In 1972, Celia del Pino is guarding the northern coast of Cuba in her best housedress and pearl earrings. Her husband, Jorge, who has been getting medical treatment in New York, appears walking on the water. From this, Celia discerns that Jorge has died. She wades in the ocean and thinks about her marriage, which was marked by Jorge’s frequent absence—he worked as a traveling salesman. Celia’s middle daughter, Felicia, is distraught over her father’s death. Felicia’s best friend, Herminia Delgado, encourages her to participate in a cleansing Santería ritual in order to make peace with her father’s spirit. Even though Felicia hates the blood of animal sacrifice, she agrees.
Meanwhile, Celia’s eldest daughter, Lourdes, lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she runs a successful bakery. In the midst of her grief over Jorge’s death (the two of them were especially close), Lourdes discovers that her 13-year-old daughter, Pilar, has run away. It turns out that Pilar witnessed her father, Rufino, having an affair and decided to return to Cuba, where she was born. Pilar has always identified strongly with her grandmother Celia and fights with Lourdes. Sometimes Celia even communicates with Pilar by speaking to her at night from hundreds of miles away. Pilar makes it to Miami, Florida by bus and reaches a cousin’s house, but before she can figure out how to catch a boat to Cuba, one of her aunts contacts Lourdes, and Pilar is sent back to New York.
Back in Cuba, Celia thinks about her affair with a married Spanish lawyer, Gustavo Sierra de Armas, before she married Jorge. After Gustavo returned to Spain, Celia fell into a debilitating depression. While she was housebound, Jorge visited her and told her to write to Gustavo. If Gustavo doesn’t write back, Jorge reasoned, Celia should marry Jorge instead. Celia does write to Gustavo, on the 11th day of each month, for 25 years. However, she keeps the letters in a box under her bed and never sends them.
When Celia visits Felicia’s house, which once belonged to Jorge’s mother, Berta, she remembers how her mother-in-law hated and tormented her when she and Jorge were newlyweds. The experience broke Celia mentally, and she rejected her newborn daughter, Lourdes. After that, Jorge placed Celia in an asylum for a while. After she got out, they lived in a house by the beach, which the doctor hoped would provide a healing atmosphere for Celia. There, she gave birth to Felicia and, years later, a son named Javier. All this time, Celia longed for Gustavo, and Jorge knew that Celia didn’t love him passionately. Returning to the present, Celia decides that with Jorge now dead, she will devote her life to the service of El Líder (Fidel Castro) and the Cuban Revolution.
Forty days after Jorge’s death, he starts visiting Lourdes. She can’t see him, but she hears his voice and smells his trademark cigar. Lourdes is unsettled by this, and she thinks back to her departure from Cuba: after Castro’s takeover, Lourdes had been pregnant with her second child. Some Revolutionary soldiers came to Rufino’s family estate, claiming that it now belonged to the government. After Lourdes threatened the soldiers, she suffered a miscarriage. Some time after, while Rufino was away, the soldiers returned, and one of them raped Lourdes. Nowadays, Lourdes feels grateful for her new life and self-reinvention in the United States. She passionately hates all things related to Castro and the Revolution, and she pours herself into her business. Her biggest regret these days is that Pilar hates her.
Back in Cuba, Felicia sometimes has delusions. The summer following her father’s death, the delusions are especially overpowering. She shuts herself indoors, plays records, and dances with her five-year-old son, Ivanito. Ivanito’s father, Hugo Villaverde, was a merchant marine who could be violently abusive and who often cheated on Felicia. He even gave Felicia syphilis, which nearly killed Ivanito when Felicia gave birth to him. One day, Felicia kicked him out of the house by dropping a flaming rag onto his face, maiming him for life. Ivanito doesn’t remember his father, and unlike his older sisters, twins Luz and Milagro, he is loyal to his mother and thinks her behavior is normal. But by the end of the summer, Felicia attempts to kill herself and Ivanito. After that, Ivanito is sent to boarding school, and Felicia is sent to serve in a guerilla brigade in the mountains. Celia hopes that Felicia will find a new sense of purpose in the Revolution, but Felicia is indifferent to politics.
