The Unfortunate Resurrection of Lazarus

Abstract

On March 30th 2006, at the age of forty, my brother, who I grew up with and looked up to as a child, who'd started to lose his mind in his early 20s, killed his wife and her mother. He left his three boys orphaned and traumatized.

My father, Orestes Fuentes, was born in 1928, in a farm deep in the Cuban countryside where there were spirits and saints and demons and Santeria rituals, and curses were real. This book will explore our father's prejudices and superstitions and his refusal to acknowledge his son's demons, in an effort to find the reasons why his son, my brother, Jose, eventually killed the mother and grandmother of his children, the why he thought they were agents of Satan.

My book explores a curse that Orestes (and therefore all of us) incurred, and the sins that caused it. The book looks at the apogee of that curse: my brother's murders and, ultimately, the reversal of that curse, which, in writing it, I realized, is what this book is.