Dreaming in Cuban is the first novel written by author Cristina García, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. This novel moves between Cuba and the United States featuring three generations of a single family. The novel focuses particularly on the females—Celia del Pino, her daughters Lourdes and Felicia, and her granddaughter Pilar. While most of the novel is written in the third person, some sections are written in the first person, and letters are also included. The novel is not told in linear fashion; it moves between characters and jumps in time.
The novel’s central themes include family relationships, exile, the divisiveness of politics, and memory. Cuban history and culture are important in the novel, including important historical events and the elements of Santería that appear throughout the novel.
Read more about Dreaming In Cuban: Plot Summary, Important Characters, Themes, Novel Structure
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“I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structure—the web—of society needed reform, not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)
“Because a person is born the subject of a given state, you deny the sovereignty of the people? How about the child of Cuban slaves who is born a slave, is that an argument for slavery? The one is a fact as well as the other. Why then, if you use legal arguments in the one case, you don’t in the other?”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)