Dreaming in Cuban
Cristina García’s first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, dramatizes the profound interconnections between three generations of Cuban women. Their memories, dreams, and hopes are gradually revealed and interlinked, and the importance to them of Cuba and what it means to be Cuban is explored. The voices of the three generations are presented in short, clearly labeled segments that move backward and forward in time to tell their life stories. Gradually their lives are interwoven and their interdependencies become apparent, although historical events have separated the family members geographically.
For Celia del Pino, and for her three children and her grandchildren, Cuba is a complex construct of memories and realities. Celia’s story frames the novel. Sets of her unmailed monthly letters to her first love, a Spaniard who returned to Spain in 1935, just before the Spanish Civil War, are included at regular intervals throughout the book, in chronological order. The book concludes with Celia’s last letter, in which she tells Gustavo that “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.” The novel is structured as Celia’s transmission to Pilar of all she knows. The family members are introduced in the immediate present of 1972, and their various stories gradually mesh and explain each other as they recount the events of the next eight years. Celia and her daughters, Lourdes and Felicia, are described in an intimate third-person voice, and the grandchildren tell their tales in first-person segments, with the strongest voice being that of Pilar.
Celia in 1972 is an enthusiastic supporter of Fidel Castro (El Líder in the book), and she is proud to be part of the revolution. As the novel opens, she dresses up in her best housedress and drop pearl earrings to keep watch from her porch swing, but instead of a hostile invading force, she sees the image of her husband and knows that he has died in New York City, where he had gone for medical treatment. She thinks back over her life, and the displacements and passions that have shaped it.
Everyone in Dreaming in Cuban has been displaced: some by exile, some by madness, some by family crises. The novel reveals the similarities of their different experiences, and the family ties, intuitions, hallucinations, and dreams that bind them together. For Celia, displacement occurred when her mother put her on a train when she was four, to go live with her Tía Alicia in Havana. She loved one man but married another, feels out of touch with her children, and yearns especially for closer contact with her first grandchild, Pilar, in Brooklyn; in Cuba, Celia “closes her eyes and speaks to her granddaughter, imagines her words as slivers of light piercing the murky night.”
Celia’s daughter Felicia has stayed in Cuba but is indifferent to the revolution, in touch only with her passions and the melodramas of daily life. Infected with syphilis by her first husband, a merchant sailor, she struggles with bouts of dementia, violent behavior, and amnesia, described with sympathy and wonderful humor, as when Felicia is assigned to a special attitude-reforming brigade in the mountains as a corrective for having tried to commit the antirevolutionary act of suicide.
For Celia’s other daughter, Lourdes, the revolution has meant being violently dispossessed of family land and being raped by a revolutionary soldier, followed by migration to Miami and then to Brooklyn. Her husband is unable to adjust, but Lourdes thrives. She...
(This entire section contains 2556 words.)
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runs one bakery successfully and then opens a second one. “Immigration has redefined her, and she is grateful. Unlike her husband, she welcomes her adopted language, its possibilities for reinvention.” While Celia communes frequently with the sea, wading into the water by her house, immersing herself in its tides and rhythms, for Lourdes, it is winter that makes her feel alive. She loves “the cold scraping sounds on sidewalks and windshields, the ritual of scarves and gloves, hats and zip-in coat linings. Its layers protect her. She wants no part of Cuba, no part of its wretched carnival floats creaking with lies, no part of Cuba at all, which Lourdes claims never possessed her.”
