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DREAMING IN CUBAN
Author: Cristina Garcia García was born in Havana in 1958 to a Guatemalan father, Francisco M. Garcia and Cuban mother, Esperanza Lois. In 1961, when she was two years old, her family was among the first wave of people to flee Cuba after Fidel Castro came to power. They moved to New York City, where she was raised in Queens, Brooklyn Heights, and Manhattan. She has a daughter, Pilar. She speaks Spanish to her daughter, believing in the importance of tradition. Although she did not grow up as part of a Latino/a or Cuban community, she says has “always thought of myself as Cuban”. Her parents chose to live in exile when Castro assumed power. Because she was two years old when they left, she has no memories of Cuba; this lack has shaped her academic interests and pervades her writing, where memory is a constant motif. García grew up in New York City and attended Barnard College. After completing a master’s degree in international relations at Johns Hopkins University, García began a decade-long period of work in journalism, ultimately attaining the position of bureau chief for Time magazine in Miami. Cristina García’s debut novel, Dreaming in Cuban (1992), was not only pivotal in the career of its author but also a watershed moment for Latina/o literature. Nominated for the National Book Award, Dreaming in Cuban has been included on university and high school reading lists nationwide, and portions of it have been anthologized. Beyond simply propelling its author’s renown, the book increased the visibility and acceptance of Latina/o writing within the mainstream American literary canon. The novel’s treatment of Cuban exiles’ acculturation to the United States is compelling and the focus of much of the scholarship on the book. Yet its exploration of Cuban citizens’ acculturation to Castro’s Cuba-presented through Cuba’s intricate political and cultural history-is equally provocative. In addition to her novels, García has published short stories and essays; edited anthologies of Cuban literature and Mexican and Mexican American
literature; and written an introduction to a bilingual edition of the poems of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Of García's first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, (1992) García said, "I surprised myself by how Cuban the book turned out to be. I don't remember growing up with a longing for Cuba, so I didn't realize how Cuban I was, how deep a sense I had of exile and longing.” García has reported experiencing unease in relating to other Cubans—both with those still in Cuba and those in exile in Florida. Some question why she writes in English. Others take issue with her lack of engagement in anti- Castro causes. She has said she attempts to emphasize in her novels the fact that "there is no one Cuban exile". In 2007 she also said that she "wanted to break free of seeing the world largely through the eyes of Cubans or Cuban immigrants. At this time García described this "bigger canvas" as including "the entrapments and trappings of gender in my novel", partly because "it would be easy, and overly simplistic, to frame everything in terms of equality, or cultural limitations, or other vivid measurables. What's most interesting to me are the slow, internal, often largely unconscious processes that move people in unexpected directions, that reframe and refine their own notions of who they are, sexually and otherwise." While García has expressed a desire to move away from anti-Castro sentiments, the influence of her heritage is made clear when she discusses the symbolism and characters in her work. She has said, about the symbol of a tree, for example: In Afro-Cuban culture, the ceiba tree is also sacred, a kind of maternal, healing figure to which offerings are made, petitions placed. So absolutely, for me trees do represent a crossroads, an opportunity for redemption and change. In Dreaming in Cuban, Pilar Puente has a transformative experience under an elm tree that leads to her returning to Cuba. CONTEXT OF PRODUCTION How does the time period affect the language, atmosphere or social circumstances of the short story?
