Dreaming In Cuban

Felicia offers an alternate view to Ivanito’s teacher, and a nearly identical view to that of Lourdes when she tells Ivanito to “imagine winter and its white extinguishings” (88). There is a desire in the Del Piño women to escape the past and its haunting of memory. Once one has escaped from the thralls of a violent history, there is a denial of the initial event that took place. After living in New York for years, when Lourdes speaks of Cuba it is only with disdain. “She wants no part of Cuba, no part of its wretched carnival floats creaking with lies, no part of Cuba at all, which Lourdes claims never possessed her” (73). Garcia’s personification of Cuba, giving it the human trait of ownership delineates the lack of autonomy that Lourdes
Music has, in many ways, the ability to transport one to a different reality. Throughout Dreaming in Cuban, music serves as a tool that blurs the boundaries that exist geographically and spatially between the characters. Garcia utilizes unique devices in her narrative to connect the women despite their generational differences. In 1955, Celia writes in a letter, “The singer’s voice sounded just like Beny Moré’s in his finest years. One song made me cry, and I saw others crying, too, as they tossed their coins in the musicians’ hat” (165). When writing to Gustavo about the singer’s voice, Celia is immediately transported to a concert that she witnessed first hand, and she has the visceral sensations that she did at that time. In a nearly identical way, when Felicia is trying to block out memories of the violence she endured at the hand of her husband, she too relies on the melody of the Beny Moré song to transport her to an alternate reality. Of this time, she says, “Only the Beny Moré records, played loud and warped as they are, lessen the din” (75). When the music stops playing, Felicia is once again flooded with sensations of the harsh present that she is trying to escape. Garcia describes this shift saying, “when the music stops, she sees her husband’s hands, big knuckled with long, square-tipped fingers, inordinately large
Her remembrance resists the idea of light as a clarifying and natural source of truth, making it instead a tool of erasure for one’s personal memory” (155). Indeed, the erasing of memory to construct a new reality in its place is one facet of what light signifies. However, Garcia’s assigning of an opposite meaning to the concept, also serves to question what lies beneath it. By utilizing something that is traditionally accepted as one thing, to represent something entirely different, Garcia questions what typically is the firmly defined boundary between truth and fabrication. Interrogating this boundary thus suggests that the notions of truth and lie may not be such black and white concepts. If light is not pure—not truth—but rather something to be feared, is it then possible that what we believe to be the truth is not