The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

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The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

Introduction
Author Biography
Plot Summary
Characters
Themes
Style
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism
Sources
Further Reading

Oscar Hijuelos
1989

Introduction

Oscar Hijuelos's novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love was published in 1989, and soon became a huge international bestseller. It tells the story of Cesar Castillo, an aged musician who once had a small amount of fame when he and his brother appeared on an episode of I Love Lucy in the 1950s. The book chronicles Cesar's last hours as he sits in a seedy hotel room, drinking and listening to recordings made by his band, the Mambo Kings. Events and characters whirl through his mind, evoking what he has lost over the years: his brother and collaborator, Nestor, who spent his adult life constantly rewriting one song about a lost love; the many lovers who gave themselves up to him as he rose triumphantly through the mambo music craze of the early fifties; and the way of life that disappeared for all Cubans after that country was over-thrown by an insurrection led by Fidel Castro in 1959. In telling Cesar's story, Hijuelos weaves in cameo appearances by several real-life mambo musicians, including Desi Arnaz, Tito Puente, Pérez Prado, Machito and Mongo Santamaría.

This novel, Hijuelos's second, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1990, marking the first time that that prize was awarded to a Hispanic author. Hijuelos has published four more novels since then, frequently touching on the theme of immigrants and how they adjust to coming to America.

Author Biography

Oscar Hijuelos (his last name is pronounced "E-way-los") was born in New York City on August 24, 1951. His parents came from the Oriente province of Cuba, emigrating in 1943 to the Spanish Harlem section of New York, which is where the author grew up. As a teenager in the 1960s, Hijuelos played guitar in Top 40 bands. He attended City College of New York, receiving a bachelor of arts degree in 1975 and a master's degree in creative writing in 1976. After college, he worked for Transportation Display, Inc., an advertising firm, for seven years. During that time, he continued writing.

In 1978, his short story "Columbus Discovering America" received a Pushcart Press citation for "outstanding writer." Following that, he won an Oscar Cintas fiction writing grant for 1978–1979; a Bread Loaf Writers Conference scholarship in 1980; a fiction writing grant from Creative Artists Programs Service in 1982; and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation in 1983.

His first novel, Our House in the Last World, was published in 1983. It concerns a Cuban couple, Alejo and Sorrea, who, like the author's parents, emigrate from Cuba to New York in the 1940s. It won several awards, including the American Academy in Rome Fellowship in Literature, which allowed him to live in Rome for a while. While in Italy, he developed an interest in archeology, a hobby which has affected the historical curiosity of his books.

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, published in 1989, was Hijuelos's second novel, and is by far his most famous to date. Along with other honors, it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1990, making Hijuelos the first Hispanic novelist to take that award. He followed this up with The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien in 1993; Mr. Ives' Christmas in 1995; and Empress of the Splendid Season in 1999. Although Hijuelos has been an American citizen all of his life, his books are rich in images of Cuba that he gained from research and from the memories of older family members. This makes him distinct from other Cuban-American writers, whose works often contain a strong political element that draws on the sharp contrast between the two countries' systems.

Hijuelos's latest novel, his sixth, is A Simple Habana Melody, published in 2002. He still lives in New York City, near the Spanish Harlem apartment where he grew up.

Plot Summary

It Was a Saturday Afternoon on LaSalle Street

The first few pages of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love are narrated by Eugenio Castillo, who is the nephew of the book's main character, Cesar Castillo. He describes an afternoon in his childhood, sometime in the early 1960s, when the landlady called up to the apartment where his family lived to let Cesar know that they were rerunning the episode of I Love Lucy that he and his brother had appeared on, performing the song that Eugenio's father Nestor wrote, "Beautiful María of My Soul." When Eugenio goes to the kitchen to get him, Cesar has a difficult time rising from the table, having been out until four or five in the morning playing the trumpet. With Eugenio's help, Cesar makes it to the couch, and Eugenio brings him a drink of whisky as he watches the most important moment of his life repeat once more.

Side A:In the Hotel Splendour, 1980

Cesar has checked into a room at the Hotel Splendour with his record player, a stack of records, and several bottles of liquor. He wonders if this is the room in the same hotel where he used to take girls in the old days. He recalls arriving with Nestor in New York in 1949 and forming the band. They were from a farm in Cuba and had been playing with a small combo in Havana before moving to New York, where they moved in with their cousin Pablo and his family at 500 LaSalle Street.

The early days of the band Cesar and Nestor formed, the Mambo Kings, were slow. They worked in a meat factory during the days and wrote songs, in particular "Beautiful María of My Soul," which Nestor eventually rewrote forty-four times. Cesar remembers that, before moving to Havana, he was with an orchestra run by Julián García in Santiago de Cuba. He married Julián's niece, Luisa, and she moved to Havana with him, but one of his many girlfriends told Luisa about their affair, and Luisa left Cesar while she was pregnant. They reconciled for a few months, but then she left him for good. Over the years he sent presents to their daughter, Mariela.

In 1950, Nestor met Delores Fuentes and they started an affair that made Nestor think back to his tragic affair with María. It had occurred several years earlier, in Havana: walking down the street one day, he heard a man and woman fighting, and, investigating it, found a man beating on María. He chased the man away, and he and María started a passionate love affair. Eventually, though, Nestor turned to his brother Cesar for advice about how to behave toward his woman, and Cesar recommended that he assert his manliness and abuse María. She left him and went back to her home village. When he eventually followed, he learned that she had just married the man he had seen beating her in Havana. In America, his affair with Dolores led to her being pregnant with Eugenio, so they got married. A daughter, Leticia, was born three years later, in 1954. Nestor was a distant father and husband, always dreaming about María: writing her letters, and working on his song about her.

The Mambo Kings became one of the most popular bands in New York. One night in 1955, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball came to see them. After the show, Cesar struck up a conversation with Arnaz. They were from the same area of Cuba, and they had both sung in the Julián García band. Cesar remembers conversing into the night with Arnaz and Ball and inviting them back to his and Nestor's apartment, although he is not sure if that is how it went. Three months later, they went out to Hollywood to film the I Love Lucy episode in which the Castillo brothers play Ricky Ricardo's cousins who have just arrived from Cuba. They became wealthy from that appearance, as several singers, including Arnaz, recorded "Beautiful María of My Soul," and the Mambo Kings did their one and only national tour.

