom she adored, she holds in every emotion as tightly as the girdle that binds her female flesh. She has never forgiven her mother for sending her away, yet she isolates herself emotionally just as her mother isolated her. In contrast, Reina’s life echoes her mother’s passion, just as Blanca once cast off all propriety to live with Reina’s biological father, a dark-skinned man who beat her.

In the sisters’ tentative search for the past, the Magical Realism typical of Latin American literature plays an important role. Two particularly strange events mark their lives. Earlier, when Blanca first disappeared, a wise woman predicted that she would return bearing a child for the African god Changó, to whom fire and lightning are sacred. Oddly enough, Reina was born with a mysterious affinity for light, fire, and electricity. Constancia even blames electrical irregularities in her Miami condo on Reina’s presence, as clocks run backward and lights dim.

Then, in 1990, as Reina attempts to repair a flooded pump in a Cuban mine, she is struck by lightning. Her burns result in a patchwork skin pieced together from grafts donated by relatives and friends. Her skin becomes multicolored rather than nutmeg brown, and she is obsessed by its peculiar odor even though no one else seems to notice. This experience eventually triggers her journey to Miami to find her sister and some answers to her questions.

At about the same time, Constancia awakens in Miami after a troubled sleep to discover that she is quite literally wearing her mother’s face. (At Blanca’s funeral, people noted that the child Constancia looked remarkably like her mother for about a week.) The face is never explained, although Reina suggests, “Sometimes we become what we try to forget most.” Ladylike Constancia, crediting her new face for her increased energy and business acumen, slowly begins to change. By the end of the novel, she has donned a wet suit to swim three miles to the Cuban shore to discover her own answers.

Strange powers have always existed in this family. Blanca’s mother, a mulatta descended from French Haitians, was reputed to be either a witch or a saint. Blanca herself, who always carried a small wrist bone with her, exhibited an unusual knowledge of herbs. Other peculiar incidents include an account of Ignacio’s birth, during which a black owl seized the placenta and flew away, sprinkling blood over the president of Cuba and a waiting crowd; the three conflicting visions of the bird (crow, dove, or hummingbird?) that hovered above Blanca’s grave; and Constancia’s attempt to prevent hallucinations by dosing herself with silver dust.

The novel presents a mystery worthy of exploration, rewarding but at times difficult. Although García’s four major characters are skillfully drawn, some of the minor characters, especially the sisters’ three children, are less successful. Those who prefer tidy conclusions may be distressed by the number of loose ends remaining in this story. What happened between Blanca and her father, whom she wanted to forget? Why does Silvestre, son of Constancia and her first husband, Gonzalo Cruz, suddenly murder his father?

Another problem for some readers will be the fact that García provides a great deal of information to process. For example, while she takes necessary pains to give some background on Santería, the mixture of African-based religion and Catholicism that underlies much of the action, an English-speaking reader may well have a distinct sense of missing something. As Reina’s mother once warned her, “You don’t know how much of what you see . . . you never see at all.”

The Agüero Sisters addresses the sisters’ desire to recover each other and the buried truths of their past. In their journey toward integration there can be no unity, no real completion in their lives until they can force themselves to speak at last of the secrets and half-truths that have been silenced for so long. Only an understanding and acceptance of their parents can ultimately heal the unspoken rift between the daughters, allowing them to make peace with their own children and the ghosts of their parents.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. XCIII, May 1, 1997, p. 1478.

Chicago Tribune. June 8, 1997, XIV, p. 1.

Library Journal. CXXII, March 15, 1997, p. 88.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. June 8, 1997, p. 8.

The Nation. CCLXIV, May 19, 1997, p. 32.

The New York Times. CXLVI, May 27, 1997, p. B6.

The New York Times Book Review. CII, June 15, 1997, p. 38.

Newsweek. CXXIX, April 28, 1997, p. 79.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLIV, March 10, 1997, p. 48.

Time. CXLIX, May 12, 1997, p. 88.

The Times Literary Supplement. August 29, 1997, p. 23.

The Washington Post Book World. XXVII, July 13, 1997, p. 1.

Setting
In this novel, the Cuban characters coexist with their history. In Havana, Reina resides in the same apartment where she grew up. Hanging from the chandelier in her father's study is a bird's nest; Reina lives "amidst the debris of her childhood." To Ignacio and Blanca Agüero, the Cuban natural world resembles the Garden of Eden. "The Agüeros often imagined what Cuba must have been like before the arrival of the Spaniards, whose dogs, cats, and rats multiplied rapidly and eventually caused chaos among the island's native creatures. Long ago, Cuba was a naturalist's paradise." In a 1997 interview with the Santa Fe New Mexican, Garcia stated, "Cuba has always lived in my imagination. I have only spent half a month in Cuba since I was 2 1/2, so I don't have much to go on in that sense... to me, Cuba is on the page. In an odd sense, it is what I create for myself. I don't think I fit in Cuba, I don't fit in the exile community in Miami. So in many ways, it is the search for home. The search for Cuba begins on the page."

