When reading of this or that book is completed the reader unwillingly asks oneself a question: did the book appeal to him/her and what are the sources of the work’s influence on the reader? Christina Garcia’s 1992 novel Dreaming in Cuban does not fail to capture the reader’s attention by the themes it touches upon. The book’s peculiar feature is that the author manages to cover the topics in their close interconnection. And this makes the reader follow the stories of the main characters up to the end.
The characters’ destiny is disclosed along with the image of Cuba. This country has a pivotal presence in the novel and its current state is described through the main characters’ assumption of it. The constant opposition between Cuba and the United States is made by the author who describes the difference between Communists and anti-Communists.
Extreme political ideologies that this contradiction arises are not rare for the modern society. But when this problem concerns directly your own family, it acquires the especial significance. The conflicting political issues depicted in terms of one family show how historical development may influence the development of the whole family as a constituent part of any society. To emphasize the difference between the characters’ political views the author chooses the country’s portrayal through insider and outsider perspectives, on the one hand, showing the evocations of those who remained in Cuba and, on the other, showing the nostalgia of those who once left the country and now want to return to it.
Cuba serves as a symbol in the novel. Blinding the characters together and splitting them apart this country checks the characters’ unity as a family. It is a reality where, whether they want it or not, they still exist and cannot tear themselves away from.
Despite the first impression that the novel might evoke, it does not restrict to historical problems only, or, to be more exact, history helps the reader to understand some other aspects of human life. Dreaming in Cuban is the author’s emotional biography, as her family was as well as the characters’ family was divided over the Cuban revolution. Cristina Garcia has herself grown up with the split within the family and wanted to render her experience to the reader. Thus, the complex discourse of mother-daughter relationships acquires the author’s close examination in the novel.
The story of three generations of Cuban women is the main concern of the author of the book. Being members of the same family, Celia, the grandmother, Lourdes and Felicia, her daughters and Pilar, her granddaughter, have an extremely different perception of what Cuba should be. Celia is a dedicated Castro supporter, she remains in Cuba, her daughter Lourdes had emigrated to the United States with her husband and baby-daughter and has quite opposite views as for Castro’s politics, meanwhile, Pilar finds her mother’s anti-Castro moods absurd.
Lourdes is convinced that she needs to get rid of any signs of Cuba, including palm trees and warm weather, in order to live Cuba in her past. This Lourdes’s attitude to her native country influenced her daughter’s treatment of Cuba. Pilar considers herself to be an indigene New Yorker. Cuba is absent in her life and she has no necessity to remove the past from her memory.
The feeling of Americanism is what distinguishes Lourdes from her daughter. Trying to assimilate into New York, Lourdes opens two Yankee Doodle Bakeries, but the success of these undertakings does not destroy her desire of tropical warmth of the south. The external sign of this feeling is ever-increasing appetite for her husband and for sticky buns. It seems that though Lourdes does not want to preserve the smallest part of Cuba in her heart, Cuba possesses a very large part of her and she is powerless to change the situation.
In the context of Lourdes’s desire to separate from Cuba Celia’s wish to remain there is a bit difficult to understand. We are inclined to believe that the driving force that moves Celia to live in Cuba is not her enormous patriotic feelings that she possesses but the heartbreaking love affair that she once had. The eleventh day of every month is the day of her commemoration of the feelings she once had: writing letters to her beloved and never sending them to the addressee is the obvious sign of Celia’s resistance to say good-bye to her past. Suffering from the loss of the Spanish lover prevents Celia from having good relationships with her daughter. Lourdes does not only abandon her motherland, she abandons her mother thus rejecting the communism that both advocated.
Celia’s other daughter, Felicia, is also foreign for her mother. And it is revolution that made them so strange for each other. Felicia abandons her mother because of her indifference to revolution. As Celia points out, “…the only thing Felicia ever did for the revolution was pull a few dandelions during the weed-eradication campaign in 1962, and then only reluctantly. Her lack of commitment is a source of great rancour between them” (Garcia, p. 107). It is interesting to admit that the opposition that exists between Celia and her daughters is repeated in the next generation between Lourdes and Felicia and their own daughters.
But even the ocean cannot rupture the natural connection between the daughters and mothers. They still have much in common: both Celia and Lourdes serve law and order, Pilar resembles her mother in her attitude to people: if she does not like someone she demonstrates this feeling (Garcia, p. 135).
Not only in the analysis of the three generations of women and including sisters as integral part of the female group the theme of mother-daughter relationships is revealed. Also, the author constantly contrasts their relationships with those between fathers and daughters. The latter have such feelings towards each other that mothers could only envy. Celia admits that drastic difference between her daughter’s attitude to her and her husband: “That girl is a stranger to me. When I approach her, she turns numb, as if she wanted to be dead in my presence. I see how different Lourdes is with her father, so alive and gay, and it hurts me, but I don’t know what to do. She still punishes me for the early years” (Garcia, p. 163). Celia continues with a bitter feeling that “Lourdes is herself only with her father. Even after his death, they understand each other perfectly, as they always have” (Garcia, p. 131).
The contrast between mother and daughter is emphasized through depicting relations between the mothers and their sons. Mothers indulge their sons as opposite to their daughters who are treated harshly, as they need to be prepared for life.
To understand better the mother-daughter relationships the reader is also offered a sort of incomplete ending to the problems revealed. At the end of the novel the problems between Pilar and her mother are not solved, Celia dies without reaching agreement with her daughter. Garcia prefers to emphasize the characters’ ultimate disconnection than to describe the process of reunion between them.
Though the novel under consideration lacks some strict structure and a clean narrative, the readers fully understand the author’s message that is as follows: a family is a separate united mechanism the existence of which is predetermined by each member’s attitude to it. No historical event is worth a tear that drops from the family member’s eye. The family’s power is in its unity, as long as this unity exists, the state does not influence its destiny. Though the example of the family presented in the Dreaming in Cuban does not seem to be an embodiment of happiness, it still makes the reader believe in the power of family and the power of state as its logical extension.
Works Cited
Garcia, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban. Ballantine Books, 1993.