Media Adaptations

This novel was adapted to a movie in 1992, starring Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas as the Castillo brothers. It was directed by Arne Glimcher. It was produced by Warner Brothers and is available on videocassette from Warner Home Video.
An audiocassette version of the book was read by E. B. Marshall and released by NewStar Media in 1991.
Although most movie soundtracks have little to do with the novels the movies are adapted from, the soundtrack for The Mambo Kings brings to life the music that is so important to the book. It features songs by legendary musicians such as Tito Puente and Celia Cruz, as well as works by contemporary Cuban artists such as Arturo Sandoval. The album includes two versions of the Mambo Kings' signature song "Beautiful María of My Soul": one in English (performed by Los Lobos) and one in Spanish (performed by one of the movie's stars, Antonio Banderas). It is available on cassette and compact disc from Elektra.

Nestor died in a car accident in 1957, sliding on an icy road into a tree while driving back from a performance. Cesar stayed in the apartment with Dolores and the children for a while, but he found himself too attracted to Dolores. He joined the Merchant Marines and traveled the world for two years. After a while of inactivity, he took a job as the maintenance man for the building at 500 LaSalle.

Side B:Sometime Later in the Night in the Hotel Splendour

During the night, a man from the next room at the Hotel Splendour comes over to borrow some liquor from Cesar. He invites Cesar back to his room to meet the woman he is with. Back in his own room, Cesar hears the couple through the wall, making love, and he is disappointed about what his own life has come to.

He remembers the doctor who told him that his body is incapable of processing alcohol, that it is like poison to him, and he pours himself another drink.

His mind drifts back to the early 1960s when he began to perform again, in order to make money to send to his family, which was suffering in Cuba because of the Communist revolution. With the backing of a local gangster, Fernando Pérez, he opens a small nightclub, the Club Havana, but he loses money because he hires too many friends, and the gangsters take control of it, using it as a place to sell drugs in the neighborhood.

Toward the End, While Listening to the Wistful "Beautiful María of My Soul"

Cesar recalls his most recent affair, when he was nearly sixty. Her name was Lydia Santos. She was in her mid-thirties, and had two children. Cesar began taking her out and buying presents for her children. Even after he determined that he was truly in love with her, he was insecure, always expecting her to leave him for a younger man.

As his health deteriorated, his doctor gave him prescription pain killers, which made him angry and disoriented. He said offensive things to Lydia, and later wondered why he said them. They finally broke up when she had to miss a date with him: she called later to explain that she had taken a child to the emergency room, but Cesar would not accept her excuse.

One final memory Cesar has is from his childhood: he wanted to be a musician so badly that he would pay a local musician for lessons with rum that he stole from his father. His father always beat him mercilessly for stealing, and treated him badly the rest of his life. Cesar also remembers his mother, who was at her happiest when dancing in the kitchen. Then he says goodbye to a succession of people who have been important in his life. He is found the next morning with a drink in his hand, a smile on his face, and a handwritten copy of the lyrics to "Beautiful María of My Soul."

When I Called the Number

Like the first section, the last section is told by Eugenio. He talks about going to see Desi Arnaz about a year after Cesar's death. Mr. Arnaz remembers Cesar and Nestor well, and has a photograph of himself with them on his wall, along with photos of other celebrities. He starts singing "Beautiful María of My Soul," which he admires, but forgets some words. When he is out of the room, Eugenio has a fantasy that combines the appearance of the ghost of his father, Nestor, and the famed I Love Lucy episode.

Characters

Desi Arnaz

Desario Arnaz is a real-life person who plays a crucial role as a character in the book. He was born in the Oriente province of Cuba and became a famous television star. When he hears the Castillo brothers in a nightclub, he invites them to perform on his television sitcom, I Love Lucy. Cesar remembers having Desi and his wife, Lucille Ball, to their apartment for some Cuban food, spending the night eating and drinking with them, but he questions whether his memory is accurate. In the last section of the book, Nestor's son Eugenio goes to visit Mr. Arnaz, and finds that he remembers the Castillos very well and has a picture of them on his wall.

Lucille Ball

Lucille Ball is a real person as well as a character in the novel. She was the star of the show I Love Lucy, which, in the book, the Castillo brothers appear on in the 1950s. Lucy is hardly mentioned in The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. In her few scenes, she is gracious but slightly impatient with her husband, Desi Arnaz, who wants to spend time talking about Cuba with Cesar and Nestor.

Cesar Castillo

Cesar is the focus of this novel. Except for a few pages at the beginning and a few at the end that are narrated by his nephew Eugenio, the book concerns Cesar sitting in a room at the Hotel Splendour in 1980, drinking and listening to the recordings he and his group, the Mambo Kings, made in the 1940s and 50s. He is sixty-two years old, depressed because his health is failing him, and purposely drinking himself to death because he can no longer drink or have sex, which were his main pursuits in life.

Cesar's reminiscences bounce around in no particular order, covering how he was abused by his father back in Cuba, how he left home to be a musician, working first in the capital city of Oriente province and then in Havana, before emigrating to New York City in 1949. As the leader of the Mambo Kings band, he lived the good life, meeting famous people, drinking and playing music all night, and having sexual encounters with dozens of women, some of which he thinks may have occurred in the same room he currently occupies, before the Hotel Splendor became run down. The high point of his professional career was the brothers' appearance on I Love Lucy, which made them famous and led to high sales figures for their most popular album, The Mambo Kings Sing Songs of Love, which sold ten thousand copies. After that, his life had a few problems, but for the most part he was where he wanted to be.

When his brother Nestor died in 1957, Cesar's life fell apart. He became uninterested in performing music, eventually taking a job as the superintendent of his building. He became sexually infatuated with his brother's widow. He lets his health decline, drinking recklessly, to the point where a doctor admitted him to into the hospital, warning that he faced a breakdown of his ravaged digestive system if he did not change his lifestyle. In his sixties, he had a love affair with a woman in her thirties, Lydia Santos. While mixing medication and alcohol, Cesar became abusive to her, and she stopped seeing him. With nothing to live for, he gave away prized possessions and came to the Hotel Splendour for a night of drinking and reminiscing. He is found dead in the morning with a drink in his hand and a smile on his face, having written out the lyrics to the haunting song Nestor worked his whole life on, "Beautiful María of My Soul."