madness as she marries twice more (#2 dies in a freak grease fire; #3 she pushes to his death), and attempts to kill herself and Ivanito. Luz and Milagro fear and detest Felicia and wrap themselves up in their own world to protect themselves. Felicia eventually turns to santería to find some peace, but the gods have it out for her. She returns home from her initiation rites and dies a swift and mysterious death. Jorge, who returns after his death to keep his beloved Lourdes company, informs her of Felicia's death and urges her to return to Cuba. She hesitates until Pilar reaches a kind of spiritual clarity about traveling to Cuba and sets the journey in motion. They return to find Celia in a sorry state, having just buried Felicia and lost her son, Javier (he runs off to the mountains, no forwarding address). Lourdes and Pilar spend time with Celia and Felicia's children in Cuba. Pilar receives her grandmother's unsent letters to Gustavo—essentially her repository of memories—and learns what life is really like in Cuba. Lourdes visits the places of her past and confirms every bad opinion she's ever had about the island of her birth. She decides to take advantage of the open emigration allowed through the Peruvian embassy to get Ivanito out of Cuba. Even though she knows it will destroy her grandmother, Pilar eventually goes along with the plan because she realizes that there is no future for her little cousin there. Ultimately, Celia is left by herself in Cuba with very little more than her house by the sea, her poetry, and her trademark pearl earrings, which she drops into the ocean in the last moments of the book. How is the title related to the plot? After Pilar spends some days in Cuba, she realizes that she is "dreaming in Spanish, which she has never done before (235). Listen to the way she describes the experience: I've started dreaming in Spanish, which has never happened before. I wake up feeling different, like something inside me is changing, something chemical and irreversible. There's a magic here working its way through my veins. (235) Pilar has reached the peak of her struggle with her "hyphenated" existence: to be Cuban-American means that one side of her identity has had to give ground to the other. Now that she can sit with her grandmother by the sea and immerse herself in the language and natural beauty of her motherland, her ethnicity balances out and Pilar can become fully herself. But please note that there's a difference between dreaming in Cuban and dreaming in Spanish. Spanish is one of the six official languages that the U.N. uses when conducting official meetings and is spoken by a variety of cultural groups around the world. It's hard to own something like that as part of your inner life. When García titles her book Dreaming in Cuban, she's bringing Pilar's revelation even closer to home and placing the family's intimate identity squarely on the island. Are the events plausible? Are they in a logical, well-motivated sequence? It is loosely based on the experiences some of the Cubans lived.
How is the plot structured? Is it linear, chronological or does it move around? Could the order of the events be changed? It moves around and has many different timelines according to who is narrating the story. What is the most important event in your opinion? Are there dramatic or tense scenes? How is tension build up in the story? SETTING How is the setting created? Consider geography, weather, time of day, social conditions, imagery, etc. What role does setting play in the story? Is it an important part of the plot or theme? Or is it just a backdrop against which the action takes place? Does the setting help create a particular mood? Could the story have happened somewhere else rather than in the place where the events take place? How long does the development of events last? Does the author follow one timeline from beginning to end or does the author jump back and forth in time? The book is set in Cuba (pre-Revolution to 1980), Havana and Santa Teresa del Mar; Brooklyn (1972 -1980) García opens the work on the shoreline of Santa Teresa del Mar, a small community on the northwest coast of Cuba, about ten or so miles north of Havana. Celia would have a panoramic view of the ocean flowing through the Straits of Florida from this perch. Celia's memories of Cuba stretch back to a time well before the Revolution and include scenes of poverty in the countryside that often spilled over into larger and more prosperous cities like Havana. When she recalls her journey from her mother's house to Tía Alicia's, the train ride brings her from squalor to the quiet gentility of mansions in Havana. Celia recalls for Gustavo impoverished families sprawling on benches in the parks, despite the obvious wealth surrounding them. As she ages, Celia also travels into the sugarcane fields to do her part for the Revolution and describes the smell of the burning vegetation and the blood that drops to the earth from the faces of inexperienced, mauled workers. When Pilar and Lourdes journey back to Cuba, they are seeing a place that has been frozen in time, striving to survive on whatever resources it had before the Revolution. Lourdes sees decay everywhere, the places of her young married life falling to bits and her husband's farm appropriated by the state. Even Pilar has to admit that Abuela Celia's house is kind of a dump, with broken tiles, rotting vegetation and a rust heap of a fridge in the kitchen—not to mention the lack of hot water in the shower.
