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Love
Love hurts. Love scars. And not to mix idioms, but love also bleeds. Love commits you to an insane asylum. It holds you out by the ankle and drops you in the lap of whoever happens to be there. It looks like rejection and feels like hatred. García really elevates the love/hate binary to another plane in Dreaming in Cuban, complicating most family relationships by showing that affection and loyalty can make the characters do some very unsavory things. Think of Felicia and her attempted murder of her child or her mutilation of Graciela Moreira. Celia almost forfeits her life because her passion is thwarted. "Protective" gods turn on their devotees and crush them like bugs, despite their diligent attentions. Don't despair: good love exists (think Celia and Pilar)—you'll just have to do a little digging to get at it.
Familial love appears to be as complicated and difficult as erotic love in García's work.
Celia's desire to "live for passion" belies a need to keep from disappearing beneath the apparatus of an uncaring and impoverished social order.
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