Watching the Coastline

Celia del Pino, matriarch of the del Pino family, sits on her porch in Santa Teresa del Mar, scanning the horizon for threats to the revolution. Her vigilance is both literal and symbolic: she is a true believer in Castro's Cuba, but also a woman beset by memories and longing. Her husband Jorge, now dead and buried in New York, appears to her in visions, a ghostly presence that blurs the line between past and present. Celia's solitude is punctuated by her care for her grandson Ivanito and her correspondence with her granddaughter Pilar in Brooklyn, whose Spanish is fading. The ocean, with its shifting blues, is both barrier and bridge, separating her from her family abroad and from the life she might have been. Celia's watchfulness is a metaphor for the vigilance required to maintain both revolution and family, even as both are threatened by distance, ideology, and time.

Letters Never Sent

Throughout her life, Celia writes monthly letters to her lost Spanish lover, Gustavo, never mailing them but storing them in a chest. These letters spanning decades, chronicle her emotional landscape: her marriage to Jorge, her struggles with mental illness, her children's births, and the tides of Cuban history. The letters are confessions, meditations, and acts of preservation—Celia's way of holding onto a self that predates the revolution and her family's fractures. They reveal her ambivalence about love, motherhood, and the choices that have defined her. The letters also serve as a counterpoint to the official narratives of Cuba, offering a private, poetic record of longing, regret, and resilience. Through them, we glimpse the inner life of a woman who is both participant in and witness to the island's transformations.

Sisters Divided

Celia's daughters, Lourdes and Felicia, embody the schisms of post-revolutionary Cuba. Lourdes, exiled in Brooklyn, is fiercely anti-Communist, obsessed with order, and determined to erase her Cuban past. She channels her trauma—rape, exile, and loss—into her bakery and her daughter Pilar, whom she tries to mold in her own image. Felicia, left behind in Cuba, is volatile, mystical, and mentally fragile, drawn to santería and haunted by abuse and failed marriages. The sisters' relationship is marked by misunderstanding and distance, their lives shaped by the choices and allegiances of their mother. Their brother Javier, an exile in Czechoslovakia, is similarly estranged. The family's fragmentation mirrors the divided Cuban nation, with each member seeking belonging in different ways—through ideology, ritual, or escape.

The Summer of Coconuts

One summer, Felicia's mental health unravels. She becomes obsessed with coconuts, feeding her children nothing but coconut ice cream, and retreats into a world of music, ritual, and delusion. Her son Ivanito, sensitive and loyal, becomes her companion in these rituals, while her twin daughters, Luz and Milagro, distance themselves, forming a secretive alliance. Felicia's breakdown is both a personal crisis and a reflection of the larger dislocations of Cuban society—her inability to adapt to the revolution, her failed marriages, and her spiritual hunger. The summer ends in tragedy, with Felicia's attempted murder-suicide and her eventual death, leaving Ivanito vulnerable and the family further fractured.

Exile and Return

Years after leaving Cuba, Lourdes and her daughter Pilar return for a brief visit, each carrying their own expectations and wounds. Lourdes is determined to confront the past and assert her American identity, while Pilar seeks connection with her grandmother Celia and a sense of belonging. The journey is marked by misunderstandings, cultural dissonance, and the realization that home is both irretrievable and ever-present. Pilar's artistic sensibility and psychic connection to Celia allow her to bridge some of the gaps, but the visit also exposes the irreconcilable differences between generations and between those who left and those who stayed.

Dancing with Ghosts

Jorge, Celia's husband, returns as a ghost to visit both Celia and Lourdes, offering comfort, confession, and unresolved truths. His spectral presence underscores the persistence of the past and the unfinished business of love, betrayal, and forgiveness. The family's dead—Jorge, Felicia, and others—haunt the living, their stories and secrets shaping the choices of those left behind. The boundaries between life and death, memory and reality, are porous, and the family's history is a palimpsest of loss and longing.

Rituals and Revolutions

Felicia's embrace of santería, the Afro-Cuban religion, is both a source of healing and a sign of her alienation from the secular, rationalist ideals of the revolution. Her rituals, sacrifices, and eventual initiation as a santera are acts of resistance and self-assertion, but also lead to her demise. The novel juxtaposes the public rituals of socialism—marches, courts, and slogans—with the private rituals of faith, magic, and family. Both are attempts to impose order on chaos, to find meaning in suffering, and to claim agency in a world of forces beyond one's control.

The Meaning of Shells

Shells recur throughout the novel as objects of beauty, luck, and divination. For Felicia, they are tokens of the goddess of the sea; for Celia, reminders of childhood and loss. Shells are used in santería rituals to communicate with the gods, and their patterns are read as omens. They also evoke the island's geography—its isolation, its exposure to the tides of history, and the porousness of its boundaries. The shells' meanings shift with each character, but they always point to the interplay of fate and choice, the randomness of survival, and the persistence of memory.

