The Distant Marvels

In 1963, as Hurricane Flora threatens Cuba, eight women are forcibly evacuated into a former governor's mansion and watched over by Ofelia, a young soldier of Castro's revolution. To keep panic at bay, Maria Sirena, once a cigar-factory lector paid to read stories aloud to workers, begins to tell her own. Her story reaches back to Cuba's Third War of Independence, to her father Augustin, a ferocious rebel, and her mother Lulu, a woman who fought and loved as fiercely as her husband. Like a modern Scheherazade, Maria Sirena spins one tale after another while the storm rages, and the past she conjures reveals the secrets that shaped her family and the island.