Dreaming in Cuban

“Felicia laughed when she remembered how her mother had warned her not to bring shells home. After the tidal wave, the house was full of them.”

For Celia, shells are harbingers of bad luck, but for Felicia, they are a connection to the sea and to the Yoruba Orisha of Yemayá. The women in this family remain deeply divided by their beliefs, and the divergent opinion here on the meaning of shells illustrates their profound ideological differences. Although not entirely free from superstition, Celia is mostly atheist in her religious orientation. Felica, on the other hand, grows increasingly dedicated to Santería as the narrative progresses.

“Mom says ‘communist’ the way some people say ‘cancer,’ low and fierce.”

Here, the author provides evidence of the deep ideological divides within this family, for this passage highlights The Impact of Political Ideology on Individuals. Lourdes is staunchly anti-communist, and this view represents a rejection of her mother and her mother’s belief system. Lourdes’s own daughter feels more of an affinity for Celia than for Lourdes. Each generation of the family is thus in conflict with the other generations.

“For twenty-five years Celia wrote her Spanish lover a letter on the eleventh day of every month, then stored it in a satin-covered chest beneath her bed. Celia has removed her drop pearl earrings only nine times, to clean them. No one ever remembers her without them.”

This passage establishes the important symbolism of Celia’s drop pearl earrings. They are a present from her former lover Gustavo, and she wears them every day despite the relative brevity of the relationship in the grand scheme of her life. This personality quirk emphasizes her inability to escape the past.

“Celia hitchhikes to Plaza de la Revolución, where El Líder, wearing his customary fatigues, is making a speech. Workers pack the square, cheering his words that echo and collide in mid-air. Celia makes a decision. Ten years or twenty, whatever she has left, she will devote to El Líder, give herself to his revolution.”

This passage presents the motif of El Líder and the cult of personality surrounding Cuba’s dictator. Celia is firmly dedicated to Castro, but her daughters are not, and this difference highlights the deep political divide that runs through each generation of this family.

“Memory cannot be confined, Celia realizes, looking out the kitchen window to the sea.”

This passage illustrates the importance of memory, both for Celia and for the Cuban diasporic community. Celia keeps her early memories alive despite the vast changes that eclipse her main focus, and this aspect of the novel provides a broader metaphor for the way that individuals keep memories of their home countries alive even in exile.

“Even though I’ve been living in Brooklyn all my life, it doesn’t feel like home to me. I’m not sure Cuba is, but I want to find out.”

This passage, spoken by Pilar, explores the theme of Immigration, Exile, and Cuban Identity. Pilar’s character illustrates the way that home-country identifications persist even after immigration. Part of Pilar’s arc in this narrative is locating a sense of her Cuban identity, and she ultimately finds it through Santería and through her voyage to Cuba.

“When Lourdes was a child in Cuba, she used to wait anxiously for her father to return from his trips selling small fans and electric brooms in distant provinces.”

This passage speaks to Lourdes’s characterization. As Celia tells Pilar during the nights when she appears to her granddaughter, Lourdes’s angry, intractable personality is rooted in pain, in memories of her childhood in Cuba, and in the difficulty of balancing her demanding job with running a household and raising a family. Here, Lourdes has just been visited by her father’s spirit and cannot stop thinking about him. Although she is somewhat antagonistic to her daughter, she is a complex and not entirely unsympathetic figure.

“She ponders the transmigrations from the southern latitudes, the millions moving north. What happens to their languages? The warm burial grounds they leave behind? What of their passions lying stiff and untranslated in their breasts? Lourdes considers herself lucky. Immigration has redefined her, and she is grateful.”

This passage highlights the theme of Immigration, Exile, and Cuban Identity. The experiences of immigrants vary greatly, and Lourdes is markedly different from her husband in that she embraces America and a sense of American identity. However, she is aware that for many, migration is a kind of rupture and, like her husband, some immigrants are never the same after they leave their home country.

“Pilar doesn’t hate you, hija. She just hasn’t learned to love you yet.” 

This passage illustrates the theme of Fraught Family Bonds. Many of the women in this family struggle in their relationships with either their mother or their daughter. Here, Jorge explains to Lourdes that her bond with Pilar is still deep, even if the two argue.

“Felicia knew that her mother, who stayed at home reading her books and rocking on the porch swing, had an instinctive distrust of the ecclesiastical. She suspected her mother of being an atheist and only hoped she wouldn’t burn in hell for eternity like Lourdes and the nuns said.”

This passage speaks to the themes of Fraught Family Bonds and Immigration, Exile, and Cuban Identity. Celia’s family is divided by ideology, exile, and their own difficult relationships with one another. Religious differences are a key point of contention amongst these characters, and each woman practices religion (or refuses to) in her own individual manner.

“That night Celia sleeps restlessly. Voices call to her in ragged words stitched together from many languages, like dissonant scraps of quilt.”

On this night, Celia’s daughter Felicia is attempting suicide, and although the two have not spoken about it, there is some part of Celia that can sense her daughter’s actions. This shows how deeply connected the women in this family are in spite of their differences.

“I still love you Gustavo, but it’s a habitual love, a wound in the knee that predicts rain. Memory is a skilled seducer. I write to you because I must.”

