Cristina Garcia’s novel Dreaming in Cuban paints a portrait of two different Cuban American women and the way exile has helped to shape their identities as American citizens. Lourdes is a wife and mother at the time she flees to America to escape Fidel Castro’s Cuba. She leaves behind her parents and siblings to build her new life with her husband and daughter. Her American ideal is the stuff of movies and 50’s sitcoms. She has no patience for non-believers in the American dream and goes about creating her new identity from scratch. Pilar is a toddler when she leaves Cuba and it is not by choice. She is ripped from the arms of her grandmother and must accompany her parents to the U.S. She is torn between Cuba and America throughout her childhood due to her memories of her grandmother and a yearning to be reconnected with her. She resents the patriotism and blind faith her mother Lourdes places in the American dream and rebels against her mother’s ideals.

Lourdes owns a chain of Yankee Doodle Bakeries and is proud of the business she is building. She is a volunteer for the police force who patrols the neighborhood and believes it to be her “civic duty” (Garcia 136). She does things she believes to be distinctly American like she makes “Jello-O molds with miniature marshmallows” and “barbecues anything she can get her hands on” (Garcia 137). She attends the Thanksgiving Day parade on Fifth Avenue and watches the Rose Parade for New Year’s on television. For the American bicentennial, she plans to sell “tricolor cupcakes and Uncle Sam marzipan” (Garcia 136). She openly opposes anything that hints of communism or Cuban patriotism. “She’s convinced she can fight Communism from behind her bakery counter” (Garcia 136). Her daughter thinks she dreams of sponsoring her own float someday, “maybe a huge burning effigy of El Lider” (Garcia 137).

She only begrudgingly returns for a visit to Cuba in 1980 at the request of her daughter and is miserable the entire time arguing with the locals, complaining about the poor accommodations, criticizing the economy, etc. Garcia shows the contrast of Lourdes’s praise and pride in America with her disdain for Cuba. When she comes within killing distance of El Lider, Lourdes fantasizes about assassinating him, and her final act on the island is helping her nephew escape. She becomes a patriotic American whose love for her new country is partially a reaction to her escape and hatred of her old country. Her exile is her salvation and she is proud of her choice.

In contrast, Pilar struggles to figure out her identity. She takes for granted the country she grows up in because she did not have negative experiences in Cuba. She longs for a return to the island to see her grandmother and views those who bar her way as obstinate for no good reason. Pilar is a product of American society. She is drawn to the rebellious punk culture and uses her art to protest societal norms. She says she likes to “confront people” and that her art says, “Hey, we’re here too and what we think matters!” (Garcia 135). It is not until she returns to Cuba for a visit to her grandmother that she is confronted with the reality of the social, political, and economic unrest of her birthplace. Though she loves Cuba, she belongs in New York. “I know now it’s where I belong – not instead of here, but more than here” (Garcia 236). Her exile becomes real to her and that is when Pilar truly chooses America as her own, ready to claim it as part of her identity.

Works Cited

Garcia, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban. New York, Ballantine Books, 1992.