Yuri is a 16-year-old orphan who lives simply with her religious aunt in a big, old house in Communist Cuba in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Yuri’s parents had named her after the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gargarin, hoping that one day she would grow up to be a famous female astronaut. Yuri now has vague hopes of being accepted into the Lenin school, Cuba’s prestigious preparatory.
Yuri and her Aunt Ruth’s quiet lives are suddenly turned upside down when an unexpected visitor from “la Yuma” — slang for the United States — shows up at their Havana home with a camera swinging from her neck and announcing she is family. Ruth later tells Yuri that 34-year-old Mariela is her daughter, and that when Mariela was an infant she sent her to live with a family in the United States through Operation Pedro Pan, a U.S. government program in which thousands of unaccompanied children were sent from Cuba to Miami in the early 1960s.
“The Tilting House,” by Miami-based writer Ivonne Lamazares, is an affecting and sometimes amusing coming-of-age novel set in a country that few have had the opportunity to visit, despite its proximity to the U.S.
It’s a study of hidden family secrets, the unhealed wound of losing a mother and the quest for home.
Lamazares, who was born in Havana, knows her homeland well, and her book is rife with description and historic detail that only someone with first-hand knowledge could provide. Lamazares left Cuba for the United States in 1989 during a period of shortages and deprivation known as “The Special Period in Time of Peace.” Her first novel, “The Sugar Island,” also set in Cuba, was translated into seven languages.
In “The Tilting House,” Yuri is quickly pulled into Mariela’s chaotic world and her absurd art projects, which include a tragicomic funeral for Ruth’s dead dog, Lucho, in a public park using highly illegal homemade fireworks. Ruth, already viewed as suspect by the government as a member of the small Jehovah’s Witnesses group, is arrested and sent to jail on unexplained charges.
Mariela later tells Yuri that they aren’t cousins, but sisters, and that their now-dead mother gave birth to her as a teenager. Mariela insists that their Aunt Ruth “kidnapped” her and sent her to live in the U.S., where she was raised on a farm in Nebraska.
More harebrained projects follow, and the family’s tilting house finally tumbles after neighbors and acquaintances slowly chip away at the building to repurpose many of the structure’s materials.
Yuri later emigrates to the U.S., where she studies and starts a career that allows her to make a return visit to the island. On that trip her past becomes clearer, and she reaches something approaching closure and forgiveness.
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