Dreaming in Cuban Introduction

Pack your bags and get ready to have your cheeks pinched—we're going to grandma's house. Oh yeah, and get ready for some hardcore introspection and reflection, too. This isn't "Over the River and Through the Woods"—it's Cristina García's 1992 novel, Dreaming in Cuban, a poetic meditation on her own experiences as a young Cuban-American who, like her alter-ego Pilar Puente, returned to Cuba as a young woman to meet her maternal grandmother for the first time. Like Pilar, García struggled with her "hyphenated" existence and longed to find a way to reconcile the two sides of her life in a way that would help her feel like a unified person in both public and private life. And here we thought we were just going to get spoiled with grandma's homemade cookies and pie. At least there's always Thanksgiving.

It couldn't have been an easy journey for García, as it isn't for Pilar, her grandmother Celia or her mother, Lourdes. As Pilar says:

Cuba is a peculiar exile, I think, an island-colony. We can reach it by a 30-minute charter flight from Miami yet never reach it at all. ("Six Days," 219)

She's expressing a sentiment that is felt not only by those who have been forced away from their homeland, but by those characters who spend their lives trying to make Cuba into a place that fulfills and sustains them. Let's just say—it's no easy task.

Despite Pilar's kind disposition toward the island and her years of longing to return to it, she finds, as her mother does, that there is something about Cuba that cannot be embraced or touched by outsiders (which they have now become). There is a grandeur and beauty about Havana, in particular, but sadness, poverty, and social challenges keep Cuba isolated and impenetrable far more effectively than any ring of ocean ever could.

Pilar takes a few steps toward her goal of embracing this half of her identity—she even begins dreaming in Spanish—but she can't make the whole journey in one leap. The years of separation from her beloved grandmother and another departure feel utterly daunting to her, though she knows that she really belongs back in her adopted home, New York.

 

What is Dreaming in Cuban About and Why Should I Care?

If you pull up Google Maps and ask it to do something really wonky like provide walking directions from Sweden to Germany, it will find a path for you, despite the forbidding stretch of water that you'd have to cross (okay, okay—there's a ferry). But if you ask that same site to find you a way to get from, say, Hemingway's house in Florida to our main character Celia del Pino's house in Cuba (a mere 90 miles), you'll get the following message:

"Sorry, we could not calculate directions from Key West, Florida to Santa Teresa, La Habana, Cuba."

Okay, we know there's a major difference in navigating between two free European countries and moving between the hostile waters that separate Cuba and the U.S. But the Google Maps exercise reveals a deeper and more poignant truth understood by over one million exiles who have left Cuba since the revolution in 1959: you simply can't go home again. Even if you could physically cross the Straits of Florida and find the home where you grew up, there would be an invisible barrier that would keep you from being part of your native society again. How's that for uncomfortable?

If you are a member of a "hyphenated" family or have the direct experience of immigration yourself, you understand firsthand the difficulty of separation and the need for adaptation and the creation of a new identity. For the rest of us, we have narratives like García's to help build our capacity for imaginative empathy with those who take such unbidden journeys.