Dreaming in Cuba

In Cristina Garcia's 1992 novel Dreaming in Cuban, Cuba is a pivotal presence. The work examines, through a wealth of female and male characters, with emphasis upon the matrilinear chain, the intense experience of Cubanness. The island country of Cuba is portrayed from within and without, and the distance from it is measured through the fictive evocation of exile, exile once removed, and inner exile.Different views of Cuba both inspire and result from divergent exiles. …

…together and split them apart. Sometimes the greatest distances of all are between those continents whose land masses are still joined: Lourdes and Rufino, Pilar and Lourdes, Felicia and her daughters. The Cuba of Garcia's novel is both the sum and the part o the characters' unions and sunderings, and sometimes the cause of their rending. It is also both the product and the dividend, the irreducible core reality in whose terms they all exist