Critical Overview
Dreaming in Cuban has received critical attention and has been used in graduate and undergraduate literature courses. Stylistically, it uses elements of magical realism, sensual lyricism that borders on poetry, the epistolary form, and first-person narrative. The novel shifts back and forth in time, but does not interrupt the flow of reading: this formally illustrates the troubled continuum of the women in the del Pino family. Iraida H. Lopez writes:
The structure of the novel reinforces the decentralizing spirit that animates the text. Narrative techniques are deployed parallel to the themes to show the range of perceptions and interpretations constructed by these women about the forces—historical, political, patriarchal, cultural, and personal—that shape their lives.
The novel's most profound statements are on history, memory, and identity. Although there are characters who are polarized politically (i.e., Celia and Lourdes), Garcia shows that being Cuban or Cuban-American is not stereotypical by graying the characters' interpretation of the political opposition between the two cultures, namely through Pilar. With the focus on the individual, rather than larger historical focus on developments like the Cuban Revolution, the reader sees how personal history and identity are not limited to nationalism and ethnicity. Still, each character is subject to ideology and Pilar is subject to her manifested nostalgia for a Cuba that no longer exists. In the end, she must negotiate this nostalgia and discover that bridging the gap between being Cuban and American cannot be accomplished via nostalgia or migration: it is a mental social construct that is personally created, and because of political divides, it is always elusive.
Finding individualism in mass movements has been a force in literary analysis and social criticism in America since the Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s. Each character has her own questions about the patriarchal and politically dominated historical record. Here we have a feminist and, more importantly, an individualist perspective on history. When Lourdes returns to Cuba, she revisits the place where she was raped:
What she fears most is this: that her rape, her baby's death were absorbed quietly by the earth, that they are ultimately no more meaningful than falling leaves on an autumn day. She hungers for a violence of nature, terrible and permanent, to record the evil.
Commenting on the male-dominated, conquistador version of history, Pilar wonders why history is mostly limited to people like Charlemagne, Napoleon, and Columbus—people who "fought their way into posterity":
If it were up to me, I'd record other things. Like the time there was a freak hailstorm in the Congo and the women took it as a sign that they should rule. Or the life stories of prostitutes in Bombay. Why don't I know anything about them? Who chooses what we should know or what's important?
On Garcia's own perspective of history, Andrea O'Reilly Herrara writes:
Signaling her acute consciousness of women's exclusion from patriarchal exilic historical discourse (history writ large, as opposed to personal and familial history) Garcia once observed in a personal conversation with Iraida Lopez, that "Traditional history, the way it has been written, interpreted and recorded, obviates women and the evolution of home, family and society, and basically becomes a recording of battles and wars, and dubious accomplishments of men."
This critique of history is not limited to the exclusion of women. Felicia’s best friend Herminia, who is black and the daughter of a priest of Santeria, thinks of the unspoken racism in Cuba and the Little War of 1912 (a war basically between blacks and whites) and how it is barely mentioned in the history books. Felicia says:
The war that killed my grandfather and great-uncles and thousands of...
(This entire section contains 1028 words.)
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other blacks is only a footnote in our history books. Why should I believe anything I read? I trust only what I see, what I know with my heart, nothing more.
When Celia claims in her last letter that Pilar will remember everything, the implication is that Pilar has a responsibility to create and remember a history that is not limited to the patriarchal forces of history: via dreaming and migration. Many of the characters find themselves through ritual: Felicia with Santeria, Lourdes with the bakery, Celia with watching the coast and the court. Pilar engages in rituals such as art and music, but her real ritual is dreaming and travel.
By dreaming, Pilar is in a metaphysical space, one that aspires to be "above" (meta) history. Susanne Leonard writes:
The jouissance experienced by the women in fact seems commensurate with Luce Irigaray's notion of feminine syntax, a concept that is informed by female sexuality and is used by Irigaray to describe the privileging of feminine multiplicity and plurality over phallocentric oneness.
The connection between grandmother and granddaughter is a motif of personal history and a praxis of female community. That feminine abstract language provides a multiplicity that is indeed in keeping with the graying up of polarized identity.
Elana Machado writes, "Dreaming in Cuban ambivalently positions Pilar's nostalgia as both a product of her creative imagination and a product of globalization." Pilar has accessed Cuban culture through American commodities and her own imagination.
Pilar stands somewhere in between these two extremes of Lourdes's celebration of capitalism and Celia's rejection of commodification. Commodities offer Pilar the possibility for reconnection to Cuba via the Beny More album or the santeria herbs, yet she remains ambivalent regarding the access these products supposedly provide.
American consumerism and Cuba's political and economic isolation make it equally difficult for Pilar to "see" her Cuban cultural roots. She must dream them and when that is not enough, she must travel there. The Cuba she visits is clearly not the same as in the exotic "other" Cuba in her nostalgic dreams. She realizes that her Cuban/American identity is more complicated: her access to authentic Cuban culture is blocked by U.S. opposition and Cuba's nationalist insularity. She can dream and reconstruct history, but politics still do play a role in granting access to culture. Neither political extreme provides access to complete cultural authenticity. Pilar again finds herself in the middle.