Delores Castillo

Although he cannot forget María, whom he fell in love with in Cuba, Nestor marries Delores in New York, and they have two children together. She is a voracious reader and something of an introvert, having come to New York from Cuba when she was thirteen and taken care of her hardworking and hard-drinking father until he died. When she marries Nestor, she moves into the apartment the Castillo brothers share; after Nestor's death, she becomes uncomfortable because Cesar keeps trying to make love to her, and so she asks him to move out. When the children are grown up and her second husband dies, she goes back to school, something that Nestor had prevented her from doing. She has an affair with a young man who is also a student, and when he breaks off their relationship she wanders home through a bad neighborhood and is mugged and almost raped.

Eugenio Castillo

Eugenio is the son of Nestor Castillo. He is the narrator of the book's brief introduction, in which he remembers being a child and watching his father and uncle on an I Love Lucy rerun with Cesar, and of the last section, in which he goes to visit Desi Arnaz in California. Throughout the story, he is mentioned from Cesar's perspective as a moody art student and briefly as a trumpet player, although he gives up music early.

Leticia Castillo

Leticia is Nestor's daughter. She is seldom mentioned in the book except when, as a young woman, she develops a crush on one of the young Cuban musicians whom Cesar helps, and has her heart broken by him. Later she marries and has children.

Mariela Castillo

Mariela is Cesar's daughter in Cuba. Mariela's mother, Luisa, leaves him soon after the baby is born because he is having affairs with other women. He constantly sends gifts to his daughter from America, and returns to Cuba to visit her when she is thirteen, but he never sees her after that. They nearly meet in the 1970s, when she is in her thirties and appearing in Montreal with a Cuban ballet troupe, but Cesar is old and finds himself too ill to travel to Montreal, so they talk on the phone for one last time.

Nestor Castillo

Nestor is the more sensitive of the two Mambo Kings, younger than Cesar by ten years. As a boy, he has a strong bond with his mother, but he leaves to follow his older brother's success. He meets María in Havana. They have a brief but tempestuous affair, during which Nestor follows Cesar's advice to be more macho, ordering her around. She leaves him and goes back to her home village. Heartbroken, he writes a song about her, which eventually evolves into "Beautiful María of My Soul." Over the rest of his lifetime, Nestor writes forty-four versions of the song.

After moving to New York, Nestor joins Cesar in forming the Mambo Kings, but he is shy and for the most part just follows his outgoing brother. He meets Dolores Fuentes at a bus stop, falls in love with her, marries her and has two children with her, but still he cannot help thinking about María. One afternoon he buys a book called Forward America! at a newsstand and for the rest of his life he reads and rereads it, marking passages in the margins. It is an inspirational book, meant to tell readers how to lead happy, fulfilled lives. Even when the Mambo Kings make a fortune on the recording of the song they played on the I Love Lucy show, Nestor keeps his job at the meat packing factory.

Nestor dies in 1957, while driving Cesar's car back from a coming-out party in New Jersey, with Cesar and his date in the back seat. His funeral is attended by some of the most important Mambo musicians, and others send floral bouquets. Thoughts of Nestor haunt Cesar throughout his life.

Ana María Fuentes

Ana María is Delores' sister, and remains a part of Cesar Castillo's life throughout the decades.

Delores Fuentes

See Delores Castillo

Julián García

Julián is the leader of the band in Santiago de Cuba. He gives Cesar his first break in music when he is just nineteen. In one of Cesar's drunken memories, he thinks that he may have met Desi Arnaz when he came to audition for Julián's band, that Arnaz was the singer who was leaving on the day that he came to audition, but he soon questions whether that was the way it happened at all.

Luisa García

Luisa is the niece of Julián García, the orchestra leader whom Cesar works with in Cuba. Cesar marries her in 1943, and they have a daughter, Mariela. When one of Cesar's lovers confronts Luisa, she divorces him and eventually remarries.

Dr. Victor López

Dr. López is the person who puts Cesar in the hospital for a few weeks, and tells him he will be dead soon if he does not quit drinking.

Bernardito Mandelbaum

A lifelong friend of Cesar, Bernardito is neither a musician nor a Cuban, but an artist who is enraptured with Cuban culture. He designs the covers for several of the Mambo Kings albums. He has an extensive collection of Latin music. When he meets a woman, Fifi, at a Mambo Kings party, he falls in love with her. He moves in with her, but does not marry her for twenty-five years, because his parents disapprove.

Miguel Montoya

The pianist for the Mambo Kings and their musical arranger, Miguel Montoya is described as "elegant," and as a sharp dresser. In later life, Montoya makes a fortune by moving to Hollywood and playing with the commercial orchestra "Ten Thousand Strings," and also writing scores for cheap Mexican horror films.

Fernando Pérez

Fernando is an old friend of Cesar's, a gangster. When Cesar is poor, Fernando offers to back him financially in opening a bar. The place that they open is the Club Havana. It is successful, but it loses money because of Cesar's freewheeling practices, so Fernando buys him out. Under the control of Fernando's organized crime associates, the place gains a reputation for selling drugs in the neighborhood, until, after Fernando's death, it closes down.

Frankie Pérez

Frankie is from the New York neighborhood where Cesar and Nestor live. They meet him when he is dancing at a hall where the Mambo Kings are playing early in their career. He remains a friend of Cesar's throughout his life, after the band has broken up.

María Rivera

María is the subject of Nestor's song "Beautiful María of My Soul." When he meets her, she is a dancer in the chorus line at the Havana Hilton. He first sees her when, walking down the street, he finds a man abusing her and fights with the man. Nestor and María have a torrid love affair, but after a while Nestor takes his brother's advice and starts treating her badly, being verbally and physically rough. Soon after, she disappears from town. He goes to the village where she grew up and finds that she has married the man whom she was fighting with when they met. Through the years, Nestor continues to write María letters, proclaiming his love.

Lydia Santos

When Cesar is sixty-two, he begins an affair with Lydia Santos, who is thirty-five. She has two children, works at a menial job, and lives in a bad neighborhood. Cesar spends money on her and her children, but he finds it difficult to believe that she is actually interested in him romantically. He becomes jealous, and the medication that he takes as his health fails him makes him say rude things to her. One night Lydia does not show up for a date, explaining that she spent the night in the emergency room because her son was ill; Cesar refuses to believe her, and, with his feelings hurt, he quits seeing her.

