Cubatown, U.S.A.

A WAKE IN YBOR CITY by Jose Yglesias. 284 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $4.95.

Ybor City is old Cubatown in Tampa, Fla., where Cuban cigarmakers and their families have lived for generations. In this first novel, Florida-born Jose Yglesias, 43, paints a low-key Street Scene that is more fit for play-acting than reading, but his descriptions of Cuban-American family life in 1958 contain much that is touching.

Yglesias' family is almost Dostoevskian in size and complexity. Its three generations stem from three aged sisters--Dolores, Clemencia and Mina. Among the younger men, Armando is a sex-starved punk who works for the local numbers racketeer; Esteban runs guns to a revolutionist named Castro; Robert fiddles on the periphery of the left wing but lacks the will to fish or cut bait. A domineering, money-mad daughter, Elena, is married to a Batista speechwriter who regularly hauls huge bundles of cash from Havana to a Miami bank and is contemptuous of all the pin-poor folk of Ybor City.

The death of Jimmy, a little grandson, precipitates the grand confrontation of good and evil--between Elena, who has power only to destroy, and the rest of the family, whose strength lies in spirit and nothing else.

Yglesias has nothing more profound to exhibit than his sensitivity for familial relationships--full of humor and bathos and love. The old sisters yak-yak away like a Greek chorus about their lives, their children and their hopes. "Let us not dig up old regrets," Dolores tells her sisters just before little Jimmy's wake begins. "There are too many of them, and we shall end up fighting for the biggest share. Let us remind ourselves of all the wonderful things in life, for in a moment we shall have to go inside and look into his face."

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