April 9, 2020 17
to more than 450 pages, with a story
that stretches back to the early years of
the revolution and extends to Obama’s
2015 visit to Cuba and Trump’s elec-
tion. Living mostly in West New
York, the book’s main characters are
Wonder, a handyman whose sister is
a celebrity artist who reacts to being
evicted from his carpentry workshop
by going on Facebook Live to tell his
life story while brandishing a gun; Brit-
ish, an aesthete with a fabricated art
history degree who wishes he weren’t
Cuban (hence the nickname) and who
is also an incorrigible womanizer; Ale-
jandra, a divorcée psychologist who
fled from Argentina to Havana in the
1970s with her leftist mother and who
drifts from lover to lover while strug-
gling with multiple cases of child abuse
in her clinical practice; and Eltico, a
resourceful Marielito (an émigré who
came over in the 1980 Mariel boatlift)
with a big heart who knows everything
about every Cuban who ever settled
in New Jersey but can’t bring himself
to tell his young son that his mother is
dead.
Exiles from every generation and
every political persuasion find their
way into Del Risco’s tale. Fidel Castro
is invoked as a joke and a curse: British
thinks of him to postpone ejaculation
during his many sexual exploits, while
the psychologist finds herself under
threat from the parent of one of her pa-
tients, who proudly calls himself Fidel
Castro while denying that he abuses his
daughter. Although it’s not uncommon
for immigrants to reinvent themselves
in a new country—as a survival strat-
egy or an escape from an unwanted
past—Del Risco adds layers of irony
to the usual plot twists of forged identi-
ties: characters find out as adults that
their parents are not as politically pure
as they had thought, presumed former
enemies turn out to disappoint their
wannabe assassins, and secret missions
to “liberate Cuba” turn out to be ven-
tures in human trafficking.
Del Risco’s style is at once sardonic
and affectionate—you can tell that he
loves his characters in spite of their
weaknesses, especially when their an-
tics are most revealing of their irratio-
nality. With a language that is rich in
Cuban argot but not at all dense, he
captures Cubans’ profound resent-
ment of the revolution’s obsession
w it h m i nd c ont rol , a s wel l a s t hei r p en -
chant for pranks and irreverent cracks
at everyone’s expense, including their
own. “Don’t you know the joke about
Cubans, that they are all bilingual be-
cause in addition to speaking Spanish
they all talk shit?” says Wonder’s sis-
ter with a smile when she tries to con-
vince homeowners in West New York
to place toilets in their front yards
so that everyone will know they are
Cuban.
The characters in Turcos en la niebla
like to be in America; however, un-
like the characters in classic immigrant
stories who strive to succeed in a new
land, they don’t seem very interested in
assimilating. Del Risco devises comic
scenarios that highlight exactly what
Cubans find odd about Americans,
despite their longstanding familiarity
with American culture. When British
makes one of his American girlfriends
cry by giving unsatisfactory answers
to her questions about “their relation-
ship,” he flippantly suggests that they
marry in order to calm her down, and
then comments to himself:
I’ve never understood American
women’s relationship with mar-
riage, which is to say, with the im-
plied promise of a future. Getting
married in Cuba is rather insig-
nificant. It’s like getting a divorce
or having an abortion. Just a pro-
cedure. But here, it’s as if it were
magic.And when Wonder, the evicted handy-
man, imagines his imminent encounter
with the police, he tells himself:But I will screw them over because
before I put a few in front of me [as
human shields] I am going to talk.
And I am going to do it in Spanish.
Not only because I will feel more
comfortable. Also, to give myself
time. If I speak in English, some-
one will alert the FBI right away. Or
an automatic sensor that can detect
communication containing terror-
ist threats will go off. The SWAT
team would be here in ten minutes.
No. I want to talk until dawn. I
don’t want them to imprison me, I
want them to kill me while the sun
shines in my face, so that I die the
way Martí did.As someone whose personal and
professional life has been shaped by
cold war tensions between Cuba and
the US, I find it both a pleasure and a
relief to see the experience of a politi-
cally manipulated and misunderstood
people depicted with such intelligence
and clarity of vision. Álvarez and Del
Risco each elaborate an extended
metaphor that captures the essence of
our people’s dilemma. Álvarez slips
what at first seem like innocent sto-
ries about eggs and chicken into his
novel; both foods are among the few
sources of protein that ordinary Cu-
bans can access. The father proudly
recalls how his daughter learned as
a child to consume her one fried egg
slowly and savor each grain of rice on
her plate. Things take an unexpected
turn when the mother remembers how
she and her husband rejoiced when
she received a bit of chicken as a gift
from the grateful parent of one of her
students during the austere years of
the Special Period, only to discover
that their children didn’t want to eat
it because they were unaccustomed
to the taste of flesh. By the end of the
novel, chicken is no longer simply em-
blematic of the hunger for more than
islanders can have, it is a symbol of
what they have become—confined
animals.
Del Risco seems to comment on his
own attempt to capture the aspirations
and folly of his fellow exiles through
British’s musings about the Hudson
River School of painting. Those art-
ists’ pristine landscapes were roman-
ticized renderings of a wilderness that
was quickly disappearing. Del Risco’s
characters are hardly perfect, but their
loyalty to their friends remains intact
while their homeland is collapsing and
their neighborhoods are being changed
by new waves of immigrants from Cen-
tral America. His raucous and lovable
Cubans can maintain a coherent idea
of their country only through the sto-
ries they tell one another. Both authors
offer extraordinarily pointed and poi-
gnant commentary on one of the twen-
tieth century’s most calamitous social
experiments, and on the inheritors of
its ruins. QDISTRIBUTED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS http://www.press.uchicago.eduNow in Paperback
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