As a reader, were you prepared for the resolution? How predictable is the ending? What is your opinion regarding how the story ends? Is the ending closed or open? If you could change the ending, how would you do so? Would you have ended the story in the same way? THEMES Are there repeated elements that suggest a theme? Passion, Romance, and Marriage In Dreaming in Cuban, Cristina García’s magical realist novel about three generations of the del Pino family, the heat of passion and the stability of marriage are often in conflict. The romance that dominates the novel is that of matriarch Celia for Gustavo, the lover who abandoned her following a passionate, youthful affair, sending Celia into a profound depression. Celia’s ongoing love for Gustavo overshadows her marriage to a good man, Jorge, even though her life with Jorge is real and her relationship with Gustavo is not. By framing the novel around Celia’s stubborn love for the absent Gustavo, García argues that passion, because of its tendency to fizzle out, obscures and even damages the more ordinary happiness that can be found within lifelong marriage. Celia has removed her drop pearl earrings only nine times, to clean them. No one ever remembers her without them.” Writing to Gustavo is an ingrained ritual, and the earrings which Gustavo gave Celia are her trademark, even long after her marriage to Jorge. Celia and Jorge’s marital struggles further show that passion, if clung onto long after it has spent itself, is not harmless—it can damage potentially healthy relationships. When Jorge is injured in a car crash, Celia realizes that she does have feelings for him. Celia realizes that there are different intensities of love, and she concludes that these can exist simultaneously. However, she draws the wrong conclusion about Jorge’s feelings. It’s transparently obvious, even to Pilar, that her grandmother doesn’t share her grandfather’s romantic feelings. Yet even Celia’s coldness doesn’t stop Jorge from expressing his love for her on a daily basis, suggesting that a happy marriage could have been possible. Near the end of the book, Jorge’s ghost visits his eldest daughter, Lourdes, and confesses to her that he’s responsible for Celia’s unhappiness during their marriage and the suffering this subsequently caused the family. Despite Celia’s assumptions, in other words, Jorge has never been oblivious to the truth about Celia’s feelings for Gustavo, and that’s why he abandoned her to mistreatment at the hands of his jealous mother and sister. Celia’s and Jorge’s relationship, haunted by the lingering ghost of Gustavo, became a spiral of mutual harm and regret. None of the major characters’ marriages are happy ones. Lourdes uses her husband for sex, objectifying him until her passion is briefly satisfied, but she
doesn’t respect him as a man; more dramatically, Felicia serially marries men who ignite her passion, but she ends up maiming or killing them all. There isn’t an ideal marriage in the book—rather, there’s only the ghost of healthy marriages that might have been. Intergenerational Conflict When Lourdes, eldest daughter of protagonist and del Pino family matriarch Celia, announces that she and her daughter Pilar are leaving the country, the resulting scene displays the larger family conflict on a smaller scale: “I was sitting in my grandmother's lap,” Pilar recalls, “playing with her drop pearl earrings, when my mother told her we were leaving the country. Abuela Celia called her a traitor to the revolution. Mom tried to pull me away but I clung to Abuela and screamed at the top of my lungs. […] That was the last time I saw her.” Celia conceives of Lourdes’s decision to flee as a betrayal of Celia’s communist beliefs and therefore a betrayal of Celia herself. Pilar, only a child, feels caught in the middle between her mother and grandmother. By portraying the clash of three generations as they deal with the fallout from the 1950s Cuban Revolution, García suggests that when family relationships are viewed through the lens of politics, unfettered relationships between parents and children become impossible. Celia diagnoses the problems of Felicia, her middle daughter who suffers from mental illness, as essentially political, and she therefore prescribes a political solution. Felicia’s reluctance to get on board with the revolution, in other words, is an affront to Celia, and something to which Felicia’s lifelong problems can be conveniently attributed. Celia’s relationship with Lourdes, living in exile in the United States, is even worse. The conflict between mother and daughter comes down to the mundane products of Lourdes’s new life abroad—instead of seeing the pastries as proof of her daughter’s success in which Celia can take pride, Celia sees them as proof