CRAZY POOR CUBANS

CRAZY POOR CUBANS opens in Los Angeles in 1967 the night 16-year-old Carida learns her father has run off with the strumpet from the bank leaving behind a locked desk and not much else. How they got there is a story that begins decades earlier in a Havana that no longer exists.It’s the story of a family where love abounds but sanity is in short supply. Of a mother inexplicably hanging on to an impossible marriage to a damaged and violent man at a time when no one talked about such things, an uncle wanting nothing more than to divorce his wife who thinks she talks to ghosts, a wise grandmother who can’t understand what’s happened to her children, and Carida, the only child, swirling in the middle. When a political revolution throws their lives into further chaos, they flee to America to ride out what they expect will be a temporary setback. As time passes they begrudgingly begin to accept the permanence of their circumstances in a new country with unpronounceable words and mystifying food. Their efforts at adapting often fall short, occasionally taking a turn for the hilarious—although not for Carida, trapped between her family’s devotion to the past and her desire to join the future, something she knows she can’t do unless she reaches outside the family. In the end, it’s the story of the unlikely friendships that sustained her.Equal parts character study, dark comedy, and Caribbean magic, this is a book you'll want to read more than once. Fast-paced, witty, and entirely unpredictable. Read more