Cuba as text and context in Cristina (2)
Garcia'as Dreaming in Cuba

She, too, would write the past to her measure and need. Of course, both are exercises of invention. Situated halfway between the dreamers--Celia, Pilar's father, her Aunt Felicia, her cousin Ivanito--and the proponents of order and practicality, Pilar has her parental link with her father Rufino. He is the unadapted, unadaptable one in his marriage, though his wife is distinctly the more unhappy and unsatisfied of the two. Pilar's relationship with her mother is deeply conflicted, her rebelliousness a manifestation of her longing, her resentment of truncation from her Cuba. Both Pilar and her mother rage and rant in paired but solitary angers. And yet, when Pilar is accosted and pressed against an elm tree by newly adolescent boys, she endures their rough caresses, feeling the tree's life -giving force- a clear suggestion of the elm present in her mother's musings. Interestingly, only the narrative segments corresponding to Pilar and her cousins Ivanito and Luz --the young generation-- are related in the first person. The only other use of the first person outside quoted speech is to be found in Grandmother Celia's letters to her long-ago lover Gustavo. Theirs is the new journey, the awakening discovery. For Pilar, this discovery is ultimately that. Although Cuba is home, New York is more so, despite the fact that Grandmother Celia beseeches her to stay.

For Celia del Pino in Cuba, as for Lourdes outside it, time is arrested. "All summer she has lived in her memories. . . . Her past, she fears, iseclipsing her present". In Celia's life, it always has. Celia is caught in the folds of time. Her central memory is that of Gustavo Sierra de Armas, the married Spaniard with whom Celia, when she was a very young department store clerk in Havana, had an intense love affair that was truncated by his unannounced departure. For twenty-five years, until the triumph of the revolution, Celia writes to Gustavo on the eleventh day of each month, keeping the unmailed letters in a satin lined box. "I watch the sun rise, burning its collection of memories", she writes to Gustavo and later, "Memory is a skilled seducer" who hover around the mid-century of life recall the rumors of multiple seductions by the dictator at the presidential palace. For Celia, these rumors become present reality, with Celia as one of the seduced. He does not age, nor does she. In Celia's reveries, memory is most often sensualized and is always infused and injected with imagination. Memory is scripted, the script becoming more real than fact. As Celia's daughter Felicia will tell her son Ivanito, "Imagination, like memory, can transform lies to truths . . .". The matriarch of the novel's dreamers, Celia seems engaged in an eternal wait that is never concluded, never satisfied. Her life, like her time, is arrested, moving then in long, elliptical swirls like patterns drawn on the sand by her beloved sea, whose waters envelop her again and again at critical junctures, cleansing and caressing her, then depositing her once again on shore, amid the folds of time.

Celia is a failed and even lethal mother. The child of a cold mother herself, she has passed this legacy to Lourdes, who, not surprisingly, passes it in turn to her Pilar. To her other daughter, Felicia, Celia bequeaths her poetry, her love of language, her sensuality, her ever hovering madness; Felicia, whose name belies her perpetual unhappiness, leads a tormented life and meets an early demise. Celia has endowed her third child, Javier, with her own consumption by passion for a lost love. "There is no solace among [her children], only a past infected with disillusion". Yet there is another Celia. Not only is she entrusted with an anachronistic mission to patrol her patch of coast by night against Yankee marauders, she also receives an appointment as judge of her neighborhood tribunal, resolving the disputes brought to her in a
surprisingly equanimous manner. Celia is profoundly committed to the revolution and frequently quotes El Lider's statement from earlier years that the revolution, until its stability was ensured, could not tolerate dissent. These two parts of Celia are seemingly unreconciled, existing in a permanent contradiction. Ironically, it is she, the inadaptada, who has most thoroughly and enthusiastically adapted to Castro's Cuba.
However, she does not feel betrayed. Is the endurance of her loyalty a product of her having been taken seriously at last? Or is it made possible precisely because of her imbalance? Are the Celias perhaps the only possible friends the regime has left? Celia's particular sense and experience of time, after all, equip her perfectly to tolerate anachronism, which for her does not exist, and to shuffle the cards of change in among those of immutability. A fervent critic of earlier Cuban regimes and keenly aware of social injustice, Celia has stopped national time at the moment of this regime's triumph, a device that obviates the need to record, assess, and finally judge its history.

