762 The American Century: Literature since 1945identification with her old home. Rather, it is a symptom of her subtle reaction to
the alchemy of exile; she, at least, understands that she must recreate herself out of
the two cultures to which she is heir.
Another potent source of latino culture in the United States has been supplied by
the successive waves of immigrants arriving from Cuba. As late as 1950 there were as
few as fifty thousand foreign-born Cubans in the whole country. In the wake of the
revolution, however, close to a million Cubans left the island for America, the
majority of them torn between an imagined Eden left or lost behind and their
emergent status as secure Americans. In The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989),
Oscar Hijuelos (1951–) (whose other novels include Our House in the Last World
(2003) and Dark Dude (2008)) centers his story on two Cuban brothers, Nestor and
Cesar Castillo, who arrive in America a decade before the revolution in their
homeland. It is 1949, and Latin American music is at the height of its popularity.
“Part of the wave of musicians who had been pouring out of Havana,” they are lured
by the chance, the hope of fame and fortune. They love “the immensity of the United
States” and they embrace the glamour of the metropolis. In New York City they also
find themselves cheerfully at home in a community of immigrants, “apartments
filled with travelers or cousins and friends from Cuba.” Their music, a mix of Cuban
and American influences, enables them to make sense of their new world and
navigate their way through their divided allegiances. However, the novel is no simple,
straightforward success story. Even at the height of their fame, the songs of the
Castillo brothers, full of the “sadness and torment of love,” reflect their lingering
attachment to a lost, lamented world. Nestor writes letters to his mother: “heartsick
letters nostalgic for the security of the home he had – or thought he had – in Cuba.”
And with the passing of the fashion for Latin music, the Castillo brothers find their
fame fading away. Not a simple success story, neither is The Mambo Kings a naturalist
tale of failure and decline. It is a magically realist account of the way celebration and
sadness, consummation and loss are all woven into the same tapestry. The story is
structurally framed by the occasion when, at the apex of their fame, the Castillo
brothers appear on the I Love Lucy television show. And it is emotionally framed by
the Cuban-American star of that show, Desi Arnaz, who invites them to appear after
hearing, in their music, a poignant expression of “his own past love, his love for ...
his family down in Cuba and old friends he had not seen in a long time.” In a
paradigmatic moment at the end of the novel, Desi – grown old now – reappears,
living in seclusion in California. “I chose this climate here,” he explains, “because it
reminds me of Cuba.” Like the Castillo brothers, he remains torn emotionally
between his old home and his new. Like them, too, he has shaped his life, and his art,
out of the fusion between them.
“Cuba is a peculiar exile, I think, an island-colony,” says the narrator of Dreaming
in Cuban (1992) by Christine Garcia (1958–). “We can reach it by a thirty-minute
charter flight from Miami, but never reach it at all.” The dream-like rhythm of
longing and attachment, exile and return, is as fundamental to this novel as it is to
The Mambo Kings. It describes the condition out of which here too, like the Castillo
brothers, the characters must construct an authentic reality: in this case, the fourGGray_c05.indd 762ray_c 05 .indd 762 8 8/1/2011 7:31:43 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 43 PM