A few years later, in 1975, Lourdes has become an auxiliary policewoman in Brooklyn, eager to carry out her ideas about law and order. Pilar has gotten into the punk music scene and become an avid abstract painter. To Pilar’s amazement, Lourdes commissions her to paint a patriotic mural for the grand opening of her second bakery. Pilar can’t help portraying a “punk” Liberty, complete with a safety pin through her nose, though she feels uneasy about it. At the unveiling, when a disgruntled customer intends to destroy the offensive painting, Lourdes knocks him flat with her handbag, and Pilar feels a surge of love for her mother.
In 1978, Felicia consults a santero because she’s longing for a husband. The santero forecasts misfortune in Felicia’s life and gives her a healing spell to perform, but before she can do this, Felicia falls in love with an awkward restaurant inspector named Ernesto. After four days of bliss, Ernesto is killed in a grease fire. Felicia becomes convinced that El Líder is behind it. After that, Felicia disappears for a while. In July, she finds herself married to a carnival worker named Otto, unable to remember how she got there. One night, Otto dies when he falls off the roller coaster that he and Felicia are riding, and Felicia claims that she intentionally pushed him. After this, Felicia makes her way home and embraces the practice of Santería, with her friend Herminia’s help. She undergoes the initiation to become a santera, seeming at first to find peace; however, she gradually sickens, aging before her time. At the very end of Felicia’s life, Celia orders Felicia’s so-called “witch doctor” friends out of the house, stomps on the divination shells they’d been using, and holds Felicia until she dies.
In 1979, Jorge stops communicating with Lourdes and disappears, but not before admitting to her that during the first year of their marriage, he sent Celia to live with his cruel mother in hopes of breaking Celia’s spirit—he was jealous of her love for Gustavo. Jorge assures Lourdes that Celia really did love her.
In 1980, Pilar, who’s always been irreligious but lately feels uninspired, wanders into a botánica in New York. The shop owner gives Pilar a spell to perform, promising her that after nine days of sacred baths, she’ll know her next steps in life. Before Pilar can do this, she’s sexually assaulted in a park. After the assault, she notices that she can read disconnected bits of people’s thoughts and even see glimpses of the future. She performs the ritual and learns that she and Lourdes must go to Cuba. They do go end up going to Cuba, where Lourdes is pained by the decay visible everywhere and disgusted by her mother’s continued devotion to El Líder. She revisits the old Puente estate, where her rape occurred, and she wonders if she will ever see justice. She tries to convince her nephew Ivanito, now 13 and gifted at languages, to defect to the United States.
By contrast, Pilar is enchanted by Cuba and relishes spending time with her Abuela Celia at last. She paints Celia’s portrait and listens to stories about her life. Celia gives Pilar the collection of letters that she wrote Gustavo. Pilar also visits Herminia, learns about her aunt Felicia’s life, and discovers that she, too, is destined to become a Santería initiate. One day, Pilar asks Celia if she’d be allowed to paint anything she wants in Cuba. Celia says she can, as long as she doesn’t attack the Revolution—Cuba can’t yet afford the luxury of dissent. Pilar begins to realize that as much as she loves Cuba, she truly belongs in New York.
Early one morning, Lourdes drives Ivanito to the Peruvian embassy, where a crowd of defectors has gathered. She urges him to get out of Cuba and tells him that she’ll sponsor him for American citizenship. When Celia discovers they have gone, Pilar drives to Havana in pursuit and finds Ivanito among the crowd, but she lets him go and lies to Celia that she couldn’t find him.
Some time after this, Celia, alone again, takes a swim deep into the ocean. She sinks beneath the surface, taking off the pearl earrings Gustavo once gave her. It’s not clear that she ever surfaces.