For Pilar, Lourdes’s daughter, Cuba represents all she longs for: warmth, identity, family connectedness, and the presence of her beloved grandmother. Pilar’s first- person account is a story of growing up and becoming aware of adult realities. She tries to run away to Cuba when she discovers her father with a lover, but she gets only as far as her uncle’s house in Miami. She struggles with her strong-willed mother, tries out art school and boyfriends and punk rock, and despairs at her parents’ right-wing politics, scoffing that her mother’s “Yankee Doodle bakeries have become gathering places for these shady Cuban extremists who come all the way from New Jersey and the Bronx to talk their dinosaur politics and drink her killer espressos.” Pilar yearns for the Cuba she has never known, fearing that “Every day Cuba fades a little more inside me, my grandmother fades a little more inside me. And there’s only my imagination where our history should be.” She believes that a return to Cuba will put all the pieces of her life together. When she and Lourdes do return to Havana, impelled by Pilar’s sense of urgency (and indeed they do find Celia in despair after the death of Felicia), Pilar does reconnect with her grandmother; as she listens to Celia’s stories, she says that “I feel my grandmother’s life passing to me through her hands. It’s a steady electricity, humming and true.” Celia passes along to Pilar her unmailed letters to her Spanish lover, along with the volume of Federico García Lorca poems that have meant so much to her and that have been woven into the narrative. Pilar begins to dream in Spanish. In Cuba, she says, “I wake up feeling different, like something inside me is changing, something chemical and irreversible.” But she knows that however deeply important it has been to her to experience Cuba, she eventually will need to return to New York: “I know now it’s where I belong—not instead of here, but more than here.” For Lourdes, reencounter with the past is painful. She cannot forgive, and she rants about the failures of the revolution and the question of retribution: “Who will repay us for our homes, for the lands the Communists stole from us?” She shouts “Asesino!” at El Líder himself and engineers the emigration of her nephew Ivanito, although this distresses Celia and Pilar.
Only with her husband in New York has Celia been able to dedicate herself to the revolution. She has replaced her bedside portrait of her husband with a photo of El Líder (which Lourdes throws into the sea when she visits), volunteers for sugar cane harvesting and vaccination campaigns, keeps watch over her stretch of the coast, and serves as a civilian judge in the People’s Court. Dreaming in Cuban is full of the specific realities of Cuban experience, from food rationing to idealism, but it is primarily a novel about the fragile balances between passion and obsession. Passion for Cuba, for lovers and family, for expression in music and painting and dance, and for the emotional fulfillment possible through belief in santería (the Cuban fusion of Catholicism and traditional Yoruba religion) and herbal holistic medicine, are all tied together by a vital tide of sexuality and sensuality that pervades every aspect of life.
Celia’s voice is lyrical and connective, but her three children represent radically different ways of dealing with Cuban reality: Each one is driven to extremes by personal unbearable pain. All three inherit Celia’s dangerous dedication to passion, but in each of the three it is realized differently. Javier so identifies with the Communist affiliation of the revolution that he moves to Czechoslovakia, returning to Cuba in utter despair when deserted by his wife and child. Felicia hardly notices the revolution, absorbed as she is in life’s immediate melodramas, moving from one excess to another, as she falls in love, slips in and out of madness, dancing “for days to her Beny Moré records, her hands in position for an impossibly lanky partner, to ‘Rebel Heart,’ her slippers scraping the floor, to ‘Treat Me As I Am,’ a buoyant guaracha.” For a whole summer, she feeds her children nothing but coconut ice cream, to purify and heal them. She demolishes the men she loves and is finally totally absorbed by the rituals of santería.
Lourdes is just as voracious and just as obsessive. She, too, lives out her vengeance and her painful memories, coping with her father’s illness by indulging her almost unlimited appetites for sex and food, her personal anguish translated into ferocious entrepreneurship as she runs her bakeries, firing off snapshots of her pastries to Celia in Cuba: “Each glistening éclair is a grenade aimed at Celia’s political beliefs, each strawberry shortcake proof—in butter, cream, and eggs—of Lourdes’s success in America, and a reminder of the ongoing shortages in Cuba.”
For all their differences, the parallels between the experiences, emotions, and imaginations of the various family members are emphasized. They are instinctively in touch with each other: her dead husband appears to Celia, and Lourdes carries on a series of conversations with her dead father; Pilar and Celia converse mentally; they are all able to sense one another’s well-being or danger across distances. These magical communications are closely allied with spiritual beliefs. The Catholic rituals of childhood spill into later reliance on the rituals of santería, with its predictions and atonements and complex rites. Celia seeks the santera in times of stress, and Felicia finally is absorbed altogether into the ceremonies that connect her “to larger worlds, worlds alive and infinite” and is a novice santera herself when she dies. In New York, Pilar consults an herbalist, explaining that “I’m not religious but I get the feeling that it’s the simplest rituals, the ones that are integrated with the earth and its seasons, that are the most profound. It makes more sense to me than the more abstract forms of worship.” These beliefs are part of Dreaming in Cuban’s powerful network of repeated symbols and images: recurrent references to the songs of Beny Moré, the poems of García Lorca, shells, Tía Alicia’s peacock brooch, the colors blue and green, and Celia’s pearl drop earrings are effectively interwoven to connect the generations and unify events over the fifty-year span of the novel. Magic and imagination and historical reality fuse in the musical rhythms of Dreaming in Cuban.