The settings in the United States echo the Cuban-American community's yearning for their homeland. Little Havana in Miami acts like a museum preserving Cuba's past. In the U.S., at "the best bodega in Little Havana," you can find two dozen types of bananas. There are piles of juicy mangoes, soursops, custard apples, and papayas. In an instant, they'll whip up a milkshake that tastes of her past. Every Friday, Constancia fills her pink Cadillac convertible with fresh fruit to purée and cries all the way home. However, the Cuban-Americans living in Miami and Key Biscayne are recreating a version of Cuba that no longer exists. Reina and the other Cubans in this novel live frugally and are familiar with food shortages. Reina's longtime lover, Pepín, believes it's the gusanos (a derogatory term for Cubans who left for the U.S., meaning "worm") who dismantled the revolution's achievements. The wealth they brought back—even items like extra-strength aspirin—led citizens to stop attending the May Day parade and to refuse cutting their sugarcane quota. Reina writes to Constancia "with news of successive deprivations. Reina says it's sad to see the nearly empty baskets and shelves of the markets in Cuba, the wilted vegetables, the chickens too scrawny even for soup." In Garcia's narrative, each culture longs for the perceived comforts of the other.

Point of View
A fascinating and intricate element of Garcia's novel is its changing perspectives. While Reina and Constancia are central to the narrative, these two main characters don't narrate their stories in their own voices. Instead, Ignacio Agüero has left a diary, where he recounts his life's events in the first person, sharing his story and thoughts on various actions and characters. This account is likely the true one, reflecting what he genuinely believes rather than the falsehoods he later tells his daughters. Additionally, Reina's daughter, Dulce, narrates her own story in the first person. Through this approach, Garcia frames the sisters' main storyline with the deeply personal viewpoints of both older and younger generations. The first-person narratives provide a distanced perspective on the main events. For instance, Reina's daughter, Dulce, experiences the revolution differently than the older generation. Dulce remarks, "I used to be friends with Che Guevara's son in high school. We used to joke about our respective revolutionary burdens. Last I heard, he was a heavy-metal musician, pierced everywhere and trying to leave the country."

By weaving together various perspectives, Garcia provides the reader with insights that the characters themselves do not have. For example, from the novel's outset, the reader is aware that Ignacio murdered his wife, a fact unknown to Constancia and Reina until the story's conclusion.

Literary HeritageThe Agüero Sisters is heavily influenced by magical realism, a literary style prevalent in Latin America where fantastical or dreamlike events occur alongside more realistic ones. Garcia describes a man struck by lightning who reads everything backward and a woman who ingests silver dust to stop hallucinations. These fantastic events, as Michiko Kakutani noted in a 1997 New York Times review, are "a symptom both of the natural world's surpassing strangeness and the bizarre predicaments the human species likes to invent for itself." Among the events Kakutani highlighted are a man rescued from his furious workers by a flock of tree ducks, a man killed in a hurricane by "a high-velocity avocado," and the death of Reina and Constancia's grandmother in a pig stampede.

Garcia believes that second-generation Cuban immigrants are uniquely positioned to transform their experiences into art. "They're very close to these roots but not scarred by them, or at least not directly scarred," Garcia mentioned in an interview with the Phoenix Gazette. "They had the opportunity to receive an education in this country. It's the best of both worlds." She further explained, "I think another point is that a few generations ago, assimilation was seen as essential for success, and parents didn't speak to their children in their native language... Now, being bilingual or multilingual is viewed as an advantage, not something you need to hide."

Sources
Behar, Ruth, review in the Chicago Tribune, June 8, 1997, p. 1.

Cryer, Dan, review in Newsday, May 5, 1997, p. B02.

Iyer, Pico, review in Time, May 12, 1997, p. 88.

Kakutani, Michiko, review in the New York Times, May 27, 1997, p. C16.

King, Nina, review in the Washington Post, July 13, 1997, p. X01.

Kirkwood, Cynthia Adina, "A Cuban Odyssey: It Took a Trip to Havana to Piece Together Cristina Garcia's History and Literary Quest," in the Los Angeles Times, August 30, 1992, p. E7.

Lopez, Ruth, "Five Questions" (interview with Cristina Garcia), in the Santa Fe New Mexican, June 8, 1997, p. E3.

McNamer, Deirdre, "World of Portents," in the New York Times, June 15, 1997, sec. 7, p. 38.

Miller, Susan, "Caught between Two Cultures," in Newsweek, April 20, 1992.

Porter, William, "Worlds Apart: Dreaming in Cuban Novelist to Read from Her Works in Valley," in the Phoenix Gazette, March 31, 1993, p. D3.

Sachs, Lloyd, review in the Chicago Sun-Times, June 10, 1997, p. 35.

Stavans, Ilan, review in Nation, Vol. 264, No. 19, May 19, 1997, p. 32.

Vourvoulias, Bill, "Talking with Cristina Garcia," in Newsday, May 4, 1997.

Further Reading
Burkett, Elinor, "Author Focuses on Cuban Nostalgia," in the Chicago Tribune, April 9, 1992, p. 11I.
This interview features Garcia discussing her experiences as a Cuban-American author, her childhood, and the start of her literary career.

Davila, Florangela, "Cristina Garcia Identifies with Her Characters," in the Seattle Times, June 17, 1997, p. C1.
An interview where Garcia talks about how a group of ducks inspired her second novel.

Garcia, Cristina, "Star-Spangled," in the Washington Post, July 18, 1999, p. W21.
Garcia reflects on her childhood and the experience of celebrating her birthday on July 4th, the national holiday of her adopted country.

Italie, Hillel, "Imagining Cuba," in the Associated Press, March 30, 1992.
Garcia shares insights into the creation of her debut novel.

Stephenson, Anne, "Dreaming in Cuban Has Happy Ending: First-Time Novelist Hailed as Major Voice for Latinos," in the Arizona Republic, March 31, 1993.
In this interview, Garcia discusses being recognized as "a major new voice in an emerging chorus of Latino writers" and the reactions of her family to her debut novel.