Cuba as text and context in Cristina
Garcia'as Dreaming in Cuba

In Cristina Garcia's 1992 novel Dreaming in Cuban, Cuba is a pivotal presence. The work examines, through a wealth of female and male characters, with emphasis upon the matrilinear chain, the intense experience of Cubanness. The island country of Cuba is portrayed from within and without, and the distance from it is measured through the fictive evocation of exile, exile once removed, and inner exile.Different views of Cuba both inspire and result from divergent exiles. I have chosen to approach the topic of Cuba as text and context in the novel through an analysis of three female characters: Lourdes del Pino Puente, a Cuban exile living in Brooklyn; her daughter Pilar, age 13 when the novel opens; and Lourdes's mother, Celia del Pino,who has by choice indee insistence remained behind in Cuba, in her seaside home.

Dreaming in Cuban is told in segments related by numerous narrative consciousness, usually in the third person, from time planes that move backward and forward but follow a general linear chronological direction. What we learn of Lourdes comes primarily from the third-person narrative segments devoted to her and, secondarily, from the reflections of her daughter and her mother in the sequences narrated by or devoted to them. Lourdes has passed into exile, like so many of her contemporaries in 1961, with her husband Rufino Puente and their two year old daughter, Pilar. Lourdes has tried to force roots into the northern soil of Brooklyn, and genuinely believes that she has done so. In fact, when they leave Miami in a secondhand Chevy, unable to bear "the endless brooding over their wealth, the competition for dishwasher jobs" of Rufino's family, which has been ostentatiously prominent in Havana society, it is Lourdes who insists that they move ever northward, in search of the cold. New York City, finally, is cold enough. As enterprising and dynamic as Maria de los Angeles "Mina" Lopez in Roberto Fernandez's much praised 1988 novel Raining Backwards, Lourdes has founded the Yankee Doodle Bakery, and in time opens a second one. A fighter and a survivor, she has prospered. Lourdes takes pride in her love of order, her practicality. A take charge person who sees right and wrong in uncomplicatedly absolute terms, Lourdes becomes a volunteer auxiliary policewoman on a neighborhood beat, slapping her nightstick over and over into her palm before she goes out on patrol. Always estranged from her distant mother, Celia, who has been sent away to Havana by her own mother, never to see her again, Lourdes feels her parental affinity is with her father, Jorge del Pino, who railed over the years in Cuba at what he termed tropical squalor and who comes to New York to die of cancer.

For Lourdes, Cuba is present only as an absence, an absence chosen and quite satisfactory. Time with respect to Cuba is frozen in her perception as of 1959: Cuba itself is immutable, lost, and deviant until Castro's fall, which must surely come, and, when it does not, can only be delayed by the regime's lies and the people's blindness. No dreamer like her mother, her sister Felicia or her husband, a thinker and would be inventor, Lourdes has no patience with abstraction, yet for her Cuba has become one. She feels no patience for the infuriating indifference she observes in her mother, in Felicia, and in her daughter Pilar; yet she feigns precisely that toward Cuba. Her vocal patriotism she reserves for the United States; of Cuba she speaks with derision, when she will speak of it at all. "Immigration has redefined [Lourdes]," the reader is told, "and she is grateful". "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". Yet seeing a row of Arab owned shops on her way home from her bakery--significantly, they are not Cuban or even Hispanic but safely "different"-- and contemplating the foods displayed, ". . . she ponders the transmigrations from the southern latitudes, the millions moving north. What happens to their languages? The warm burial grounds they leave behind? What of their passions lying stiff and untranslated in their breasts?" . The introduction of language into Lourdes's musings is hardly accidental, for language functions in Dreaming in Cuban as a measuring device gauging both affinity and distance. Celia's poetic idiom passes to her daughter, Felicia, for example, but not to Lourdes, for whom even her mother- especially her mother--speaks a foreign tongue. It is her father's deprecating rhetoric that becomes Lourdes' legacy. By extension, foreignness becomes in Dreaming in Cuban a metaphor for separation and estrangement; it can exist as fully within a family home as in exile in an alien land. Indeed, individual language in the novel's world becomes emblem, and expression of foreignness becomes impenetrability, the ultimate isolation to which each of Garcia's characters is condemned.

