Analysis
Cristina García creates in Celia a character whose fragility emphasizes the tenuous nature of the del Pino family, and by extension any family separated during the Cuban revolution. At the same time, Celia’s rational internal voice and astonishing bursts of strength suggest the underlying unifying power of ancestral identity. The reader is never sure which force prevails, division and political disagreement or the need for reunification, and it is this unresolvable conflict between characters that gives Dreaming in Cuban its realistic edge.
Though Pilar’s efforts to reunite the family suggest the legitimacy of a multicultural clan, the revolution leaves permanent, irreparable scars. Jorge del Pino dies, emaciated from cancer, without forgiving Felicia for staying with her violent husband; Felicia dies haunted by her father’s rejection and deformed by madness and the syphilis with which her husband had infected her. Celia’s son Javier, leaving his family for a new one overseas, is himself abandoned by his wife and daughter. Emotionally destroyed, he returns to Cuba, but Celia’s careful ministrations cannot heal his wounds. While bathing him, she sees a pulpy scar on his back that matches the scar across her chest where a breast was removed. Family members share common ground after all: Their souls are gradually consumed by the loss of love and stability.
García metaphorically depicts the family’s simultaneous fragmentation and interdependence by dividing the text into three parts, which are further divided into chapters, then into brief sections of narrative. Each section focuses on a single character’s point of view. In this way, a chapter that begins by relating Felicia’s story from the third-person point of view breaks for a section about Celia from the third-person point of view, then into a section about Felicia’s daughter Luz told as a first-person narrative. Characters’ narratives are then divided by tense: past for stories preceding 1972, present for stories occurring between 1972 and 1980. Characters’ lives are revealed individually, and their perspectives about the revolution do not overlap. Yet they do touch: The various voices side by side form the story of the del Pinos. No point of view dominates the novel, and each section depends on the next to progress. Though many of the characters never reunite physically or spiritually, the distinct voices within the text together describe one family.
Sprinkled throughout the text are Celia’s letters to Gustavo, a Spanish lawyer with whom she had an affair as a young woman. After he returned to his family, Celia married Jorge, but she never forgot her love for Gustavo. She wrote to him on the eleventh of each month between 1935 and 1959, then saved each letter beneath her bed. The letters reveal Celia’s artistic side; only to Gustavo does she reveal her love for poetry, Claude Debussy, the plays of Molière. She discusses her daily life, her marriage to Jorge, and the political events leading up to the revolution, thus providing background for what happens to the family after the revolution.
Celia’s final letter concludes the book and reveals her hope for Pilar: “The revolution is eleven days old. My granddaughter, Pilar Puente del Pino, was born today. It is also my birthday. I am fifty years old. I will no longer write to you, mi amor . She will remember everything.” Celia is right; Pilar does remember everything that happens to her. At this point the reader realizes that Celia’s love letters have always been to her own family, a passionate diary of their common history. The letters are given to Pilar, the new protector of family memory. Pilar, reared in the United States and distant from...
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the emotional agony of exile from Cuba, knows about the revolution as a curious student. She is not idealistic about either capitalism or communism. She reconciles her two backgrounds into one, accepting both cultures as her own, and is comfortably Cuban American. She will remember both histories.
The importance of family memory is also emphasized by the magical elements of the novel, particularly for Lourdes. Jorge returns after death not as a crumpled victim of cancer but as the elegant gentleman he had been in the 1940’s, wearing a white summer suit and Panama hat. In essence, the importance of remembering Jorge, and what Lourdes loved about him, brings him back. By admitting this powerful manifestation of her father’s memory into her daily life, she is able to reevaluate memories of Cuba as well and enjoy aspects of returning to her childhood home.
The magical clairvoyance between Pilar and Celia is further evidence that the family is held together by more than physical proximity. Yet those connections are thin; Pilar loves her abuela deeply but lies to Celia at the end of the novel. When Pilar paints a portrait of Celia to immortalize her memory, Celia asks to be painted as a young flamenco dancer; Pilar paints her mostly in blue, capturing an expression of unhappiness. Even as memory is preserved, it is distorted, translated as it is through one woman’s perspective. Ultimately, the losses experienced by the del Pino family are too great; some memories will be salvaged and passed along, but others, unrecorded, must fade with those characters who possessed them.