Free The Aguero Sisters by Cristina Garcia Page A

the revolution.
    Reina cannot say when her discontent took root. Pepín, for one, blames El Comandante. After all, it was he who invited the trouble by allowing the exiles to return to Cuba for visits. What those
gusanos
brought in their crammed suitcases—photographs of ranch homes and Cadillacs, leather shoes in every color, watches that told the time in China, even extra-strength aspirin—began rapidly to unravel the revolution. In no time at all, good citizens started skipping the May Day rallies, refused to cut their quota of sugarcane.
    Over the years, Reina had hoped her sister would return to Cuba, but Constancia always found an excuse not to come. Instead she sent packages every Christmas, with instant vanilla pudding, cubes of beef bouillon, and the strawberry sourballs she knew Reina loved. Constancia referred to her husband and her children only in passing, updating what Reina hadn’t known to begin with. Heberto finally passed his kidney stone; Isabel had dyed her hair indigo, like Indonesian cloth; Silvestre had changed his name to Jack. Curious details.
    Reina realized then that she understood as little of her sister’s life in America as she had in Cuba. When they were children, Reina had wondered why Constancia had been sent to live so far away. But her mother told her only that she and her sister were meant to live apart.
    Six years ago, Reina had a chance to leave the country. She was on a trip to Venezuela with a Cuban delegation of master electricians, to install generators along the Orinoco River, where the mosquitoes feasted on every inch of exposed flesh. By the end of the second week, all her colleagues had defected, and Reina returned to Cuba alone.
    Now it’s nearly impossible to leave the island without the express permission of El Comandante himself. Escapes have become more daring, the repudiations more scorchingly severe. Last year, Osoris de León, a former lover of Reina’s from Tunas de Zaza, a decorated hero from the war in Somalia, fled the island in a stolen government helicopter and landed on the roof of the Miami airport’s Holiday Inn. A group of backslapping exiles were waiting for him, and soon Osoris was giving interviews deploring the revolution on Radio Martí. Now Reina’s daughter, too, has left Cuba. Her Dulcita, a desperate
jinetera cualquiera
.
    Reina wonders what José Luís would think of his revolution now, of Dulcita’s defection on the arm of a detestabletourist. José Luís had been one of El Comandante’s most trusted aides, his link to sympathetic youth throughout the country. He was only fourteen when he left high school to join the rebels in the Sierra Maestra. Reina discovered José Luís several years later, gaunt and foul-mouthed, subsisting on oranges from her boarding school’s grove. She hid him in a local dovecote, far from Batista’s men, and later in her bed. When Reina found out she was pregnant, she begged him to marry her.
    â€œDo you think we can keep anything we love, Reina?” José Luís demanded.
    When Dulcita was four years old, Réina heard that her beloved had drowned off the Isle of Pines, learning to swim. It was then that she gave their daughter his last name: Fuerte.
    Reina knows that Dulcita resents her father, the veneration he still receives as a Hero of the Revolution. As her daughter grew older, his picture stared back at her from her history books, his slogans were extolled while she endlessly harvested lemons or yams. All Dulcita’s life, it was José Luís Fuerte this, José Luís Fuerte that, until it made her ill.
    If he was so great, why didn’t he ever see me?
Dulcita was six years old when she asked Reina this. They were on a train headed for Matanzas, to the first of Dulcita’s many boarding schools (she was kicked out of eleven altogether). Reina tried to explain to her daughter the nature of longing, the nervous pressure in the heart