Mrs. Shannon

Mrs. Shannon is the landlady of the building that Cesar lives in from 1949 to 1980. At first, she dislikes him, but after his appearance on the I Love Lucy show she becomes susceptible to his flirting, and gives him a job as the building's supervisor.

Vanna Vane

The Castillo brothers meet Vanna Vane when she is a cigarette girl at the Palm Nightclub. Cesar has an affair with her, and he has her photographed for the cover of one of the group's records. Through the years, he continues to date Vanna, and throughout his night in the Hotel Splendour he thinks of her, wondering if they ever had sex in that same hotel room. Vanna becomes pregnant by him, and he takes her to get an abortion. Eventually, she marries a man named Friedman who works for the post office, living with him and her two sons in Co-op City in the Bronx, wondering whatever happened to Cesar.

Themes

Ideal Love

In The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Nestor Castillo is characterized by his devotion to the memory of María, with whom he had a love affair during his early twenties. Their affair was over after only a few months, and Hijuelos gives readers several reasons to doubt that the love between Nestor and María was really as deep as he remembers it to be. For one thing, the book refers to several uncomfortable moments between them, probably because she is trying to conceal her relationship with the man she eventually marries. Nestor does not really know much about her. Also, he does not seem to understand his own motive for being attracted to her. The novel leads into their first meeting with a description of Nestor wandering among the prostitutes along the waterfront and thinking how he could only sleep well, comfortably, in the arms of his mother, who was also named María. He is not aware of the simple psychological fact that he might be projecting onto María the dancer a purity that he associates with his mother, missing the fact that he does not really understand her at all.

The clearest indicator that Nestor's love for María is idealized and not actual can be seen in the way that he cannot relate his romance to real life. As a composer, he is limited to writing just one song, going back to rewrite it over and over, obsessed. He stays up nights rewriting his song about María and writing letters to her, neglecting the relationship that he should have with his wife and two children. He lives in a fantasy, consistently reliving a love that never was as solid and true as he has made it to be in his mind.

Machismo

Both of the Castillo brothers struggle to project a sense of machismo, which is especially important to men in Spanish-speaking countries such as Cuba. Machismo is a personality that emphasizes traits that are generally associated with masculinity, such as physical strength, aggression, and sexual virility. The term often has a negative connotation, because macho behavior often entails dominating and abusing women. It is also negative because it is often achieved through presenting a false front or adapting a macho pose, rather than being an honest characteristic that occurs naturally as part of one's true personality.

The insincerity often associated with machismo is clearly shown in the way that Nestor treats, and loses, María. On their first night together, Nestor tells her "everything about his short life, his childhood illnesses, his sense of unworthiness, his fears that he could never be a real macho in the kingdom of machos." Later, his uncertainty about her grows and Cesar advises him to be more macho with her: "A little abuse never hurt a romance. Women like to know who's the boss." Soon after, Nestor adapts a macho approach, María leaves him, going back to her old abusive fiancé.

Cesar's long life is spent pursuing machismo. Much of the novel bounces from one description to the next of his sexual conquests or graphic thoughts about women as conquests. Cesar's constant focus on affirming his machismo through sexual activity becomes increasingly tragic as he grows older and realizes that women do not see him as a lover anymore. When he falls in love, at age 60, with a woman in her thirties, his need to be macho defeats him: Lydia appears to be happy with Cesar, but he is insecure, focusing on any sign that she lacks respect for him and breaking up with her over a minor issue because his masculine pride is offended.

Success and Failure

The two sections of this novel narrated by Cesar's nephew Eugenio show readers the different fates that can befall musicians. The first, at the beginning of the book, shows the once-great Cesar Castillo as a failure, a washed-up has-been. Readers can tell that he once held some degree of fame because a neighbor sees him on the television (on a show taped so long ago that she has not entirely certain that it is him) and because the stacks of records that he knocks to the floor are ones that Cesar recorded. Still, the Cesar Castillo presented in this section, stumbling drunkenly around his apartment in the middle of the afternoon, shows no sign that he might once have been a television or recording star. Because this section is in Eugenio's eyes, Cesar looks like more of a failure than he does in the sections that present his life from his point of view.

At the end of the book, Eugenio meets Desi Arnaz, who shows all of the signs of commercial success. He has a large, expensive home, with horses and several gardens that overlook the Pacific Ocean. He is still involved in business deals, which is indicated by the fact that he excuses himself to "take care of some telephone calls."

Success and failure intersect in a shared wistfulness about the past. Cesar, drunk in a hotel room, listens to his old songs and reminisces about the people he has known, while Arnaz wanders around his huge estate singing phrases from his old songs, thinking briefly about the fact that his life will soon end, but then going on with his business.

In drawing the connection between the two, Hijuelos does nothing to diminish Arnaz's success, but instead he sheds a new light on Cesar's apparent failure. Eugenio feels comfortable in Arnaz's house, recognizing, for the first time in his life, the common denominator between Cesar, Nestor, and Arnaz, connecting Arnaz's graciousness with the modesty of his father and uncle. Once he learns to see beyond success and failure, he is able to accept their love in a way that he could not before.

Topics for Further Study

Explore the life and career of one of the musicians mentioned in the book, such as Celia Cruz, Pérez Prado, Tito Rodriguez or Machito, and report on the similarities and differences between that person's experiences and those of the fictitious Cesar Castillo.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Cuba was a popular resort destination for American vacationers. After doing some research, design a mock travel brochure for Havana in 1948, describing what tourists could expect to see there and what things cost in the actual prices of the time.
Watch the movie For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story, about the famed jazz trumpeter who left Cuba in 1990. Based on the movie, explain how the political world and the musical world have changed since the Castillo brothers in the novel emigrated in the 1940s.
A central point in the Castillo brothers' lives is their few minutes on the I Love Lucy program. Watch a current sitcom, and write a short story about what you imagine old age will be like for one of the minor actors who is not a regular on the show.
Contact the Congress person representing your district and ask them to explain the current United States policy toward Cuba.
Research Latin American dance, then teach your class how to dance the mambo. Use recordings done in the 1950s, or even the soundtrack from the movie The Mambo Kings for the music.

