Fantasy 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 sugar, 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 Garcia 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 forefathers "stretch out a colossal hand."