Bibliography
America. CLXVII, July 18, 1992, p. 39. A review of Dreaming in Cuban.
Belles Lettres. VIII, Fall, 1992, p. 15. A review of Dreaming in Cuban.
Boswell, Thomas D. The Cuban American Experience: Culture, Images and Perspectives. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allanheld, 1984.
The Christian Science Monitor. March 24, 1992, p. 13. A review of Dreaming in Cuban.
Davis, Thulani. “Fidel Castro Between Them: Dreaming in Cuban.” The New York Times Book Review, May 17, 1992, 14.
Eder, Richard. “Cuban Revolution Tugs on Family Ties.” Los Angeles Times, March 12, 1992, p. E10. Generally laudatory discussion of García’s novel. Eder praises García’s realistic passages as “exquisite” but observes that she is sometimes “indulgent and awkward” in her use of magical elements.
Gann, L. H., and Peter J. Duignan. The Hispanics in the United States: A History. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1986. An overview of the history and culture of the various groups of Hispanic immigrants to the United States. Of particular interest in relation to Dreaming in Cuban is chapter 6, “The Cubans,” which deals with the Cuban-born population of the United States.
García, Christina. “. . . And There Is Only My Imagination Where Our History Should Be: An Interview with Christina García.” Interview by Iraida H. Lopez. Michigan Quarterly Review 33 (Summer, 1994): 604-617. García discusses her background as a Cuban immigrant in New York City and the influence her ethnic identity has had on her writing. She also addresses the political situation in Cuba, as well as the strong anti-communist feelings of the Cuban population in Miami. A useful supplement to the novel.
García, María Cristina. “Adapting to Exile: Cuban Women in the United States, 1959-1973.” Latino Studies Journal 2 (May, 1991): 17-33. This scholar (who is not the author of Dreaming in Cuban) suggests that Cuban women in exile, faced with the necessity of working to support their families, have experienced expanded roles in the United States. Willing to work for low wages, these women have secured more jobs than their male counterparts, and have achieved political and economic clout. Published before Dreaming in Cuban, the article provides excellent background for the novel’s political base.
Kirkus Reviews. Review of Dreaming in Cuban, by Cristina García. 60 (January 1, 1992): 7. Brief, hostile review that claims that the novel “lacks sufficient freshness of insight to be consistently compelling.”
Migration World Magazine. XX, Number 2, 1992, p. 39. A review of Dreaming in Cuban.
Miller, Susan. “Caught Between Two Cultures.” Newsweek 119 (April 20, 1992): 78-79. Describes García’s visit to Cuba in 1984 as the impetus for writing Dreaming in Cuban. García is quoted saying that Latino immigrants are bringing a new voice to literature in English, one that is enriched by its dual heritage.
Mitchell, David T. “National Families and Familial Nations: Communista Americans in Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 15 (Spring, 1996): 51-60. Mitchell analyzes Pilar, the main character in García’s novel. He explores Pilar’s failure to belong to either family or nation, expressions of her artistic struggle, and the contradictory coexistence of national and family unity Pilar experiences upon her return to Cuba.
The New Yorker. LXVIII, June 1, 1992, p. 86. A review of Dreaming in Cuban.
Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban American Way. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.
Publishers Weekly. CCXXXIX, January 13, 1992, p. 46. A review of Dreaming in Cuban.
