Anita de Monte Laughs Last

Anita de Monte is one of the novel’s narrators and, alongside Raquel Toro, she stands as its key protagonist. Anita is a Cuban artist and is married to the American sculptor, Jack Martin. Anita is deeply connected to her Cuban roots, and she draws artistic inspiration from Cuba’s social, spiritual, and cultural landscapes. She embodies an inherent, inescapable connection between the artist’s identity and their art, and her characterization is one of the primary ways that Gonzalez argues for the existence (and importance) of such connections. She is extraverted, unapologetically vivacious, and has a “big” personality. As one of the first artists of color to break into the majority white world of New York City’s 1980s-era art scene, she is often viewed through the lens of harmful stereotypes and is the target of anti-Latinx discrimination. Her volatile marriage ends in her tragic death during an altercation with her husband, revealing the true cost of toxic masculinity and the connection between misogyny and domestic violence.

Anita de Monte was born into a wealthy Cuban family, and although her husband Jack likes to twist her life story in order to make her appear to be a Marxist crusader, her father was imprisoned by dictator Fidel Castro because of his devout Catholicism, and Anita was sent to the United States as a child to escape communist indoctrination in school.