Author Archives: Alexandra B

The Del Pino Family in Dreaming in Cuban, Or, What the Relationships Tell about the Characters

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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:

  1. Garcia, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Ballantine Books, 1993.
  2. Edwards, Justin. Postcolonial literature. Chapter 9 “Gender”. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Luz Villaverde in Dreaming in Cuban The Rift Between Felicia and her Daughters

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Extract pp.120-121, “Luckily Milagro and I have each other” to “He is her gullible ragdoll”

In Dreaming in Cuban, Cristina Garcia explores the theme of mother-daughter relationships among other things. In a part of the chapter “The Meaning of Shells”, Luz Villaverde temporarily takes over the narration. Close reading this passage allows an understanding of the difficult relationship between Felicia and her daughters through Luz’s eyes. It is the first time Felicia’s older children feelings toward their mother are expressed. It exposes how the girls live with her and her madness. This relationship is unique in the book, because the girls consciously ignore their mother and work together to erase her from their lives.

The excerpt starts with “Luckily, Milagro and I have each other” (Garcia, 120) which illustrates how the sisters handle the situation with their mother: together. Luz is conscious of their luck: they are going through the same situation and can help each other. This sentence summarises their whole relationship with each other and with their family. Indeed, if they “have each other” in such away, it is because they do not have anyone else. The use of the metaphor “We’re a double helix” (Garcia, 120) is a clever way to express the closeness of the sisters. Indeed as twins, they share the same DNA, represented by a double helix. It is then an extrapolation of a scientific truth used to give an idea of how the girls work together so that “Mamá can’t penetrate [them]” (Garcia, 120).

Luz then reports words from her mother. By quoting Felicia she wants to show her mother’s state of mind and thus brings more substance to her argument. The question: “Do you know the meaning of shells?” seems strange coming from a grown up. Indeed, it is usually young children who ask questions like this one. Felicia’s answer, though very poetic, only reinforces the absurdity of the conversation: “They’re the jewels of the goddess of the sea” (Garcia, 120). The comparisons that Felicia then makes are difficult to comprehend: “You’re my little jewel, Milagro. You, Luz, you’re the light in the night that guides our dreams” (Garcia, 120-121). If they were only a way for her to express her love to her daughters it obviously does not work in her favour but they would be understandable in a poetic way. However, if they are supposed to be interpretations of the girls’ names it does not work completely. Indeed, Luz does mean light, but as Milagro means miracle the comparison to jewels is surprising.

That part is followed by a sarcastic comment from Luz and lets the true disappointment both girls experience appear. It starts with the shortest sentence of the passage: “Pretty words” (Garcia, 121), which summarises Felicia perfectly for Luz: she is made of poetic words that her daughters do not understand, and that only her son listens to. The sentence “Meaningless words that didn’t nourish us, that didn’t comfort us, that kept us prisoners in her alphabet world” (Garcia, 121) enumerates all the reasons why the girls despise their mother. The girls will never forgive Felicia for not being a mother to them, and making them feel locked up in her madness, with no way out.

Luz then shows once again the twins’ closeness by revealing their way of distancing themselves from Felicia’s behaviour: they call her “not-Máma” (Garcia, 121). Luz chooses three examples in which they use this nickname. The first is related to everyday life in a household, highlighting their mother’s incapability of cooking a chicken without burning it and cursing. The second relates to their everyday life, when their mother dances by herself in the dark. The third starts with an apostrophe used as a warning addressed at the second sister to “watch out” for Felicia’s behaviour (Garcia, 121). The twins use this nickname “not-Máma” when Felicia’s actions are not ones of a mother, according to them.

Luz reveals that neither her nor Milagro is able to tell their mother they love her even if Felicia wants them to. Felicia’s reaction is to “[look] right past [the twins]” and Luz believes her mother is looking for another pair of daughters who could say what she wants to hear (Garcia, 121). For Luz and Milagro, not answering to their mother’s expectations is a way to stand up for themselves and show Felicia that she does not deserve their love if she cannot take care of them in the ways a mother is supposed to.

The passage concludes with the mention of Ivanito and his relationship with his mother and his sisters. The boy thinks the twins are “cruel to Mamá” (Garcia, 121), but Luz responds by stating that “[Ivanito] never saw what we saw, he never heard what we heard” (Garcia, 121). This shows the differences between the children. The older ones have known their father, who they respect more than Felicia, ready to forgive him anything and accusing their mother of having driven him away. But Hugo left before Ivanito was born and the boy only knows him through his mother’s eyes. The girls have no pity for the situation their mother was in when Hugo was around. They just do not understand why their mother chased their father away. They only see their mother’s illness and do not find it in themselves to try to understand what happened. Luz says they want to “protect” their brother from their mother’s influence and reveals “he doesn’t want to be protected” (Garcia, 121). This explains why the sisters only count on each other and why they have built a wall between themselves and the other members of their household. Luz nails the coffin of their relationship with their brother with the last sentence of the passage: “He is her gullible rag doll” (Garcia, 121), showing little mercy to either their little brother reduced to a puppet or their mother embodying the puppeteer and dismissing them for the time being.

This extract illustrates for the first time the point of view from one of Felicia’s daughter, and shows how they react to her madness, how they do not have the patience to excuse their mother’s behaviour. Garcia’s theme of mother-daughter relationship is once again explored in depth, this time by an unforgiving daughter whose only solace is found in her twin sister who is the only one who can understand everything she lives.