This passage speaks to Celia’s difficulty in forgetting her first love, Gustavo. She still wears the drop pearl earrings that he gave to her and writes him letters for many years after he leaves Cuba without her. Celia will move on from this relationship only at the very end of the novel, when she finally casts the drop pearl earrings into the sea.

“Felicia tries to shake off her doubts, but all she sees is a country living on slogans and agitation, a people always on the brink of war.”

This passage speaks to the themes of Fraught Family Bonds and The Impact of Ideology on Individuals. Although Celia and Javier are dedicated communists, Felica and Lourdes are not. Their family is divided by ideological differences, and those differences contribute to the tense nature of their familial relationships.

“Her daughters cannot understand her commitment to El Líder. Lourdes sends her snapshots of her pastries from her bakery in Brooklyn. Each glistening éclair is a grenade aimed at Celia’s political beliefs, each strawberry shortcake proof, in butter, cream, and eggs, of Lourdes’ success in America, and a reminder of the ongoing shortages in Cuba.”

This passage focuses on Celia’s characterization and the themes of Fraught Family Bonds and The Impact of Political Ideology on Individuals. Her children do not understand her obsession with the revolution, and it remains a source of division within the family, even as it defines Celia. The quote also uses rich visual imagery to compare the decadence of the bakery’s wares with warlike imagery, thereby implying the intensity of the ideological clashes between mother and daughter.

“Luckily Milagro and I have each other. We’re a double helix, tight and impervious. That’s why Mamá can’t penetrate us.”

This passage enhances the characterization of the twins Luz and Milagro as well as the theme of Fraught Family Bonds. Like many of the other women in their family, the twins do not feel particularly bonded with their mother and look for love and support from other family members. Their deep relationship with each other—characterized by the image of the double helix—also emphasizes their reliance on their sisterly relationship to replace the absence of close parental bonds.

“Lourdes enjoys patrolling the streets in her thick-soled black shoes. These shoes, it seems to her, are a kind of equalizer. She can run in them if she has to, jump curbs, traverse the buckled, faulted sidewalks of Brooklyn without twisting an ankle. These shoes are power.”

This passage characterizes Lourdes as a decisive, forceful person who enjoys maintaining order and discipline. She is just as hard-working in her job as an auxiliary policewoman as she is at her bakery, and her devotion to America can be seen in both roles. She also takes great pride in becoming a fully productive member of her adopted society.

“It became clear to Lourdes shortly after she and Rufino moved to New York City that he would never adapt. Something came unhinged in his brain that would make him incapable of working in a conventional way. There was a part of him that could never leave the finca or the comfort of its cycles, and this diminished him for any other life.”

This passage highlights the theme of Immigration, Exile, and Cuban Identity. Immigration is not a monolithic experience for each person who leaves their home country, and the author strives to convey the myriad philosophies and beliefs of the women who populate her novel. This particular passage illustrates the fact that although Lourdes loves the United States and readily adapts to life in exile, Rufino does not. A part of him will always remain in Cuba.

“The family is hostile to the individual.”

Pilar speaks these bleakly worded lines, which represent the theme of Fraught Family Bonds. For many of these characters, Pilar included, the family is not a space of support and safety, but one of struggle, and although each woman’s life undergoes monumental changes, these conflicts are never fully resolved.

“Most days Cuba is kind of dead to me. But every once in awhile a wave of longing will hit me and it’s all I can do not to hijack a plane to Havana or something.”

This passage enhances Pilar’s characterization by showing the pull of the exile’s home country. Despite growing up primarily in the United States, Pilar feels increasingly drawn to Cuba, and part of her narrative arc becomes an exploration of her Cuban roots.

“Above all, Lourdes and her father continue to denounce the communist threat to America. Every day they grow more convinced that the dearth of bad news about Cuba is a conspiracy by the leftist media to keep international support for El Líder strong.”

This passage speaks to several of the novel’s themes. Lourdes shares an anti-communist political orientation with her husband, Rufino, which is representative of the theme of the Impact of Political Ideology on Individuals. Because their political beliefs are in opposition to those of Celia, this passage also illustrates the theme of Fraught Family Bonds.

“I told her that at my house we had many shells, that they told the future and were the special favorites of Yemayá, goddess of the seas.”

This passage illustrates the author’s interest in the Afro-Cuban tradition of Santería. Yemayá is an Orisha that is symbolic of the sea and of divine motherhood, and Felicia is drawn to her for both of these reasons. It is through Santería that Felicia comes to understand herself and to heal, although her life’s journey will ultimately end in sorrow.

“And your mother. I couldn’t bear to watch her, she had fallen in love again. She thought only of the revolution.”

This passage characterizes Celia’s communist zeal as she replaces her love for Gustavo with her new dedication to the revolution and a growing obsession with the figure of Castro. In this way, she continues to focus her energy in areas other than her family, and her ideological fixations will ultimately fuel a myriad of rifts and conflicts that continue to plague her daughters and granddaughter long after her family flees Cuba.

“I’m not religious but I get the feeling that it’s the simplest rituals, the ones that are integrated with the earth and its seasons that are the most profound. It makes more sense to me than the more abstract forms of worship.”

This passage identifies the varied purposes of religion within the narrative. Each of the characters has their own set of individualized religious beliefs, and these beliefs shape who they are and how they understand their Cuban heritage.