that her daughter has betrayed Cuba, and her. In post-Revolutionary Cuba, estranged from actual relationships with her children, Celia spends her spare time mediating community disputes as a civilian judge. For her, these disputes come to represent something about her own family and about human nature in general. Celia sees the domestic turmoil in the court as a reflection of Cuba’s struggles more broadly, reinforcing the political view of family life that she takes throughout the novel. Though conflict is no less pronounced in subsequent generations, mother-daughter relationships—especially that of Lourdes and Pilar—thrive better when they are untangled from politics. Despite the fact that conservative, anti-Castro Lourdes and her daughter Pilar are political opposites and are locked in constant discord, they transcend politics more notably than any other characters. When Pilar’s painting of a “punk” Statue of Liberty causes an uproar at Lourdes’s bakery grand opening, Lourdes jumps to her daughter’s defense. Lourdes dislikes Pilar’s provocative painting as much as anyone present, but her love of her daughter overrides that hostility. Later, it’s evident that she lets the painting remain in her bakery. Lourdes, in other words, is fundamentally more loyal to her child than to her pro-America, anti-communist politics. García thus suggests that it’s possible to
if she had grown up in Cuba instead of America, she probably would not have become exactly the person she is today, because she would not have enjoyed the same degree of freedom of expression. While Celia takes this fact for granted as an aspect of the revolutionary Cuba she loves, Pilar sees it as a potential dilution of her identity. Ultimately, then, Pilar realizes that she cannot stay in Cuba. Pilar recognizes that the environment in which she’s grown up has had an indispensable shaping influence on who she has become, and she can’t leave it behind without risking her self-identity. Versions of Reality From Lourdes' lazy eye, which takes in things that others can't see, to those in power who construct their own versions of national histories, Dreaming in Cuban challenges the concept that anyone can be an impartial and tolerant observer of an absolute reality. Navigating a world that accommodates Felicia's hallucinatory wanderings, Celia's passions, Pilar's identity crises, Lourdes' zeal, and Jorge's refusal to "cross over" can make it difficult to get at the truth of existence, if such a truth actually exists. There's also a very fluid definition of mental illness and stability in this work that profoundly affects the life of the del Pino women and how they are viewed and labeled by the men in the work (and by us as readers). In all of these cases, it's best to follow Pilar's lead and question everything. The Supernatural There are dead people. Walking over the ocean. Living people can hear the sounds of the universe operating (including flowers growing). Catholic saints become Lukumi gods and rule the lives of humans, whether they accept it or not. All of this means one thing: you've landed in the universe of magical realism. Perhaps the most surprising thing about this kind of world is not the supernatural mingling with the quotidian. It's the absolute value of these occurrences in the lives of all the characters. Celia doesn't believe in religion, but she does step carefully around the sacred ceiba tree and leaves a prayer for Felicia. Pilar is like her grandmother: a non-believer, but still acknowledging the presence and power of invisible forces. For the del Pino family, the workings of the world beyond are just another part of a complicated life on earth. STYLE Does the author appeal to your intellect, imagination and emotions? How would you describe the author’s style? Does the author include figures of speech? Lyrical, Compact, Economical Dreaming in Cuban is basically, by the author's admission, a poem gone wild, so it's no surprise that the dreamy character of Celia writes letters that could be set to music. The open spirituality of the work—whether the main characters embrace
religion or not—and the intimate narration of the experience of mental illness lends itself to compact poetic expression. García handles a wide spectrum of personalities and speech patterns in a short space, creating distinct voices for each by varying sentence length and vocabulary. PERSONAL CONNECTION WITH THE STORY What does the story mean to you? How does the story make you feel? Do you feel related to any character in some way? If you had the chance, what would you ask or say to the characters? Does the story remind you of another short story, novel, or poem you have read? What does the story make you wonder about? What surprised you or produced an impact on you?
