Celia del Pino
Matriarch of the del Pino and devoted to the revolution of Fidel Castro and the overthrow of American puppet Batista. The novel opens on a portrait of an aged Celia in dress and pear earrings sitting on wicker swing with binoculars at the ready, a constant watchful eye on the waters off the coast for American troops hoping to correct the mistakes of their Bay of Pigs debacle a decade earlier. Flashbacks will reveal the younger Celia during the period of Castro’s revolution.
Lourdes del Pino Puente
Lourdes is the eldest of the matriarch’s children, a daughter who does not share her mother’s passionate devotion to the communists. This divide is partially ideological, but mostly because Castro’s revolutionary soldiers raped her and caused a miscarriage to the baby she was carrying. She moves with her husband to New York.
Pilar Puente
Unlike her mother, Pilar establishes a strong bond with her grandmother, Celia. Like her mother, her own mother/daughter relationship is rocky. Pilar is into art, punk rock and manifests some evidence of being gifted with strange mystical powers. When she finally gets the chance to visit her grandmother, she comes away from Cuba disillusioned at the stifling of artistic expression.
Gustavo Sierra de Armas
Gustavo is a featured character in the flashback sections, but is primarily reduced to being a specter looming over the present day. He is young Celia’s married lover, a lawyer from Spain. Part of the narrative are comprised of letters written from Celia to Gustavo: written, but never sent. Gustavo abandons Celia to head back to Spain; gone but never forgotten.
Che Guevara
Che appears on just a single page of the narrative and only in the form of a portrait featured in a photograph used as the cover of a book of essays which Pilar has gifted to her mother on Christmas. The reaction of Lourdes to this gift is triggered by the content generally, but specifically by the sight of Guevara’s face in the portrait. So extreme is her reaction that she destroys the book by plunging into a tub filled with scalding hot water. Guevara in this sense becomes a living breathing character as an iconic representation of the lingering impact of te revolution on the Cuban exiles who collectively form a group of immigrants especially incapable of letting go of their homeland’s political situation.