In Cuba, Lourdes' sister Felicia feels this unleapable distance even from her adored son Ivanito, with whom she has a powerful spiritual bond. "What is he saying?" his mother wonders about him. "Each word is a code she must decipher, a foreign language, a streak of gunshot". Even with her boy, to whom she is more closely bound than to any other being save her mother, Felicia is unwillingly but undeniably alone. Between Ivanito and his older twin sisters--stiff, unbending adherents to the regime--there is also estrangement based on language as vital posture, the sum and expression of one's stance in the world she inhabits. "He will never speak his sisters' language, account for his movements like a cow with a dull bell". The novel's title, Dreaming in Cuban, suggests an idiom of belonging, a collective, ever imperfect antidote to isolation and estrangement. What Celia terms the "morphology of survival"  must always take into account the grammar of this culture specific language,Cuban. Lourdes believes herself impervious to any such considerations. Yet the sight of a lone elm set in concrete causes her to wonder if this individual is the last of the dying species be set by Dutch elm disease. Is it a metaphor for her own exile and separation? There are other signs as well. The New York City rivers along which Lourdes walks and patrols flow gray, absorbing the light, usually unable to return it as reflection, their color and coldness evocative of metal. "Breezes from the sluggish river seem to inscribe [Lourdes'] skin with metal tips". Gray is also the color of ash. Felicia's third husband, falling onto the wires of a carnival ride in Cuba, turns to ash and blows northward, where he had wanted to go. For Lourdes's mother, gray is also the color of memory: "Memory cannot be confined. . . . It's slate gray, the color of undeveloped film". That memory has been free to follow Lourdes northward, and that she would permit it to do so is a thought she would surely deny. In her daughter Pilar's memories, her mother's toucans and cockatoos, released when the revolutionaries took over the Puente hacienda, also flew north in confusion--a confusion which Lourdes emphatically rejects; she abhors all ambiguity. Yet the northern clime has inspired in her inordinate hungers. The first is an erotic appetite for Rufino, which leads her husband to install a bell in his workshop so as to be always available to her and which finally leaves him spent and weary, and the second is a concomitant craving for pecan sticky buns, which brings about a weight gain of 118 pounds. In Rufino, Lourdes is reaching for something beyond him, something he cannot give her; she may well seek in this physical union a reintegration she cannot attain, a reconnection with her remembered life left behind, with the Cuba she knew. The sticky buns, with their impossible forbidden sweetness, may be the closest Lourdes can come in exile to the sensorial bombardment, richly evoked in the pages of Dreaming in Cuban, of her island home.

Lourdes' daughter Pilar has a solitary hunger of her own. Hers is the yearning for connection, a longing for her roots and legacy. Unlike the children-of-exile pattern found among the young characters of Roberto Fernandez' Raining Backwards and Elias Miguel Munoz 1989 novel Crazy Love, and differing in some respects from formulations that distinguish between the exile and the child of exile, the ethnic, Pilar feels a dominant pull not toward the surrounding majority culture but to her ancestral home, Cuba. Her posture recalls Roberto Fernandez's statement in an August 1990 interview to the effect that the distinction between the exile cultural pattern and that of the child of exile has to do not with birth date but with individuality and choice Pilar's hunger is felt as a longing for Cuba itself, for reintegration with a place she never truly knew, though she does claim complete recall from the day of her birth, even of complete conversations--which for her Cuban connection would cover two years and does have a direct spiritual link with her grandmother Celia, which is later interrupted, then restored. The object of her desire is, hence, a mythified Cuba, except that the myth's only real content is the awareness of lack and separation, her grandmother as a prosopopoeic representation of the island, and a young girl's awakening social conscience. Pilar and her grandmother represent the two pivotal narrative consciousness in Dreaming in Cuban. Both live for a time --Celia for most of her life, Pilar for a few searching years-- facing the past, and both apprehend Cuba through memory. The grandmother seeks to arrest the past and insert herself into it, with both she and the content of that past pristine and simultaneously changed and unchanged, for the past that she would fix permanently outside the ravages of time is a rewritten one. Pilar, on the other hand, practices the paradox of an anticipated, future memory.