Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban Essays

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Pages: 14

Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban tells the story about three generations of a Cuban family and their different views provoked by the Cuban revolution. Though part of the same family, an outsider might classify them as adversaries judging by relationships between one another, the exiled family members, and the differentiations between political views. Although all of these central themes reoccur over and over throughout the narrative, family relationships lie at the heart of the tale. The relationships between these Cuban family members are for the most part ruptured by any or a combination of the above themes. Every individual relationship mentioned in the book consists of at least one direct family member of Celia del Pino. Celia …show more content…
The eldest daughter of the family also idolized her father Jorge, imparting his personal opinions directly to her personality of pro-America and pro-Capitalism. Lourdes hates the new leader that rises to power once she exiles to America, El Lider, whom she believes is just attempting to milk Cuba of all of its goods and resources for personal gain and gain of his fellow Cuban aristocrats. “She [Lourdes] imagines seizing El Lider’s pistol, pressing it to his temple, squeezing the trigger until he hears the decisive click. She wants him to see her face, to remember her eyes and the hatred in them” (Garcia 237). In contrast, El Lider represents hope and a new beginning for Cuba through the eyes of Celia making political beliefs another area of dispute. “Ten years or twenty, whatever she has left, she will devote to El Lider, give herself to his revolution” (Garcia 44). In addition to these reasons, another important point for Lourdes disagreements with her mother includes Celia being unaware that Lourdes is trying to escape the memory of her rape by government soldiers by fleeing to the United States. Celia, who is particularly attached to Pilar, suffers from her absence of her granddaughter and is disheartened by her family’s nomadic life style. Because all of her children are either in completely different countries altogether or missing half the time, Abuela Celia feels powerless to change these circumstances. Though the relationship between Lourdes and