Self-Destruction

Both of the Mambo Kings, Cesar and Nestor Castillo, are responsible for the ends of their own unhappy lives. Nestor's death occurs because of an accident that could have happened to anyone, a car sliding on a patch of ice. Still, there is no doubt that he had little value for his life, skulking around in sadness and barely involved in his surroundings. The accident that causes his death is presented as a logical conclusion for Nestor who, at thirty-one, has nothing left to live for anyway, with his days and nights spent writing the same song over and over.

Cesar's self-destruction takes longer, and it is more deliberate. After Nestor's death he turns away from the best things in his life and begins a thirty-year downward spiral. He quits music for several years, drinks constantly, and finds more desperation than pleasure in sex. As the narrative points out, he tries "to keep his brother alive by becoming like him."

Knowing that his doctor has forbidden him to drink liquor, likening it to poison, Cesar gives away his most valuable possessions and spends his last night in the Hotel Splendour drinking himself to death. After thirty years of decline, Cesar, like Nestor, finds himself left with nothing but memories. When he is found dead in the morning, there is a "tranquil smile" on his face, indicating that his death has been a release from a life that he wanted to escape.

Style

Point of View

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is told from two points of view. The first is that of Eugenio, who tells of his experiences in the first person, using "I" and "me." Eugenio is the narrator of the book's opening and closing sections, starting with a childhood memory that he has of his uncle Cesar and ending with a fantasy of the Castillo brothers' hearts being reunited after death.

Most of the book is from Cesar's point of view. The sections that concern him are told in the third person: not using Cesar's voice, but still relating the details of his experience as he would have observed them. From Cesar's point of view, women are described in terms of their sexual attributes, musicians in terms of their talent, and political events in terms of how they affect Cuban farmers. Readers are therefore given a biased view of the world, and can only experience unbiased reality in brief glimpses. An example of this is the way that Cesar's daughter Mariela shows little interest in him, even though he feels that he is going to great lengths to be a good father. There are also places where his memory of events is questioned, such as when, after describing his first meeting with Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, the narrative explains that it may not have happened that way after all.

The point of view of the book is inconsistent, often relaying information to readers that Cesar would not know. At Nestor's funeral, for instance, the narrative gives a long paragraph of Dolores' thoughts, setting it off in parentheses to indicate that it is outside of the normal narrative flow. There are, however, no parentheses around the details given about Nestor's romance with María, details that would have been outside of Cesar's range of experience. Background about characters, such as the story of Dolores' encounter with the man who put on the beauty pageant and Mrs. Shannon's growing attraction to Cesar, are told directly to readers, despite the fact that Cesar would not have been aware of these details.

Structure

This book is divided into five sections. The first and last balance each other: each is short, less than ten pages, and consists of Eugenio Castillo discussing influential musicians, one who has sunk into obscurity and another who revels in fame. Between these two sections, there are two parts that are also balanced against each other. "In the Hotel Splendour, 1980" and "Sometime Later in the Night in the Hotel Splendour" are referred to, like an old vinyl record, as "Side A" and "Side B."

The symmetry of these two sets of pairs is broken, however, with the inclusion of a fifth section, titled "Toward the End, While Listening to the Wistful 'Beautiful María of My Soul.'" This section is conspicuous because it does not have a corresponding section to balance out against, as the other sections do. It follows the narrative thread that runs through "Side A" and "Side B," but, following the "record" symbolism, it could not be "Side C," since records are flat and do not have a third side.

The events that Cesar thinks about in this uneven section cover his physical decline, which leads to his decision to drink himself to death, and the fulfillment of that plan. The fact that it extends beyond the "Side A" and "Side B" structure could mean that Cesar's life has gone beyond his musical identity, that he has transcended the Mambo King personality he once made for himself and risen, or sunk, into the realm of human reality.

Antihero

Cesar Castillo is not the sort of character that most readers would consider a hero. He spends most if his time drinking, thinking about his own sexual prowess, objectifying women and avoiding responsibility. He allows himself to wallow in self-pity rather than taking advantage of the opportunities made available to him. At one point in the novel, he thinks about a woman that he raped one Christmas day, puzzled at her tears because he feels he has done her a favor, taking her virginity at age forty: "It was about time for you," he tells her. He does not remember her name. And he dies at the end of the book without even regretting his crime.

Still, many readers end up feeling sympathy for Cesar. Musicians respect him for his talent, and this novel is steeped in the world of mambo music. Readers adapt the values of this small, specific society over the values that they might hold in the real world. The novel does not necessarily promote Cesar's perspective, which can be seen by the contrasting sections at the beginning and the end, which have Eugenio coping with a hopeless Cesar and a collected Desi Arnaz. In spite of his faults, the book respects Cesar, along with his weakness and self-destructiveness.

Historical Context

Recent Cuban History

After Cuba gained its independence from Spain at the turn of the century, the Cuban government was marred by political instability, incompetence, and corruption. Throughout the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, the most powerful politician was Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar. Batista served as elected president from 1940 to 1944, and then, as the 1952 election was underway, led a military coup that seized power, suspending the constitution and declaring himself president. Under his control, rich politicians became increasingly richer, while poverty grew among Cuba's poor. Social services were ignored: disease and illiteracy ran rampant. Resistance to the government, in the form of labor strikes and demonstrations, grew. In 1956, Fidel Castro, a young lawyer who had been exiled to Mexico for participating in a failed revolt after Batista's coup, returned to Cuba, and under his direction, the people's discontent grew into an uprising. With few soldiers supporting him but with military brilliance, Castro was able to stand up against the unmotivated, corrupt Batista army. The United States became impatient with the Cuban government's neglect of its own people, and in 1958 withdrew its military support. This gave Castro's supporters their chance to press their revolution. On January 1, 1959, the government toppled: Batista left for exile in the Dominican Republic, and Castro, then thirty-one years old, took control.

The Castro government's first order of business was undoing the economic turmoil the country had fallen into. Castro ordered reforms that gave the government control over land and industries that had been privately owned. Political opponents were executed and imprisoned, and the country was declared a one-party socialist state. Relations with the United States went downhill throughout 1960 and 1961, as the Cuban government nationalized major industries such as sugar and oil production, seizing control of the property of American investors. The United States severed diplomatic relations and began concocting plans to overthrow Castro. The most conspicuous of these plans was the Bay of Pigs invasion in April of 1961. Fifteen hundred Cuban exiles, financed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, left Miami for Cuba. They were captured as soon as they arrived, having been given insufficient military or tactical support. Shortly after, Castro declared himself a Marxist-Leninist and announced a formal alliance with the Soviet Union, America's adversary in the Cold War.

