Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban Essay Example

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 is the matriarch of the del Pino family from whom many of the conflicts involved in the family originate. As a young woman, Celia meets and falls in love with a Spaniard named Gustavo. Unfortunately for her, Gustavo is married man who soon after a passionate love affair returns to Spain. The mother of Lourdes, Felicia and Javier, is then courted by her future husband Jorge del Pino. Once persuaded to marry Jorge, Celia moves in with Jorge’s mother and sister and Jorge promptly leaves for several months on business. Jorge’s mother and sister are very cruel to Celia and increase their malice after she becomes pregnant. Although revealed later, Jorge did this to intentionally punish Celia for still loving Gustavo in an indirect way. “After we were married, I left her with my mother and my sister. I knew what it would do to her. A part of me wanted to punish her. For the Spaniard” (Garcia 195). Jorge’s mother, Berta Arango del Pino, upon first meeting Celia snatched a white orchid from her hair reprimanding her “I will have no harlotry in my house,” (Garcia 40). Even though Celia did not do much of anything to provoke these hard feelings, the classic in-laws relationship is the first chronologically in the novel. This mere