Daughters and Departures

The relationships between mothers and daughters—Celia and Lourdes, Lourdes and Pilar, Felicia and her twins—are fraught with expectation, disappointment, and love. Each generation seeks to define itself against the previous one, yet is bound by invisible threads of inheritance and longing. Pilar's psychic connection to Celia, Felicia's estrangement from her daughters, and Lourdes's attempts to control Pilar all illustrate the complexities of maternal love. Departures—through exile, death, or betrayal—are both wounds and acts of self-preservation.

The Fire Between Them

Fire is both destructive and purifying in the novel. Felicia sets her abusive husband on fire, an act that liberates her but also marks her for further suffering. The fire between characters—whether sexual, ideological, or emotional—drives them apart and brings them together. Passion, in all its forms, is both a source of vitality and a force of ruin. The novel suggests that to live fully is to risk being consumed by one's own desires and convictions.

The Lost Language

As the family disperses across countries and generations, language becomes a barrier as much as a bridge. Pilar's Spanish fades, Celia's letters go unread, and the family's stories are lost or distorted in translation. The "languages lost" are not just linguistic, but emotional and cultural—the ways of understanding and expressing love, grief, and identity. The novel is haunted by the fear that what is most essential cannot be communicated, and that exile is as much a loss of language as of place.

Portraits in Blue

Pilar, the artist, seeks to capture her family's history and her own identity through painting. Her portraits of Celia, rendered in shades of blue, are acts of preservation and interpretation. Art becomes a way to resist erasure, to assert individuality, and to bridge the gaps between generations and cultures. Pilar's struggle to find her own voice—against her mother's control, her grandmother's expectations, and the weight of history—is emblematic of the larger search for meaning in a world of loss.

Betrayal at the Embassy

In the novel's climax, Lourdes helps Ivanito, Felicia's son, escape Cuba during the Mariel boatlift, while Pilar, torn between loyalty to her grandmother and compassion for her cousin, lies to Celia about his departure. The embassy, a site of hope and desperation, becomes a crucible for the family's conflicting loyalties. The act of betrayal—necessary for Ivanito's freedom—underscores the impossibility of reconciling all claims of love, duty, and justice. The family's story is one of necessary betrayals and the costs of survival.

The Weight of Memory

Memory is both a refuge and a trap for the characters. Celia's recollections, Lourdes's traumas, and Pilar's inherited nostalgia all shape their actions and self-understanding. The novel suggests that memory is selective, constructed, and often at odds with official histories. The weight of what is remembered—and what is forgotten—determines the possibilities for reconciliation and renewal. The family's story is a microcosm of Cuba's, marked by cycles of hope, disillusionment, and endurance.

The Sea's Embrace

In the novel's ambiguous ending, Celia, bereft after Ivanito's departure and Pilar's lie, walks into the sea, removing her pearl earrings and surrendering them to the waves. The ocean, which has always separated and connected her to her family, becomes her final refuge. Whether this act is suicide, transcendence, or a return to origins is left unresolved. The sea's embrace is both an ending and a beginning, a dissolution of boundaries and a merging with the island's eternal rhythms.

Generations in Exile

The novel closes with the family scattered—some in Cuba, some in exile, some dead, some dreaming. Pilar, now an adult, reflects on her inheritance: the stories, losses, and strengths passed down through the women of her family. The cycles of exile and return, betrayal and forgiveness, continue. Yet there is also the possibility of renewal, of forging new identities from the fragments of the past. The family's story is unfinished, as is Cuba's—a testament to the enduring power of memory, imagination, and love.

Characters

Celia del Pino

Celia is the emotional and ideological center of the novel—a woman whose life spans Cuba's tumultuous twentieth century. Her devotion to the revolution is as much a matter of faith as politics, rooted in her longing for justice and her need for meaning after personal betrayals. Her unsent letters to Gustavo reveal a poetic, passionate soul, haunted by what might have been. As a mother, she is both nurturing and distant, her love complicated by her own traumas and ideals. Celia's psychic connection to her granddaughter Pilar offers hope for continuity, even as her family fractures. Her final walk into the sea is both an act of surrender and a gesture of defiance—a refusal to be defined by loss alone.

Lourdes Puente

Lourdes, Celia's eldest daughter, is shaped by trauma—rape, exile, and the loss of her homeland. In Brooklyn, she becomes a successful baker, a fierce anti-Communist, and a mother determined to mold her daughter in her own image. Her obsession with order, cleanliness, and American identity is both a shield and a prison. Lourdes's relationship with Pilar is fraught with misunderstanding and control, yet also marked by moments of fierce love and protection. Her journey to Cuba is a confrontation with the past she cannot escape, and her role in Ivanito's escape is both an act of redemption and a perpetuation of the family's cycles of loss.

Felicia del Pino

Felicia, Celia's younger daughter, is the most fragile and volatile member of the family. Abused by her husband, abandoned by lovers, and alienated from the revolution, she seeks solace in santería and the rituals of the body. Her mental illness is both a personal tragedy and a metaphor for the dislocations of Cuban society. Felicia's relationships with her children are marked by intensity and instability—her son Ivanito is her confidant and victim, while her twins, Luz and Milagro, are both her judges and her legacy. Felicia's death is the novel's most intimate loss, a reminder of the costs of both resistance and surrender.