Since the early 1960s, relations between the United States and Cuba have been at a standstill. Travel between the two countries is restricted, and a trade embargo continues. Over the decades, different occasions have occurred to nearly break the status quo. In the 1970s, President Jimmy Carter supported a softer stance, loosening the embargo and giving Cubans access to American goods, but the next president, Ronald Reagan, took a hard-line anti-Communist stance which assured continued antagonism. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, when Hijuelos's novel was published, the Cuban economy plummeted, and political observers expected to see the Castro regime crumble. The economy rebounded in the mid-90s, however. Today, Castro is in his seventies and showing signs of failing health: he has announced that plans have been made for a successor to his nearly-fifty-year reign. But Cuban exiles in America await the opportunity for political unrest that will come once he is gone.

The Mambo

The mambo was developed in Cuban ballrooms in the 1940s, when the traditional rumba was infused with Afro-Cuban rhythms that were becoming popular at that time in American jazz music. The word "mambo" comes from a Bantu instrument that was originally used in religious rituals. In the late 1930s, Cuban composer Orestes Lopez wrote a traditional danzon, or dance song, which he called "Mambo": it included elements of the son, a folk song style that is native to Oriente province, which the novel identifies as the home of the Castillo brothers and of Desi Arnaz. In Lopez's song, the orchestra leader would call for musicians to start their solos by shouting out, "Mil vices mambo! (A thousand times mambo!)."

The musical style first became popular in the United States through the work of flamboyant band leader Pérez Prado, who billed himself as the Mambo King. Prado, who worked as a piano player and arranger for the famous Orquestra Casino de la Playa, left Cuba in 1947. Settling in Mexico City, he released a string of recordings that made it onto the American charts, including "Mambo No. 5" and "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White." With his trademark goatee beard and showy style, Prado was identified with the mambo by audiences in the 1950s, even though music historians tend to downplay his significance in the development of the music itself.

Compare & Contrast

1950s: Cuba is a popular vacation resort for American tourists, who enjoy the benefits of the strong U.S. dollar and a foreign government that welcomes U.S. businesses.
1980s: Cuba is an ally of the Soviet Union, the communist superpower that rivals America. American citizens are not allowed to travel to Cuba or to do business there.
Today: Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cuba is still a communist country, and the American travel and trade embargo against Cuba still exists.
1950s: America is undergoing a Mambo craze. Even mainstream orchestras are including works with a Latin flavor into their repertoires.
1980s: America is undergoing alternative music craze to replace Mambo music, among others. Mambo music and dance are relics of the simpler times and are considered oldfashioned.
Today: Mambo music is taken seriously by jazz musicians. Some of the old mainstream Latin acts, like Pérez Prado and Xavier Cugot, are appreciated by young listeners as kitsch or "lounge music."
1950s: Dancing to live music is an ordinary way to spend an evening out.
1980s: The importance of live music is diminishing. Dance clubs rely more and more on recordings, and only feature live bands on special occasions.
Today: Disc jockeys become major entertainment celebrities on the basis of how they choose to mix recorded songs together.
1950s: New York City is considered a city of ethnic neighborhoods, each based upon the population of immigrants that settled there.
1980s: New York City is mostly thought of as an exciting but dangerous place, where crime in the streets runs rampant.
Today: Although it still has the elements that characterized it in the past, New York City's international reputation is mainly built on the strength of character and cooperation shown in the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001.

A more lasting musical significance of the Americanization of mambo music is its fusion into American jazz. In the 1940s, trumpeter-arranger Mario Bauza introduced jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie to Cuban music. Gillespie is one of the most important and influential musicians in jazz history, credited with being one of the driving forces in the creation of bebop. Gillespie's collaboration with Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo in 1947–1948 created a musical style known as Afro-Cuban jazz, or, sometimes, as Cu-bop.

Mambo music achieved the height of its glory in the early- to mid-1950s in New York, particularly at the Palladium Ballroom on Broadway, often referred to as the "Temple of Mambo." Among the mambo dancers who became famous there were Mambo Aces, "Killer Joe" Piro, Paulito and Lilon, Louie Maquina and Cuban Pete. Many of the musicians who worked regularly at the Palladium are mentioned in The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, including Tito Puente, Tito Rodriguez, and Machito.

In 1954 the mambo's popularity was challenged by a new dance craze, the chachacha, created by Cuban violinist Enriqué Jorrin. It was a simpler dance that was easier for non-professional dancers to master. The cha-cha was so close in nature to the mambo that Pérez Prado put out an open offer of $5000 to anyone who could demonstrate how the two musical styles differed. In the 1960s, the chachacha gave way to the pachanga and the boogaloo. Eventually, all music coming out of the Latin New York scene has come to fall under the general blanket term of salsa.

Critical Overview

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love was a popular and critical success as soon as it was first published in 1989. It was heavily promoted by its publisher, Farrar Straus and Giroux, a fact that Nicholas Kanellos made note of in his review for The American Review: "a 40,000 copy first hard-cover printing, a $50,000 national marketing campaign, 100% national co-op advertising, rights sold in advance to England, France, Finland, Germany, Holland and Italy, extensive exposure at the American Booksellers Association…" Kanellos went on to observe that this extensive promotion "has paid off, with glowing reviews in all the right places, from Time and The New York Times to Publishers Weekly and Kirkus; and the first Pulitzer prize for fiction to a Latino. And," he added, "The Mambo

Kings is worth it. This is the best Hispanic book ever published by a large commercial press."

While the book is generally praised, critics have also found fault with it. Critical difference regarding the book's quality have generally centered around two subjects: Hijuelos's success in rendering the central character, Cesar Castillo, as a rounded and believable human, and the book's loose, repetitive, almost plotless structure. Both views have supporters and detractors. In the Time magazine review that Kanellos mentioned, for instance, R. Z. Sheppard noted that Cesar's "flamboyant plumage and mating behaviors seem dated and may not appeal to readers who now find machismo to be a dirty word." But Sheppard went on to dispute that charge: "Hijuelos deflects this prejudice with sensitivity and a charged style that elevates stereotype into character." Cathleen McGuigan made nearly the same point in Newsweek when she noted that Cesar "is a classic portrait of machismo," and then explained that the book is so well written that the familiarity of the character type does not diminish it: "Fortunately Hijuelos has a tender touch with his characters, and Cesar is more than a stereotype." The most direct criticism of Hijuelos's characterizations came from novelist Nick Hornby, who reviewed the book inThe Listener. Hornby's review, "Cuban Heels," proposed that The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is actually about three main characters: "Nestor, Cesar and Cesar's penis." About the last, he wrote, "Its exploits are detailed with alarmingly loving care and though there are hints that Hijuelos has an ironic perspective on all this machismo, they come none too frequently."