Stavans, Illan. “The Other Voice.” The Bloomsbury Review 12 (July, 1992): 5. Discusses the emergence of literature by Hispanics writing in English, including Cristina García. The author, a Mexican novelist and critic, argues that Hispanic writers often travel between the United States and their native countries, making assimilation into the mainstream difficult and cultural longing a predominant theme.
Ugalde, Sharon Keefe. “Process, Identity, and Learning to Read: Female Writing and Feminist Criticism in Latin America Today.” Latin American Research Review 24, no. 1 (1989): 222-232.
Unterburger, Amy, ed. Who’s Who Among Hispanic Americans, 1992-1993. 2d ed. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992. A brief notation on Cristina García includes personal information about the author, including names of family members, educational background, and details about her career as a journalist.
The Washington Post Book World. XXII, March 1, 1992, p. 9. A review of Dreaming in Cuban.
Weiss, Amelia. Review of Dreaming in Cuban, by Cristina García. Time 139 (March 23, 1992): 67. Rapturous commentary on the novel. States of García that, “Like a priestess, in passages of beautiful island incantation, she conjures her Cuban heritage” from across the political and physical gulf separating Cuba and the United States.
Form and Content
Dreaming in Cuban presents three generations of Cuban women with their continuum of political perspectives and reactions to the socialist revolution that began January 1, 1959. Their stories are fragmented, fed to the reader in interwoven pieces, emphasizing the similarities of each woman’s independent path away from the heart of the family. As the family members scatter, their ties to Cuba and one another seem slowly to disintegrate. This loss of historical identity provokes conflict, destroying a few of them completely.
Celia del Pino, with her staunch loyalty to Cuba and her refusal to leave her beloved brick house by the sea, is the family’s small anchor to its central history. Though she cannot keep her family together physically, the narrative describing her life and a series of letters she wrote to her lover frame the stories of her children and weave through them as a metaphorical bond.
The novel begins in 1972 on the night that Jorge, Celia’s husband, dies in New York. Celia, scanning the sea for attackers, sees the ghost of her husband walking across the water toward her. He tries to say something to her, but she does not understand, and he disappears. She runs after him, catching only the hint of his cigar smoke. Sad and reflective, she swims fully clothed in the dark sea, and as her shoes slip off she considers drowning beneath the waves. It is not the first time she almost lets go, nor the last.
For the next eight years, Celia and her children struggle along independent, often destructive paths, trying to solidify their identities. Jorge’s death sets in motion the steady decline of Felicia, who embraces black magic in an effort to communicate with her father’s soul and settle differences. As Felicia becomes increasingly deranged, her twin daughters, Luz and Milagro, develop a bond and language that give them strength independent of the rest of the family. Felicia’s youngest child, Ivanito, is closer to his mother. He adores her strange, poetic way of viewing reality and in this way inherits the del Pino tradition.
Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, Lourdes slowly recovers from the mental and financial drain of caring for her father. She openly hates El Líder, Cuba’s head of state, and her Yankee Doodle Bakeries become havens for immigrants opposed to the revolution. Inside, though, Lourdes hungers for something unnameable and attempts to satisfy it by devouring pans of sticky buns. She also longs to be close to Pilar and finally makes headway by asking her daughter to paint a portrait of the Statue of Liberty for the opening of the second bakery. Pilar agrees but streaks the background with barbed wire, puts a safety pin through Liberty’s nose, and removes the torch from her grasp. Lourdes physically defends the painting as bakery patrons try to destroy it, and in that moment Pilar realizes her love for her mother.
In college, Pilar reembraces her Cuban roots and insists on returning with Lourdes for six days in April, 1980. The reunion between Celia and Pilar seems preordained; they are immediately comfortable with each other. Lourdes, passionately critical of Cuba, convinces Ivanito to defect through the Peruvian embassy. Celia is outraged, so Pilar helps her find the young man. Surrounded by violent, celebrating Cubans desperate to leave the country, Pilar and Ivanito embrace. Pilar returns to Celia and lies to her for the first time, saying she could not find him. It is a final climax, a last dissolving of Celia’s matriarchal control. Celia takes a last swim in her housedress, and the reader is left wondering whether she makes it back to land.