A web of affinities and replications, primarily unconscious, both ultimately recognized and forever unacknowledged or unknown, links the characters of Dreaming in Cuban one to another. The love affair between the young Celia del Pino and the businessman from Granada is played out in a room of Havana's Hotel Inglaterra. A generation later, her daughter Felicia consummates a quickly born passion with merchant seaman Hugo in the same hotel, now as ill maintained and decayed as Celia's memories preserved
it--and her love--whole and lovely. Though in Felicia's case a marriage ultimately, and miserably, results from the Hotel Inglaterra encounter, and in her mother's instance it does not, both women are abandoned and wounded by their Hotel Inglaterra lovers, the aggression born for Celia of absence, and for Felicia of an all-too-real and brutal, if occasional, presence. Celia's newer-age Spanish plunderer and Felicia's sailor suggest the two major strains, the European and the African, which have made up Cuba; in these two exemplars, both mythic components are flawed and unworthy.

The mother-daughter parallels multiply in threads of connection that bind characters ever more tightly. Celia has been employed at El Encanto department store in Havana, where Felicia is later to work. She names her second child for the Felicia she knew in the asylum. Her Felicia will also suffer madness and, like her namesake, will endeavor to take her husband's life; it is clear that Celia applauded her companion's successful effort to free herself of a tyrant. Near the novel's end,Celia eats two dishes of coconut ice cream, a treat that, years earlier, had been prepared and consumed in great excess by Felicia, becoming emblematic of her fall into madness. Affinities move back and forth through time, crossing and recrossing decades and generations, joining even those characters who, like Celia and her daughter Lourdes, feel themselves to be in opposition. The elderly Celia has a lump in her breast; it is cancerous. Years earlier, Lourdes, in a scuffle with revolutionary soldiers, felt a lump descend from her own chest and move down through her body. The lump, like Celia's, is life-stealing, for it represents her unborn child. The threads of connection bind even those who have never met, or whose active memory of one another has been truncated by physical separation. In New York, Pilar buys, on impulse, a Beny More album at a used record store; her Aunt Felicia danced obsessively to his music. Pilar is drawn to a botanica, where she finds herself placing trust in the supernatural, lending full credence to the instructions of the soft-spoken man there.

Felicia, in Cuba, is long active in the santeria movement, in which she becomes a priestess. Felicia suffers in her dreams for the prostitutes in India, as does Pilar. Also in New York, "Breezes from the sluggish river seem to inscribe [Lourdes'] skin with metal tips" , while in Cuba Felicia finds herself serving in Fidel's army, another metaphor of metal. And while Pilar chafes against the lies of denied social injustice around her, the reluctantly military Felicia does her own combat with official untruths: "In the dark, the moonless jungle, the fissures are not so visible, the hypocrisies and lies less disturbing" Be they strands joining parent and child, estranged sisters, or persons who have never known one another, the affinities and replications recorded have at their web's center Cuba, to which all the strands are attached and from which they emanate. All the characters in the web are in Cuba's orbit. To a large degree, Cuba defines them and their relation to the other characters in the web. Measurements of distance between the characters must all take this center into account, measuring across Cuba,and curving around it. Their distance from the web's center is a measurement reckoned by definition from Cuba, the Cuba they yearn to recover or battle to forget. Neither the integration nor the separation is ever perfect or absolute. Both impulses prove ultimately impossible because in Dreaming in Cuban neither belonging to it nor freedom from it is ever complete, and no homecoming brings one fully home. In this sense, there can be such a phenomenon as reverse exile, as when Pilar, in Cuba at last in fulfillment of her deepest longings, reflects that Cuba--the one she pined for--is, inevitably, a different and strange exile.

At two points in the novel, reference is made to the continents' slowly and painfully pulling away from one another. "Celia wonders whether Cuba will be left behind, alone in the Caribbean sea with its faulted and folded mountains, its conquests, its memories". Here Cuba, which has shaped all of the characters, is their metaphor as well. Each of them is a continent adrift, pulled from and drawn back to the others,the tear of separation always ragged--a wound--the fit of union always imperfect, the continents' contours again wounding one another in their attempt to fuse. Affinities acknowledged and unseen, fissures alternately and even simultaneously spoken and silent, bind the novel's characters together and split them apart. Sometimes the greatest distances of all are between those continents whose land masses are still joined: Lourdes and Rufino, Pilar and Lourdes, Felicia and her daughters. The Cuba of Garcia's novel is both the sum and the part o the characters' unions and sunderings, and sometimes the cause of their rending. It is also both the product and the dividend, the irreducible core reality in whose terms they all exist.