Hornby also brought up Hijuelos's rambling, formless method of presenting the story. "Its other major disadvantage is that it is wildly under-edited," he wrote, "at just over 400 pages one is left with the feeling that there is a great short story in here struggling to get undressed." The same criticism came from Sven Birkerts, who, reviewing Hijuelos's follow-up book (The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien) for The New Republic, commented that The Mambo Kings Sing Songs of Love had been "overweight by at least 100 pages." Acknowledging the absence of plot, Birkerts opined that "the true glory of the book was its prose, which was energetic, detailed, able to modulate from the silky to the percussive in the space of a line." Margo Jefferson noted the same effect in The New York Times Book Review: she praised Hijuelos's prose with the observation that the book "alternates crisp narrative with opulent musings—the language of everyday and the language of longing." Immediately following this praise, though, she wrote, "When Mr. Hijuelos falters, as from time to time he does, it's through an excess of self-consciousness: he strives too hard for an allencompassing description or grows distant and dutiful in an effort to get period details just right."

Several reviewers compared the novel's twisted, indirect form to the style of music that is its focus. In "Fascinatin' Rhythm," her review in Newsweek, McGuigan admitted that "The novel isn't conventionally plotted; it slides back and forth in time and meanders into dreams and fantasies." She found this to be an asset: "Like an album of mambo tunes, some of the sequences begin to sound alike, but the rhythms and colors are hard to resist." Hornby, too, took note of the similarities between the prose style and the Castillo brothers' profession. "Hijuelos seems to be trying to capture at great length the rhythms and resonances of the music in the writing," he pointed out. He, however, found this "improvisational" narrative theory easy to resist: "in practice the effect is more Black Sabbath than Charlie Parker, and phrases and incidents are repeated over and over without any discernible modulation."

Criticism

David Kelly

Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature at several colleges in Illinois. In this essay, Kelly explores the idea that The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love would have been a more powerful novel if the character of Nestor had been edited out.

Oscar Hijuelos's novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love offers readers a rich, vibrant concoction of characters and details, as hot and lively as the music at the core of the story. The narrative, in fact, may be a little too rich for its own good: readers come away from it knowing little more about the central character, Cesar Castillo, than they do about such arcana as the types of underwear women wore in the 1950s through the 1980s, or the plumbing in old buildings, or the costs of 78 r.p.m. records, or the books that were popular at the middle of the century. With so much information volleyed at the reader, it takes some concentration to see, at the end of the novel, how little Cesar develops as a character. Readers can turn to any page, in the beginning, middle, or end of the novel, and be assured that Cesar likes being drunk and having sex, and can reasonably guess that the possibility of a lengthy description of either is at hand. Cesar's true personality has very little below the surface, a fact that is obscured by the constant, attention-drawing parade of exotic minor characters like René stabbing Elva, Bernardito waiting twenty-five years to marry Fifi, gay Enrique marrying Teresa, Mr. Stein owning books in Hebrew and German and Angie Pé, who only shows up to record a message at Coney Island in 1954, and Leticia's crush on Rico Sánchez. Good novels fill in all of the corners with details, but there is also such a thing as being too detailed, distracting readers from what is really important by making everything seem important.

This book is well in need of a thorough editing job, in order to give some sense of perspective to its hundreds of details. It simply has too much going on. This is, of course, almost impossible to prove, since "too much" is a subjective judgement. Millions of readers have found The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love to be just fine the way it is. To them, there is no reason for the novel to be anything more than a simple story of two brothers, one introverted and one extroverted, one romantic and the other physical: un macho grande and un infeliz, in Hijuelos's words. The book could be taken at face value and accepted this way, but there really is no reason to not think about its weaknesses.

Although the two Castillo brothers, Cesar and Nestor, are talked about throughout the course of the novel, neither is developed as a complete, convincing character. They just ride through the Cuban-American culture of the 1940s through the 1970s, each holding on to his own solitary personality traits. When Nestor dies he is the same insecure mother's boy that he has been all along, and Cesar dies listing the women, family and friends who have passed by him without his having formed an attachment to any of them. There is no progress, no result, for all of the minutiae that the narrative heaps on.

In streamlining Cesar's story, there are thousands of details that could be left out. Many that are less closely related to plot or character can be justified as necessary for establishing the world that Cesar lives in; this makes them, in a roundabout way, important for establishing his character. Many other stories, though, do not establish their importance, and instead focus on things and people that Cesar merely encountered along the way in his sixty-two year life. Having been encountered is not enough to earn them a place in his story; the fact that these events happened, even in a fictitious sense, does not in itself make them worth snaring part of the reader's attention. After accepting that some of the details presented in The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love must go—a fact that many critics take for granted, but one that Hijuelos, his publisher nor many of his readers seem to find essential—it becomes necessary to sort through all of the colorful information and decide which tell Cesar's story best. For instance, easily half of the sex scenes, and quite a few of the club dates that the Mambo Kings attend, draw their pay, then leave, could have been removed from this book without in any way altering anyone's sense of who Cesar is. The problem with editing would be deciding which scenes are truly telling of who he is, and which are just routine.

In trying to determine which parts of this story could be done without, one large, surprising element draws attention to itself: there would really be very little loss to the story if the character of Nestor Castillo had just been left out. This might at first seem to require a huge structural overhaul of the novel, which advertisers and critics alike, not to mention the screenwriters who adapted the novel to a movie, have defined as the story of two brothers whose combined life experiences make up the author's point. Actually, though, the brothers' significance in the book is in no way equal: Nestor is such a pale shadow that he has little use in the story of Cesar.

