Themes: Identity/Escape

Cultural and political ideology figure in the construction of each character's identity. But given the diversity of the del Pino women, identity construction is not (and should not be interpreted) a generalizable, passive inscription. In other words, the concept of a person as a tabula rasa needs to be replaced with something more interactive: namely, a tabula rasa that is not just a blank slate to be written upon by outside forces, but one which...

Themes: Memory/Dreaming

This theme interweaves with family and identity. Memory and dreaming are the ways the del Pino women respectively preserve/reconstruct (or rehistoricize) the past. In other novels (and historically), this type of historical reconstruction is to combat an oppressor's attempt to erase a cultural heritage: one example being certain Native American nations being eradicated by Colonialist expansion. With the characters in Dreaming in Cuban, the...

Themes: Communism vs. Capitalism

This is the generalized political divide between Cuba and the U.S. In all but one instance (Celia and Pilar), the geographic distance between U.S. and Cuba does not help. Some characters use politics as a way to sustain the emotional distance between each other. This is a chicken-and-the-egg question. Which came first: political or personal disagreement? In the end, it does not matter which came first. At times, their political interests also...

Themes: Family and Identity

Dreaming in Cuban works on three levels. At the surface, it is a melodrama, the story of various members of a large family scattered among New York, Florida, and Cuba. This, however, is the least intense part of the story. The fact that this is a Cuban family, wherever its members may live, is central to the work.

Themes: Political Conflict

The political level of the novel is quite close to the surface. The characters include Communists working hard for El Lider and capitalists who despise the Cuban government. The author’s own political stance is never made clear. Communism is praised and criticized alternately. The major point is that the characters themselves, both those who remain in Cuba and those who emigrate to the United States, are somewhat confused. The members of the...

Themes: Spirituality and Religion

The most intense part of the story, and the reason for the title, is spiritual. Cuba, as a Communist country, is supposed to be atheistic; however, spiritual values are not changed instantly by an altering of the political climate. Most Cubans in the story are Roman Catholics; only Pilar, the most American of the family and the youngest character portrayed in detail, considers atheism as a possible way of life.

Underneath Catholicism, however,...

Themes: Supernatural and Reality

Finally, many of the characters have supernatural visions. Jorge Del Pino, Celia’s dead husband, appears regularly to a number of the characters, both in Cuba and in New York. The characters so visited invariably take these appearances as quite real. While there is a certain amount of insanity in the family (two of the women have been institutionalized), the supernatural seems to play a very real, seemingly rational part in everyone’s lives. In...