Pilar Puente

Pilar, Lourdes's daughter and Celia's granddaughter, is the novel's primary lens on the younger generation. Raised in Brooklyn, she is caught between cultures, languages, and loyalties. Her psychic connection to Celia, her artistic vocation, and her rebellious spirit make her both outsider and heir. Pilar's search for identity is a search for home—a place where she can reconcile the fragments of her family's history and her own desires. Her act of betrayal at the embassy is a moment of painful maturity, a recognition that love sometimes requires sacrifice. Pilar's art and memory offer the possibility of renewal, even as she acknowledges the losses that define her.

Ivanito Villaverde

Ivanito, Felicia's son, is a child marked by trauma and loyalty. His bond with his mother is both sustaining and destructive, and his eventual escape from Cuba is both a liberation and a new wound. Ivanito's sensitivity, linguistic talent, and longing for connection make him emblematic of the costs of exile and the hope for new beginnings. His fate is left open, a question mark at the end of the family's story.

Jorge del Pino

Jorge, Celia's husband and Lourdes's father, is a man divided by allegiances—to Cuba, to America, to his family. His death in exile and subsequent return as a ghost allow him to confess his failures and seek forgiveness. Jorge's relationships with his wife and daughters are marked by both love and harm, and his presence in the novel is a reminder of the unfinished business of the past.

Luz and Milagro Villaverde

Felicia's twin daughters, Luz and Milagro, form a secretive alliance in the face of their mother's instability. They are both witnesses to and victims of the family's dysfunction, yet also possess a resilience and pragmatism that allow them to survive. Their relationship with Ivanito is ambivalent, marked by both protection and exclusion.

Javier del Pino

Celia's only son, Javier, flees Cuba for Czechoslovakia, where he builds a new life but is ultimately undone by loss and dislocation. His return to Cuba, broken and alcoholic, is a testament to the costs of exile and the difficulty of finding home. Javier's story is a minor but poignant thread, illustrating the novel's themes of displacement and longing.

Herminia Delgado

Herminia, Felicia's childhood friend and a practitioner of santería, is a source of support, wisdom, and healing. Her presence in the novel highlights the importance of Afro-Cuban culture and the ways in which faith and ritual offer solace and meaning in the face of suffering.

Gustavo Sierra de Armas

Gustavo, Celia's Spanish lover, is more absence than presence—a figure of longing, possibility, and regret. His role in the novel is to embody the roads not taken, the loves not realized, and the ways in which the past continues to shape the present.

Plot Devices

Epistolary Fragments

Celia's unsent letters to Gustavo serve as a recurring device, offering intimate access to her thoughts, emotions, and the private history of the family. These letters break the linear narrative, providing context, backstory, and a counterpoint to the public events of the revolution. They also highlight the theme of communication and miscommunication—what is said, what is withheld, and what is lost in translation.

Multiple Perspectives

The novel is told through a mosaic of voices—Celia, Lourdes, Felicia, Pilar, Ivanito, and others—each offering their own version of events. This polyphonic structure allows for a nuanced exploration of memory, truth, and identity. The shifting perspectives underscore the impossibility of a single, authoritative narrative, and invite the reader to piece together the family's story from fragments and contradictions.

Magical Realism

Dreaming in Cuban employs elements of magical realism—ghosts, psychic connections, prophetic dreams, and rituals that alter reality. These devices reflect the characters' inner lives and the cultural context of Cuba, where the boundaries between the material and spiritual worlds are fluid. Magical realism allows the novel to explore themes of loss, longing, and transformation in ways that transcend the literal.

Symbolism of the Sea and Shells

The sea is a constant presence in the novel, symbolizing both separation and connection, danger and possibility. Shells, too, are laden with meaning—tokens of luck, tools of divination, and reminders of the island's porous boundaries. These natural symbols ground the novel's exploration of exile, memory, and the search for home.

Foreshadowing and Circular Structure

The novel's structure is circular, beginning and ending with Celia at the sea. Events and motifs—letters, dances, rituals—recur in different forms, creating a sense of inevitability and fate. Foreshadowing is used to build tension and to suggest that the family's story is part of larger cycles of history and loss.

Analysis

Dreaming in Cuban is a lyrical, multi-generational exploration of family, exile, and the enduring power of memory. Cristina García weaves together the personal and the political, showing how the Cuban revolution fractures families as much as it transforms a nation. The novel's women—Celia, Lourdes, Felicia, and Pilar—are both victims and agents, navigating the demands of history, ideology, and desire. Through its shifting perspectives, magical realism, and rich symbolism, the novel interrogates the nature of identity, the costs of loyalty and betrayal, and the ways in which the past persists in the present. García suggests that exile is not just a matter of geography, but of language, memory, and the heart. The novel's ambiguous ending—Celia's walk into the sea—underscores the impossibility of closure, the persistence of longing, and the hope that, through art and imagination, new connections can be forged across the divides of time, place, and loss.

Last updated: May 21, 2025