Cesar and Nestor are written as distinctly different characters, but their differences are not clear enough to justify more than one character. Nestor has just two or three salient characteristics. For one, he is fixated on his mother, who nursed him back to health when he was young. The second is the most notable character trait, but it might just be a continuation of the first: his infatuation with María. He loses sleep thinking about María, tries unsuccessfully to politely pay some attention to his wife and children, but ends up writing new versions of "Beautiful María of my Soul" in the middle of sleepless nights. He signs letters to his mother "your hijito" (baby boy). At one point, Nestor himself notices that his mother and María are linked by having the same name, but he never does become aware that his fixation on a woman whom he knew for just a few months goes beyond sweeping romance to a routine Oedipal attachment. As Hijuelos notes when talking about Nestor's insomnia, "Cubans then (and Cubans now) didn't know about psychological problems."

Nestor's third trait is his vague desire to assimilate. He totes around the book Forward America! by a certain D. D. Vanderbuilt, underlining passages about aggression and self-assurance. It never has much effect, though. After being unfaithful to his wife, he turns to the book's philosophy that "the confident, self-assured man looks to the future and never backward to the past," but, except for momentary lapses, the book shows no sign of easing his longing for the past.

After Nestor's death, Cesar inherits Forward America!, as well as his brother's predilection for turning to it in his spare time for advice. In his hands, it has no more power than it does in Nestor's. Hijuelos mentions the book occasionally, but not with any consistency. As a symbol of Cesar's taking on his dead brother's traits, this is a particularly weak one: since readers do not see the book affecting Nestor's personality, having Cesar carry it around does not show any hint of his becoming like Nestor, it just shows that he has a sentimental attachment to one of Nestor's belongings. If this book is supposed to represent something more sweeping, such as the immigrant's struggle to suppress his tradition and adapt an American way of looking at things, then it could just as easily have been written as Cesar's book to begin with. The idea of Nestor looking to the past and not the future is so dwarfed by his melancholy that Forward America!'s significance is hardly noticeable. In Cesar's hands, the book could at least represent a struggle to find his place in the world.

What Do I Read Next?

Oscar Hijuelos's first novel, Our House in the Last World (1982), concerns a New Yorker who is haunted by the stories his parents tell of Oriente province in Cuba, where they emigrated from before his birth. A re-issue of this novel with a new afterward by Hijuelos was published in 2002 by Persea Press.
In Hijuelos's novel A Simple Habana Melody: From When the World Was Good (2002), Cuban music and nostalgia again are major themes: a Cuban composer, travelling in Europe in the 1940s, ends up mistakenly interred in the concentration camp at Buchenwald.
Jamaica-born poet Claude McKay, who was one of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, captured the spirit of exile that is felt in this book in his poem "The Tropics in New York." That poem is now available in Claude McKay: Selected Poems (1999).
In 1996, American musician Ry Cooder went to Cuba and made a documentary about a group of traditional Cuban musicians, some of whom have been playing since the 1950s. The Buena Vista Social Club, directed by Wim Wenders, had an impressive theatrical run for a documentary, and its soundtrack album was a bestseller. Buena Vista Social Club: The Companion Book to the Film, published by te Neures Publishing Company in May of 2000, tells the story of how these musical talents, who were neglected for decades, came to worldwide attention.
Critics have pointed out the debt that Hijuelos's flowing, descriptive style owes to Gabriel García Márquez's 1969 novel One Hundred Years Of Solitude. García Márquez's book, which described a century in the history of a fictional South American town, is considered one of the most important and influential books in all of Latin American literature. The most recent edition, by Harper Perennial, was published in 1998.
Like The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Christina Garcia's novel Dreaming in Cuban (1993) concerns a family that emigrated from Cuba to New York, only to find their roots cut off by the Communist revolution that has made it difficult to go back.
Popular Cuban-American author Beatriz Rivera's novel Playing with Light (2000) concerns a modern-day reading group of Cubans living in Miami and discussing a novel set in Havana in the 1870s, and a group of Cubans in the 1870s discussing a futuristic novel about Havana in the late 1990s. It was published by Arte Publico Press in 2000.

Cesar is, of course, crudely drawn as a macho figure, one who derives his self-esteem from sex. While Nestor's memories of childhood involve his mother comforting him, Cesar's memories focus on beatings from his father. The story draws so many distinctions between the two Castillo brothers that it seems almost eerie that each should remember only one parent. Since these are two different views of two different parents, it would make sense for these memories to exist in just one person, dividing the masculine and feminine aspects of the Castillo farm in Oriente so neatly and simplistically.

Nestor's main function in the book is to represent the hopeless romantic, who is so in love with a beautiful woman whom he cannot have that he allows himself to waste away. In theory, this is the reverse image of Cesar's boisterous, life-affirming carnality. In practice, however, Hijuelo does not show enough real difference between the two brothers to make readers feel the differences of their two personality types. When Nestor meets María, he defends her from a bully, a thing that one could easily imagine Cesar doing. When they begin their sexual relationship, though, any distinction between the two brothers becomes seriously blurred: Nestor and María's scenes together are indistinguishable from the book's many sex scenes involving Cesar. They are, in fact, indistinguishable from Nestor's lovemaking with Dolores.

This may well be the book's point—that Nestor turns sensual like Cesar when he meets the woman he loves and that Cesar turns mournful like Nestor after the death of his brother. The book puts them in situations meant to show they are not that different from one another. The problem is that the book never establishes their differences well enough to make their sameness worth noting. Nestor has their mother's traits, Cesar their father's: why are there even two main characters in this novel, when all of their experience could be encompassed by one character? Without Nestor in the book, readers would be focused on Cesar and his experiences, and the threshold for which descriptions and peripheral characters are relevant to his life would be lower. Without the distracting plot line of the two brothers switching personalities, the significance of all of Hijuelos's fine detail would be easier to grasp.

Of course, this is all speculation. The book is finished, and has proven itself extremely popular with audiences and critics just as it is. It is fine to imagine what the book would be like with a major change like the removal of one of the two main characters, all the while bearing in mind that this is just a hypothetical exercise in literary criticism. There is no reason to pretend that there ever would be a version of the book like the one described here, with the character of Cesar Castillo embodying all of the traits and experiences given to himself and his brother in the novel. Besides, if such a book did exist, some critic somewhere would immediately comment on how much better it would have been if the Mambo King's passive and aggressive traits had been divided into two different main characters, perhaps brothers.

Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.