THIS EARTHY ISLAND

By Pico Iyer

Reina Aguero fixes electrical wires in Fidel Castro's Cuba, while living with the "remnants of a bird's nest" in the chandelier of her decaying house; Constancia Aguero Cruz basks in affluent loneliness in Key Biscayne, Fla., where Cuban songs play "slow as regret, on the afternoon radio." Constancia wears Adolfo suits as she drives her pink Cadillac to the factory she owns; Reina sashays braless among the mahogany trees. Yet though they live on opposite sides of the revolution, both Aguero sisters share something deep as blood: a matter-of-fact commitment to the magic of their island of honey and rum. Constancia makes spells for women in the form of the "luscious unguents" she markets; Reina casts spells over men.

In her first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, five years ago, Cristina Garcia laid authoritative claim to the hearts and elemental souls of Cuban women, their dreams, their zany ways, the "anxious moonlight" inside them; in the process, she won a National Book Award nomination and a devoted following. Now, in her second novel, The Aguero Sisters, (Knopf; 300 pages; $24), she extends her domain to the whole history of the island across this century, and the "aura vultures" and "Batista hawks" and "siguapa stygian owls" that flit through its heavens, above all the political upheavals and reversals. Indeed, not the least of her achievements is to vault over all the strident polemic that stains so much writing on the island and to immerse us instead in the much deeper spirits that dwell in its imagination.

A wise and generous storyteller, Garcia unfolds her tale by cutting back and forth between the eponymous sisters and the life of their father, a distinguished scientist pledged to catalog "every one of Cuba's nearly extinct birds." Reina and her daughter plot to escape their imprisoning paradise, while Constancia's husband Heberto, aging and mild-mannered, joins a brigade that dreams of recapturing it. Born in Havana and raised in the U.S., Garcia does soaring, zesty justice to the vagaries of both malfunctioning Cuba and daydreaming South Florida.

But the heart of her novel lies in a funny, extraordinary other world where men, hit by lightning, start to read everything backward and women swallow silver dust to cure themselves of hallucinations (it doesn't work). The everyday magic of this invisible realm is given fiber by the hard facts of natural history she incorporates, and the sheer extravagance of Cuban thinking ("Dreams about carne asada can mean only one thing," a radio hostess opines: "that the caller should devote her life to God"). Writing in a voice not quite like any other, Garcia takes exuberant flight without ever taking leave of the true.

The meticulous construction and details of the book are matched by a measured lyricism as ripe and succulent as a fresh papaya. A dead woman's throat is "an estuary of color and disorder"; a father and daughter camp under "the quickening wounds of a million stars." A refrigerator coughs "like a four-pack-a-day smoker," and nothing seems impossible, not even a man killed by a hurricane-blown avocado. Drawing on the inheritance of an almost folkloric wisdom, Garcia is unafraid of suggesting that passion is "a frail interlude between the prosperities of loss."

At some point, readers may notice that bourgeois, cosmetically inclined Constancia, running her all-American business of reinventing faces with "eye repair creams," and sexy, "nutmeg-skinned" Reina, always unshavenly herself, stand nicely for Cuba's divided existence on both sides of the water. But more important is that both are spunky, indomitable humans alive to a world of wonders. Men may squirm a little at being portrayed here as leashed good-for-nothings (even the rain is "hard, linear and relentless, like self-important men"), but even they could hardly deny that Garcia has crafted a beautifully rounded work of art, as warm and wry and sensuous as the island she so clearly loves.