Word: constancia
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Reina Aguero fixes electrical wires in Fidel Castro's Cuba, while living with the "remnants of a bird's nest" in the chandelier of her decaying house; Constancia Aguero Cruz basks in affluent loneliness in Key Biscayne, Fla., where Cuban songs play "slow as regret, on the afternoon radio." Constancia wears Adolfo suits as she drives her pink Cadillac to the factory she owns; Reina sashays braless among the mahogany trees. Yet though they live on opposite sides of the revolution, both Aguero sisters share something deep as blood: a matter-of-fact commitment to the magic of their island...
...wise and generous storyteller, Garcia unfolds her tale by cutting back and forth between the eponymous sisters and the life of their father, a distinguished scientist pledged to catalog "every one of Cuba's nearly extinct birds." Reina and her daughter plot to escape their imprisoning paradise, while Constancia's husband Heberto, aging and mild-mannered, joins a brigade that dreams of recapturing it. Born in Havana and raised in the U.S., Garcia does soaring, zesty justice to the vagaries of both malfunctioning Cuba and daydreaming South Florida...
Nobody can fault her story for lack of plot. After Spain, Decca married her lover, Esmond Romilly. They came to the U.S. She conceived his child, Constancia, nicknamed Dinky, before he returned to Europe with the Canadian Royal Air Force and died in action in 1941. Despite that tragedy, Decca tells, with a nice sense of wartime humor, of her duty on the Washington front in the Office of Price Administration. At last it is the moment for the slap in the face of the British Empire-the really big Mitford-sister gesture. After moving to California, marrying a brilliant...
...PLACE OF SPLENDOR-Constancia de la Mora-Harcourt, Brace...
...Constancia de la Mora's story of her life could serve, if one were needed, or if all others were destroyed, as a history of Spain in the 20th Century...