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Overview
Carmen Peregrin, conceived in the jungles of Cuba and raised in the California desert, is the child of two rebels betrayed by their revolution. All her life Carmen has dreamed of the Cuban half brother she has never met. At last, during the hurricane season, she arrives in Old Havana to meet him, finding Camilo is not as she has imagined him all these years. By morning he is gone, setting out for freedom across ninety miles of sea on a raft made of inner tubes bound together by twine and hope. Carmen waits with Camilo's mother - the stoic Marisol, herself a onetime revolutionary - for news of his fate on the daily broadcasts from Miami's Radio Marti, but his name does not appear on the list of balseros who have survived the crossing. Instead, once Carmen has reluctantly returned home to North America, she learns that Camilo has disappeared deep within the belly of the Viper, Cuba's most infamous prison. His fate lends a darker urgency to the package he has asked her to smuggle into the United States, to be opened once she is safely out of Cuba. Back in the States, as she struggles to make contact with Marisol and to buy Camilo's release, Carmen opens the mysterious packet - and with it, a door into the past. She finds a 500-year-old chronicle of her family's history, tales of the unquiet ghosts of her renegade father, assassinated before her birth; of the ancestor who escaped the Inquisition to seek pearls and cinnamon across the sea and married a beautiful and enigmatic Cuban Indian; of the martyred Cuban poet Jose Marti, who sang of love, homeland, freedom, and music; of Cuba itself and its long history of outrages and absurdities, dreams and tyrannies.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Although it too often confronts harsh political reality with sentimentality, Engle's second novel (after Singing to Cuba) is a lush improvisation on Cuban politics and their effect on one family. Narrated by Carmen Peregrn, who was raised in the U.S. by an American mother, the novel follows the attempt of her half brother, Camilo, to flee Cuba by raft-a journey that lands him in the Viper, Castro's infamous prison. Carmen's efforts to free Camilo eventually involve an extended family, including the far reaches of the Peregrn clan in Spain, where bribe money is found in a family fortune preserved from the times of the conquistadores. The novel is resolutely-and sometimes stridently-anti-Castro. In fact, ``the Commander,'' as he is called here, is one of the most compelling characters in the book, a demon astride a paradisiacal Cuba, luring people to his speeches with fresh oranges, furtively referred to by the hungry populace as ``The Count of Meat'' or, simply, ``that guy.'' Engle indulges herself at times: Carmen's passion about her newfound Cuban identity is often pretentiously self-serious (she adopts Spanish punctuation and syntax); a trip through the family patriarch's life is overblown; and Engle's taste for lyrical language provides more rhetoric than insight, more heat than light. Nevertheless, by novel's end, she has powerfully portrayed the pain and patience demanded of citizens in the grip of tyranny. Quality Paperback alternate. (July)Book Details
Published
January 1, 1920
Publisher
Bantam USA
Pages
320
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780553377750