Rita Character Analysis

The Congressman’s wife. The narrator meets her, along with Madame and the General, at a lunch at her and her husband’s home in Huntington Beach. She is a Cuban refugee from Fidel Castro’s revolution. She bears “a passing resemblance” to an aged and plumper Rita Hayworth. She believes that the Cubans and the South Vietnamese are cousins in their shared cause against Communism. She is a housewife with strict rules for her children, including no rock music, no dating until they are eighteen, and a ten o’clock curfew.