A fifty-year-old, Cuban-born, Chicago-raised, former liberal arts professor named Crystal Donaldson longs to write a literary masterpiece - her first novel - during a critical point of deteriorating health and personal awareness in her life. She harbors endless questions about her Cuban parents, the history of the Caribbean island she was born on, and the secrets the older generations of her family left buried in la Habana (Havana) before fleeing to the United States just a few months after her birth half a century ago. Crystal begins to interview her eccentric, exotic, entertaining octogenarian aunts, Katerina and Sofia, while studying century-old love letters written by her grandparents, Lydia and Orlando, as well as examining the journals left by her dead expatriate father, Roberto Aguilar. Roberto was a maritime law-practicing lawyer and professor from an aristocratic Cuban family, a former CIA operative, and a poet who fell deeply in love with and wrote love-filled verses to Crystal's Cuban mother, Serena Vasco, an artist from a poorer class family. What Crystal will discover goes beyond the excavation of a few skeletons in the family closet and transcends beyond the dichotomy between truth and lies, rich and poor, male and female, democracy and dictatorship, text and subtext, and the differences in time and place. Crystal learns through the lives and loves of five generations of the women in her family history that the body, the mind, the heart, and the soul are far more complex, capable, and courageous than even an intelligent, middle-aged woman might have imagined. She also concludes that the truth can be an unaffordable luxury exigently commanding an unbearable price; there is no unconditional love without sacrifice; and to preserve the life-line between them, those on either side will often believe, say, and do the unthinkable. From the raising of the Cuban flag in 1902's colorful city of la Habana, through the political ups and downs of the decades preceding the so-called "communist" Fidelista revolution, to present-day American family life, this novel-within-a-novel takes the reader on a journey to another place and time and back again, opening up a dialogue and erasing the line between opposing cultures, socio-economic classes, political parties, gender roles, philosophical ideologies, values, traditions, and personalities.