Essay Questions

How is baseball significant to the story thematically and symbolically?

Baseball is a symbol that is essential to the thematic patina of mother/daughter relationships which pervades across the narrative. Baseball links mother and daughter, and across time and space. Celia’s devotion to Castro still includes clinging to the myth that his prowess at the game was so great that he was scouted by major league teams and history was nearly changed as a result of his almost becoming a pro player. Meanwhile, Lourdes recalls her own “mythic” baseball experience when it seemed the whole city was caught up in the unlikely drive to the World Series by the 1969 Amazing Miracle Mets. It is not just baseball which brings them together but the recollection of two equally unlikely circumstances. Likewise, what separates them, importantly, is that Celia’s myth is untrue while Lourdes’ is completely true. The implication is that this element applies to their respective ideologies as well, or, at least, the way they each regard the other’s ideological embrace.

What is the symbolic political significance of the 1944 tidal wave which ravages the Cuban coast?

Celia is a thoroughly committed communist whose embrace of Fidel Castro is utterly complete. She is willing to believe in the myth and the man as well as the revolution. Decades of American anti-Castro propaganda make this almost impossible to believe, of course, but the irrefutable historical facts are that the lives of native Cubans were hardly a utopian amusement park before the arrival of communism. The fascist dictatorship in Cuba established directly as a result of the Spanish Civil War and the ascension of Franco in Spain would eventually lead to American puppet Batista making life so profitable for rich American investors that, of course, Castro would look like the devil. The tidal wave is an act of nature that cannot be stopped or altered by human interaction. For Celia and others like her, Castro would come to be invested with almost magical properties: he alone had stopped the incessant tidal waves of political misery which kept devastating Cuba from abroad.

Pilar and he grandmother, Celia, are drawn as parallels to each other. Which famous person is Pilar’s version of what Castro is to Celia?

Pilar’s ideological bent is not toward politics but artistic expression. The novel is partially set in the days when punk rock was revolutionizing expression in all forms of art, not just music. Interestingly, however, it is not Johnny Rotten or another era-appropriate figure whom Pilar latches onto as an equivalence to Celia’s worship of Castro. More appropriately, it is a revolutionary figure from the previous musical era targeted by many punk rock historians as the godfather of the movement. It has often been hyperbolically suggested that though the initial sales of that album were anemic to say the least, every single buyer went on to play in a band. Pilar offer first-person commentary about Reed that sounds equally fitting to Castro to the effect that his actual standing as a musician almost seems to be on the same level of Castro’s baseball career: “he has enough attitude to kill every person in New Jersey” and “Lou has about twenty-five personalities…I feel like a new me sprouts and dies every day.”