Context
Cristina García is one of a new generation of Latino authors writing in English, expressing a bicultural background and calling attention to the experience of migration. Born in Cuba but reared in New York, she belongs to both cultures. Scarred and enriched by the transition, she has found herself the inhabitant of a new literary landscape.
Her first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, was conceived when she returned as an adult to Cuba for the first time since childhood. Like many Cuban families, hers was separated by the revolution. When Fidel Castro, called El Líder in the novel, attained power in 1959, those who had enjoyed positions of privilege under Fulgencio Batista were forced to leave the country or face retribution. Political and military leaders were the first to leave; then doctors, engineers, teachers, craftspeople, and eventually laborers left their country in search of personal freedom and better working conditions. By 1973, half a million Cubans had entered exile in the United States, forming one of the largest documented migrations to the country.
The majority of these immigrants were women, because men able to fight were prohibited from leaving the island. In Cuba, women were expected to give up careers for marriage and assume domestic responsibilities. In the United States, these same women worked long hours in order to feed their children and establish economic stability. They participated in community life, fought for political rights, and have become a powerful segment of American society.
García’s novel brings a lyrical voice to this overlooked, often stereotyped population. Her female characters, with their various political and spiritual opinions, their internal struggles, their creative abilities and energetic intelligence, portray the diversity within Cuban and Cuban American society. Dreaming in Cuban examines themes of immigration, separation, and cultural identity with a gently humorous, accurate eye; the result is a poetic achievement.
Setting
Cuba and New York
The novel is set in Cuba and New York, with brief events taking place in
Florida. It begins in Cuba in 1972, but jumps back and forth in time, as far
back as the 1930s and up until the 1980s. Many events are described in
retrospect. Place plays an extremely important role for all the
characters, most notably for Pilar, who lives in New York but feels pulled
toward Cuba. She "dreams in Cuban." Setting, geography, and travel itself are
the conduits through which culture and identity fluctuate. Each character,
while not absolutely conditioned by his or her environment, is positively
and/or negatively influenced by it.
The novel begins in 1972, in the town of Santa Teresa del Mar on Celia's front porch overlooking the sea on the north coast of Cuba. Santa Teresa del Mar is a fictional town, set some miles to the east of Havana. One gets the impression that it is a relatively small town because all the townspeople seem to know one another (e.g., the del Pino's know of the wealth of the Puente's, and everyone in court knows of the domestic dispute between Loli Regalado and Ester Ugarte's husband, Rogelio). The scene from Celia's house is oceanic, almost pastoral. For Garcia as author, the town needed to be fictional as it opened the possibilities for her own image of Cuba. However, she made it a point to stay true to the culture (food, music, landscape, politics, etc.), providing a good mix of history and creativity, a blend parsed into different instances of creative nonfiction and magical realism.
Celia and her second daughter, Felicia, never leave Cuba. Celia embraces the naturalism, landscape, and culture of Cuba as much as she espouses the Revolution. Celia did think of leaving shortly before Lourdes's birth, chasing her true love, Gustavo, to Spain. When Lourdes was born, Celia resigned herself to her homeland, and when revolution struck, she felt a deep sense of Cuban pride and being part of a "great historical unfolding."
Felicia always felt Cuba was an oppressive land of tyranny. Possibly underscored by her first abusive husband and the deaths of husbands numbers two and three, Felicia did embrace one element of Cuban culture: Santeria. Santeria comes from West Africa and has incorporated Christian saints. Felicia is therefore embracing a tradition that is both foreign and native, practiced in this world but in commune with another.
Other notable places in Cuba are the movie theater in Santa Teresa del Mar where Celia presides as a People's Court judge, Herminia del Gado's house where she and Felicia learn about Santeria, and the House on Palmas Street. This is the house where Celia lives with Jorge, his mother, and sister. Later, it is where Felicia lives with her children (Luz, Milagro, and Ivanito). It is a house that Celia believes "has only brought misfortune."
