Dreaming in Cuban
Authors: Cristina Garcia
“A MARVELOUS NOVEL AND THE DEBUT OF
A BRILLIANT STORYTELLER.”
Russell Banks
“A work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekhov story and the hallucinatory magic of novel by Gabriel García Márquez. Though one is dazzled by the book’s small fireworks of imagery, though one stops to marvel at some of the fantastic events that bloom on its pages, the reader is never distracted from the gripping story of its extraordinary heroines and the passions that bind and separate them from one another and the country of their birth.… [Garcia] is blessed with a poet’s ear for language, a historian’s fascination with the past and a musician’s intuitive understanding of the ebb and flow of emotion.”
Michiko Kakutani
The New York Times
“Captures the pain, the distance, the frustrations and the dreams of family dramas with a vivid, poetic prose … A bittersweet novel that leaves a reader with a tender, but clinging sadness. And that sadness is made even stronger by the deadly uncertainties that Cuba continues to live through.”
Alan West
The Washington Post Book World
Chosen by
Publishers Weekly
as One of the Best Books of the Year
“MAGICAL.”
Susan Miller
Newsweek
“A welcome addition to the growing literature of Latin American émigré experience [that] deftly bridges two divergent cultures … The book traces the fortunes, between 1972 and 1980, of a Cuban family divided by both geography and politics. The four central female characters comprise three generations of the colorful Del Pino family.… At its lyrical best, Garcia’s writing owes a debt to the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende.… Cristina Garcia has something vital to say about the workings of family and government and art, and she says it in this novel with considerable authority and charm.”
Hilma Wolitzer
Chicago Tribune Book World
“Ambitious … Should delight readers who can dream of the Caribbean, those connected to the past who aren’t enchained by it, and those who remember or can imagine the generational stages of becoming ‘Americanized.’ ”
Morris Thompson
Detroit Free Press
“A vivid fresco of post revolutionary Cuba, as well as a valid assessment of the motives that led up to the Castro regime during the Batista years.”
Rosario Ferre
Boston Globe
“Original, humorous and a contribution to contemporary Cuban-American literature.”
Marjorie Agosin
The Christian Science Monitor
“A BRILLIANT BOOK …
that transcends and illuminates the familiar form of the immigrant family epic.… Leaping gracefully between a wide cast of narrators, past and present, the elegant and precise language of
Dreaming in Cuban
displays Garcia’s remarkable skill at portraying three strong heroines. Even more impressive is the author’s ability to tackle the historical theme of spiritual exile. By avoiding family melodrama, [Garcia] has elevated
Dreaming in Cuban
to masterpiece status.… With tremendous skill, passion and humor, Garcia just may have written the definitive story of Cuban exiles and some of those they left behind.”
Philip Herter
The Denver Post
“Exceptionally good … has a playful style and imagination that are engaging from the first.”
Gail Pool
Houston Post
“Embracing fantasy and reality with equal fervor, Garcia’s vivid, indelible characters offer an entirely new view of a particular Latin American sensibility.”
Publishers Weekly
“Garcia juggles opposing life forces like a skilled magician accustomed to tossing into the air fiery objects that would explode if they came into contact.… Garcia tells [this] story with an economy of words and a rich, tropical imagery, setting a brisk but comfortable pace. Highly recommended.”
Library Journal
ALSO BY CRISTINA GARCÍA
Monkey Hunting
The Agüero Sisters
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A One World Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1992 by Cristina García
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by One World Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
One World is a registered trademark and the One World colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
William Peter Kosmas, Esq.: “Poemas de la Siguiriya,” “Gacela de la Huida,”
and
“La Casida de las Palomas Obscuras”
by Federico García Lorca from
Obras Completas
(Aguillar, 1987 edition). Copyright © 1986 by Herederos de Federico García Lorca. All rights reserved. For information regarding rights and permissions for works by Federico García Lorca, please contact William Peter Kosmas, Esq., 25 Howitt Road, London NW3 4LT.
Pantheon Books
: English translation of
“Poemas de la Siguiriya”
by Federico García Lorca from
Federico García Lorca: A Life
by Ian Gibson. Copyright © 1989 by Ian Gibson. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
Peer Music
: Excerpt from “
Corazon Rebelde
” by Alberto Arredondo. Copyright © 1963 by Peer International Corporation. Copyright renewed. Excerpt from
“Tratame Como Soy”
by Pedro Brunet. Copyright © 1956 by Peer International Corporation. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-90385
eISBN: 978-0-307-79800-8
v3.1
For my grandmother,
and for Scott
These casual exfoliations are
Of the tropic of resemblances …
—WALLACE STEVENS
(1972)
Ocean Blue
C
elia del Pino, equipped with binoculars and wearing her best housedress and drop pearl earrings, sits in her wicker swing guarding the north coast of Cuba. Square by square, she searches the night skies for adversaries then scrutinizes the ocean, which is roiling with nine straight days of unseasonable April rains. No sign of
gusano
traitors. Celia is honored. The neighborhood committee has voted her little brick-and-cement house by the sea as the primary lookout for Santa Teresa del Mar. From her porch, Celia could spot another Bay of Pigs invasion before it happened. She would be feted at the palace, serenaded by a brass orchestra, seduced by El Líder himself on a red velvet divan.
Celia brings the binoculars to rest in her lap and rubs her eyes with stiffened fingers. Her wattled chin trembles. Her eyes smart from the sweetness of the gardenia tree and the salt of the sea. In an hour or two, the fishermen will return, nets empty. The
yanquis
, rumors go, have ringed the island with nuclear poison, hoping to starve the people and incite a counterrevolution. They
will drop germ bombs to wither the sugarcane fields, blacken the rivers, blind horses and pigs. Celia studies the coconut palms lining the beach. Could they be blinking signals to an invisible enemy?
A radio announcer barks fresh conjectures about a possible attack and plays a special recorded message from El Líder: “Eleven years ago tonight,
compañeros
, you defended our country against American aggressors. Now each and every one of you must guard our future again. Without your support,
compañeros
, without your sacrifices, there can be no revolution.”
Celia reaches into her straw handbag for more red lipstick, then darkens the mole on her left cheek with a black eyebrow pencil. Her sticky graying hair is tied in a chignon at her neck. Celia played the piano once and still exercises her hands, unconsciously stretching them two notes beyond an octave. She wears leather pumps with her bright housedress.
Her grandson appears in the doorway, his pajama top twisted off his shoulders, his eyes vacant with sleep. Celia carries Ivanito past the sofa draped with a faded mantilla, past the water-bleached walnut piano, past the dining-room table pockmarked with ancient history. Only seven chairs remain of the set. Her husband smashed one on the back of Hugo Villaverde, their former son-in-law, and could not repair it for all the splinters. She nestles her grandson beneath a frayed blanket on her bed and kisses his eyes closed.
Celia returns to her post and adjusts the binoculars. The sides of her breasts ache under her arms. There are three fishing boats in the distance—the
Niña
, the
Pinta
, and the
Santa María
. She remembers the singsong way she used to recite their names. Celia moves the binoculars in an arc from left to right, the way she was trained, and then straight across the horizon.
At the far end of the sky, where daylight begins, a dense radiance
like a shooting star breaks forth. It weakens as it advances, as its outline takes shape in the ether. Her husband emerges from the light and comes toward her, taller than the palms, walking on water in his white summer suit and Panama hat. He is in no hurry. Celia half expects him to pull pink tea roses from behind his back as he used to when he returned from his trips to distant provinces. Or to offer her a giant eggbeater wrapped in brown paper, she doesn’t know why. But he comes empty-handed.
