Cuban American farm wife returns to Cuba after a 30-year absence in search of family and self identity, and discovers the horrible reality of her family's suffering. Engle chronicles the brutal relocation of innocent peasants to prison-cities known throughout Cuba as "Captive Towns", where descendants of those imprisoned during the early 1960s remain incarcerated today. Scenes of the narrator's travels in Cuba as she visits relatives, both dissident and Communist, are juxtaposed with an account of the imprisonment of the narrator's great uncle Gabriel, once a Castro support