Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
When Minerva is a young girl she longs to be free. Her father makes the girls ask permission for every little thing they want to do, and she wants to escape. Since she can't, she decides to liberate some rabbits in their pens:
But she wouldn't budge! She was used to her little pen. I kept slapping her, harder each time, until she started whimpering like a scared child. I was the one hurting her, insisting she be free.
Silly bunny, I thought. You're nothing at all like me. (1.2.4-5)
In her zeal to spread her message of liberation, Minerva actually hurts the rabbit rather than helping it. She realizes that not everyone wants to be free, a lesson that she'll have to remember later in life when she tries to convince her sisters to join her revolution.
The cage appears again in a metaphor for the entire country of the Dominican Republic:
And that's how I got free. I don't mean just going to sleepaway school on a train with a trunkful of new things. I mean in my head after I got to Inmaculada and met Sinita and saw what happened to Lina and realized that I'd just left a small cage to go into a bigger one, the size of the whole country. (1.2.19)
The feeling of being trapped extends from Minerva's family home to the island. She realizes that the claustrophobia she felt was not just growing pains and teenage rebellion—she was aware of the shackled state of her nation. And, much like she wants the rabbits in their hutch to go free, she wants to help free her fellow citizens from the cage of the Trujillo regime.