New York, contrasted with the more rurally described Santa Teresa del Mar, is of course the picture of big city life. Lourdes is affected by the economy and work ethic of the busy city. Pilar, inspired by the music and art scenes, often describes it in cynical terms, noting the fading punk scene, her mother's omnipresent nagging and espousal of American boot-strap capitalism. Pilar does, however, eventually, feel more at home in New York than in Cuba, perhaps because Cuba's oppression is politically legislated and America's is commercial. Also, because New York is multi-cultural, and therefore more of a cultural bridge, she finds two things that change her, one more stereotypically American (getting a bass guitar) and one more Cuban (buying herbs from a botanica where a man refers to her as a daughter of Chango). Lourdes, on the other hand, sees America as a land of opportunity. She finds solace walking Brooklyn's empty streets and the tranquility of the bakery early in the morning. She likes the hustle and bustle of the city and takes pride in her work, being successful enough to open a second bakery where a pivotal event takes place. Pilar unveils a punk version of the Statue of Liberty at the grand opening. The public scorns it, but Lourdes actually defends her daughter. Pilar says, "I love my mother very much at that moment."
Despite being geographically separated by political events, and in spite of economic, cultural, and political differences between America and Cuba, the central characters' lives reveal their interdependency through analogous practices and a kind of inherent connection (described as telepathic and simply familial). Both Celia and Lourdes are almost lovingly in tune with their surroundings: Celia finds herself most at home on the porch and at her post as Revolutionary guard, watching the sea, silent at night. Lourdes is most herself in the quiet of her bakery prior to opening hours. Pilar and Felicia are never at home; each needs a ritual of escape—music/art and Santeria, respectively.
Essentially, the novel's setting is an open cultural border/bridge. There is also a physical/metaphysical setting, or a "mind/body" bridge. Most of the novel is described via the perspective of one of the characters or from the character herself in a first-person narration. The trans-geographic (and perhaps telepathic) unspoken dialogue that occurs between Pilar and Celia, and Lourdes's conversations with her dead father, Jorge, are meaningful and consequential, interpersonal channels. These speak to the idea the while New York and Cuba are the physical main settings, the more meaningful settings are metaphysical.
The Cuban Revolution
The Cuban Revolution officially began on July 23, 1956, when a band of rebels,
including Fidel Castro, attacked the Moncada Barracks in Santiago. It failed
and Castro, his brother, and others were jailed and eventually freed by
Batista. They exiled to Mexico where Castro met Ernesto "Che" Guavara. Although
the United States backed Batista, they imposed an arms trade embargo in 1958
that hindered their ability to fight off the rebels, despite outnumbering the
rebels considerably. Batista fled to the Dominican Republic on the first of
January in 1959. Guevara arrived in Havana on the 2nd, Castro on the 8th,
electing their own president, Manuel Urrutia Lleo, thus completing their
takeover.
In 1961, an attempt was made to overthrow Castro. Near the beginning of John F. Kennedy's presidency, a CIA trained group of Cuban exiles failed to retake the Cuban government from Castro. The Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) made U.S.-Cuban relations even more adversarial. During Cuba's transition, many Batista supporters were executed, antirevolutionaries were imprisoned or deported, and Castro's regime began seizing private land and businesses.
Rebels revolted because of the corrupt U.S.-backed Batista regime. Rebels sought to redistribute the wealth of Cuba in order to end the perpetuation of the exploitation of the lower classes by the wealthy. Ironically, the revolutionaries, who fought in defiance of Batista's power, ended up further weakening the Cuban economy because of too much political control, not to mention severed relations and trade with other countries including the United States. Following the Soviet collapse in 1991, Cuba's economy plummeted further.
The spirit of the revolution was founded upon equalizing wealth and severing ties with oppressive regimes. Although the revolutionaries intended to establish a democratic-socialist state, the result was largely communistic. Because of this, the Cuban government control alienated some of its people and did little to help the struggling economy. Subsequently, there were Cuban revolutionary loyalists as well as antirevolutionaries and eventual exiles. However, as the revolution's causes and effects are not as black and white as communism/capitalism, there were/are mixed feelings among both Cuban natives and exiles. Because of Cuba's association with the U.S.S.R., its historical relationship with the U.S., and its continuing association, right or wrong, with communist and socialist policies, the United States has continued with its trade embargo, continuing Cuba's problems with international trade.