The relationships between the members of the family Del Pino are central in the novel Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia. The family seems to be split because of the political views, the religious beliefs, or the actual physical distance of its various members. Their interactions, their feelings, their actions and their memories reveal these dysfunctions. Celia, the matriarch of the family, will use the image of the ocean to put words on this separation she’s feeling growing between herself and the rest of her family: “[The sea] exists now so we can call and wave from opposite shores”(Garcia, 240). The main characters of the stories being women, it is mostly their relationships between each other that will be discussed. However, it seemed important to highlight the relationship that started it all.
This first relationship is the one between Jorge and Celia. From the beginning, it is clear that Celia’s heart was not completely ready for Jorge when he first started to court her. She feels betrayed when he leaves her at his mother’s home knowing how his family would treat her. She will finally learn to love him in her own way, but it will never be the passion she felt for her Spanish lover. Jorge is aware of Celia’s first lover and will make her pay that all his life. Jorge will say to his daughter: “I wanted to kill [Celia]” (Garcia, 195). This could be understood as his desire to dominate his wife in all ways possible. However, Celia lost her virginity to someone else and is not as “available for discovery, possession and conquest” as would a virgin girl be (Edwards, 97). The first relationship of the family being this bad does not give mush hope for the others coming.
Celia’s relationship with her first-born is the most strained of the novel. Their fate was sealed from the beginning, when Celia handed the baby to her husband, holding her by one leg and saying: “I will not remember her name” (Garcia, 43). Celia resents her daughter for being a girl, because had she been a boy, she would have “[left] Jorge and [sailed] for Spain, to Granada” (Garcia, 42). Instead, she feels trapped with this baby and her always-absent husband. Once Lourdes becomes an adult, the two women will disagree on everything: Lourdes believes in the capitalist system that allowed her to make a lot of money and believes that communism is all “lies, poisonous […] lies” (Garcia, 132), whereas Celia supports completely El Lider and the Revolution and “consigns her body to the sugar-cane” (Garcia, 44). Lourdes is catholic, and sends her daughter to a catholic school (Garcia, 58), whereas Celia is an atheist, since she was sent to her Tia Alicia (Garcia, 93). Lourdes fled Cuba with her husband and daughter yet Celia will always stay on her isle. Despite all these differences Celia kept her promise to “train her [daughter] to read the columns of blood and numbers in men’s eyes, to understand the morphology of survival” (Garcia, 42), and Lourdes certainly is not scared of men. She never hesitated to put herself between her husband and the armed soldier (Garcia, 70) and is the first to react and protect her daughter’s painting from an ill-intended man with a knife (Garcia, 144). But daughter and mother are two strangers to each other. Lourdes cannot deliver her father’s apologies to her mother (Garcia, 238), and Celia will never forgive Lourdes for taking her grandchildren away from her.
This mother-daughter relationship is explored further with Celia’s second child. Felicia turns to the Santeria religion in time of great need (Garcia, 12 and 185), which infuriates her mother. If Felicia does not seem against the Revolution, she does not particularly care either. She obeys her mother when Celia tells her to go to a guerrillas’ camp (Garcia, 105), but the younger woman does not have any change of heart concerning the Revolution. There still is a connection between Felicia and her mother as Celia feels it when Felicia tries to kill herself and her son and saves their lives (Garcia, 95). Their conflicts are not as clear as Lourdes and Celia’s, and Celia will “not refuse her daughter’s last request” concerning her burial as a Santeria (Garcia, 214).
Celia and Pilar have a more surprising relationship. Indeed, at first Pilar seems to be incredibly close to her grandmother and will keep talking to her at night (Garcia, 29), even when she moves to New York with her parents. But as Pilar grows up, her connection with Celia will weaken (Garcia, 137). Towards the end of the novel, Pilar will start to understand that even if she feels like a part of her is missing when she is in the United States, there is nothing for her in Cuba. She will finally lie to her Abuela when they go to try a take Ivanito back from the airport, telling her that “[She] couldn’t find him” (Garcia, 242).
Lourdes and Pilar’s relationship is very explosive. As said before, Pilar does not understand how she could be her mother’s daughter. They are always fighting each other for everything. Pilar will say that her mother’s views are “strictly black-and-white” (Garcia, 26) which she doesn’t understand. The only time the girl feels love for her mother (and expresses it), is when Lourdes blocks the attack against her daughter’s painting (Garcia, 144). At the time when she is not eating anymore, Lourdes describes her daughter has being “irresponsible, self-centered, a bad seed” (Garcia, 168). When Pilar was just a teenager, she admitted of having thought about killing her mother (Garcia, 29). The two women do not have the same interests or dreams. If Pilar wants to understand who she is, Lourdes wants to start a new life and has no desire on dwelling on the past. Rufino Puente, their husband and father, usually tempers their conflicts.
The women in Dreaming in Cuban all have very strong personalities and their conflicts are a very important part of the story. Celia’s comparison of their distanced family with the sea is quite melancholic. She says that the sea was a necessity for her and her health, but that it opened new horizons for her children, new possibilities they became conscious of. She only has Lourdes left, as Felicia died and Javier has disappeared in the mountains and is presumed dead, who actually lives away from her childhood house, and from her mother.
Bibliography:
- Garcia, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Ballantine Books, 1993.
- Edwards, Justin. Postcolonial literature. Chapter 9 “Gender”. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.