It's July 1997 and all of Havana is mourning the discovery of Che Guevara's bones thirty years after his disappearance. But the protagonist, Hemingway scholar, Laura Gallagher, is running from the anniversary of the death of her baby girl 5 years ago. She goes as a stranger, but soon meets Hemingway scholars like herself, as Cuba unfolds before them. In the evening Laura visits Hemingway's home, the Finca Vigia, and sees the ghost of a little girl and the ghost of Hemingway himself. It is a sign she cannot yet read, that she is in a place elsewhere, and that she will enter a visionary state. That night she becomes so ill she believes she sees images of her mother, who took her own life when Laura was 12. She is cared for by a woman named Maria, who comes to her mysteriously in the night.
Laura and Maria and her daughter Pilar develop a deepening friendship that promises both trust and betrayal in this place where nothing is as it seems. She learns that Pilar is a jineteras, working as a prostitute in this, the "special period" of Cuban desperation, which followed the Soviet withdrawal in the early1990's.
Laura's sense of threat turns to fear when a colleague disappears and she is assaulted in Old Havana by a man who grabs her, slams her against a brick wall and whispers, "Mind your own business." What business?
Maria is waiting for Laura when she returns to her room the next day, bearing an ominous request: will you carry my manuscript, the story of my life? "It has names in it," she admits. Laura agrees but fears she may have set in motion inexorable forces she does not understand. That afternoon in Havana, two visionary events occur: the appearance of a santera who blesses Laura, and a visit to a babalawo who offers a blood sacrifice for her healing.
That night at the hotel she sees Maria in the arms of the man who had assaulted her in Old Havana. She remembers an old Cuban proverb: "Believe only half of what you see in Cuba and nothing of what you hear." Feeling betrayed, she makes her way down the seawall to the ocean. But the tide rushes in, smacking her against the seawall, then pulling her out to sea, and for a terrifying moment she fears she will drown. An image of Maria calms her, as it did the night of her illness, so that she can feel her way to the stairs to safety, and the sense she will help Maria anyway she can.
The last day begins with a visit to the Finca, where she speaks with a psychiatrist, Michael Ryan, who had given a paper on Hemingway and depression, and who has also suffered a profound loss. They are drawn together as they discuss Hemingway's treatment but also Laura's mother's, and a possible answer to what had happened to her. Soon Laura uncovers the bones of her own haunted past, underscored by the historical context of the Cold War and the CIA's involvement in unspeakable experiments on innocent civilians.
The day ends with a trip to Pinar del Rio and a cave deep within the mogotes. Tomas, the tour guide, strangely insinuates himself toward both Laura and Michael. Later, the two of them spend a night together at the hotel, but are interrupted by a knock at the door. It is Tomas and Maria-and a baby girl whom they are asked to spirit out of Cuba to America. Suddenly Laura learns what roles Maria and Pilar have played in this dark drama and her own part in it. In the end, Laura reclaims both the child she lost and the motherless child within herself. The story of Cuba becomes finally, the story of all those whose lives are like the quartermoon, alone in the sky, forever waiting to complete itself.
