BOOK REVIEW : Cuban Revolution Tugs on Family Ties : DREAMING IN CUBAN <i> by Cristina Garcia</i> ; Alfred A. Knopf $20; 229 pages

Ninety miles is a distance, but there is a country where it is an identity, a syndrome that governs like a climate. Poor Cuba, the saying goes, so far from God and so close to the United States.

Those 90 turquoise miles are the subject of Cristina Garcia’s poignant and perceptive first novel, “Dreaming in Cuban.” It tells of a family divided politically and geographically by the Cuban revolution.

It tells of the generational fissures that open subsequently on each side: In Cuba, between a grandmother who is a fervent Castro supporter and a daughter who retreats into an Afro-Cuban santeria cult; in America, between another daughter, militantly anti-Castro, and her own rebellious punk-artist daughter, who mocks her obsession.

And it tells of the ghostly ties that tug on all of them, like a guillotined body that wanders in search of its severed head.

The story of Celia del Pino, her husband, Jorge, and their three children and four grandchildren flutters back and forth from the mid-1930s to 1980. It is told in a mix of realism and dreamy hallucination.

Cuban history--its unnatural closeness to the United States until 1958, and its unnatural separation ever since--is a wound; and the wound breeds fever and delusion.

The realism is exquisite; the magical elements are more problematic. They are thematically and emotionally effective, but sometimes Garcia, a Cuban-American journalist-turned-novelist, is indulgent and awkward in her use of them.

“Dreaming” opens in 1972, at night. Celia is sitting in the porch swing of her house in a beachside town outside Havana. She sweeps the horizon with binoculars, “guarding the north coast of Cuba.” The Yanquis came once, and they may come again.

She is also wearing her best housedress, drop pearl earrings and lipstick. It is a revolutionary honor to have been chosen by the neighborhood committee but, revolutionary or not, the middle class is the middle class. As much as hardships allow, Celia dresses up. It is a perfect image. The revolution, despite the three decades that have gone by and all its hardening and polarization, has never quite overcome its contradictions of class and geography.

Castro came from a well-to-do family, has well-to-do tastes and once tried out for the Washington Senators. Because he did not play baseball better, Celia reflects, “her husband will be buried in stiff, foreign earth. Because of this their children and their grandchildren are nomads.”

As a young woman, Celia played the piano and had a romantic affair with a visiting Spaniard; for a quarter-century afterward she wrote him letters that she never mailed; they appear throughout the book as a kind of private journal.

The constraints of marriage in Cuba’s particularly suffocating bourgeois society drove her temporarily mad; Jorge, her husband, was kind but distant.

He worked for an American company, and his passion was for everything it represented: Northern cleanliness and order. He endured the revolution bitterly and emigrated to New York when illness gave him an excuse.

Lourdes, the eldest daughter, was already there. She had married a rich Cuban and fled with him and his family. Felicia, her sister, remains in Cuba through three disastrous marriages, a growing mental instability and physical deterioration and membership in a santeria group.

Javier, their brother, is a scientist who went to Czechoslovakia in the glory days of Cuban internationalism; by the end of the book, he is back again, bitter and an alcoholic.

The sharpest portrait is of Lourdes. She is a woman of enormous appetites, energy and anger. Vastly overweight, she works diligently to run two bakeries in Brooklyn, supporting her husband and her daughter, Pilar.

A fierce right-winger--she joins the auxiliary police for the pleasure of the heavy boots and nightstick--she is Cuban intransigence personified.

She also has an odd, wild appeal. To taunt her “Communist” mother, she sends her a photograph of her bakery: “Each glistening eclair is a grenade aimed at Cuba’s political beliefs.”

Pilar, her rebellious daughter, has a deep curiosity about Celia and Cuba. After the death of Felicia, she persuades her mother to go with her on a visit.

While Lourdes trumpets her anger at everything she sees--at one point, she shouts “Asesino!” at Castro--Pilar and Celia tentatively explore the lost years between them.

No one is stable or complete on either side. The Cuban illness has deeply maimed, in fascinatingly different ways, Celia, Jorge and his children; Pilar may or may not suggest a glint of future reconciliation.

Garcia maps out the maiming, sometimes with excessive colors, but for the most part, acutely and with a rare sweetness.

Next: Chris Goodrich reviews “Flying Dutch” by Tom Holt.