Last week, our class concluded a vibrant discussion on Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992). This novel has usually been examined as a story of homecoming, reconciliation, and the possibilities within cultural hybridity. We began our discussion of the novel by laying out its major thematic concerns, such as nationhood, home, identity or lack of, motherhood and family, exile and diaspora, duality and hybridity. While this text does not overtly deal with a “monster” or a “haunting,” I wanted students to see those horrors that lie underneath: for example, how does the history of exile and diaspora lead to horrendous or traumatic events and feelings? In the family saga that is described in Dreaming in Cuban we see the traumatic aftermath of the Cuban Revolution (the primary horror, I argue, in the novel). As one of my students noted, the novel opens with a family tree that perpetually ruptured throughout the text.
Dreaming in Cuban tells the story, primarily, of Celia del Pino, her daughter, Lourdes Puente, and granddaughter, Pilar. While Celia is a deeply loyal to the Cuban revolutionary project, Lourdes has left Cuba to open a series of bakeries in New York, and contrarily to her mother, invested in an American narrative of upward mobility through the accumulation of capital. In Pilar, as most scholars have noted, we see a mixture of both women—as she states, she is neither of Cuban but instead “more than.” Although many have seen an ameliorative project emerge in this narrative—a recuperative trajectory that allows Pilar to be of two places at once—my class astutely observed the trauma that all women in the narrative experience and that, importantly, is never alleviated. For example, Felicia (Celia’s second daughter) dies a horrific death after being a victim of domestic violence and ruinous mental health issues (for both herself and her children); Lourdes is sexually assaulted by a soldier after the Revolution, who carves unintelligible words in her stomach after the rape.
In effect, Cuba is represented in the novel as a source of pain and terror, even as Celia is devoted to the communist mission. In fact, Dreaming in Cuban shows us that there is no future for Cuba or Celia. Her family has died or left her behind, a sign of betrayal (Pilar, indeed lies to her about Ivanito leaving the country) that shows her there is no space for her. Many of my students associated her final moments in the novel (a conclusion that brings us to the novel’s opening in which Celia is “guarding the coast of Cuba” (3) and jumps into the ocean after her husband’s ghost), with Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). As an English teacher, I could not be happier with this intertextual analysis! In Celia’s final moments, they saw a form of resignation:
Celia steps into the ocean and imagines she’s a soldier on a mission—for the moon, or the palms, or El Líder. The water rises quickly around her. It submerges her throat and her nose, her open eyes that do not perceive salt. Her hair floats loosely from her skull and waves above her in the tide. She breathes through her skin, she breathes through her wounds. (243)
I also presented an alternative reading of this final moment by asking: what if we take the text seriously when it says that Celia cannot perceive salt and that she is breathing underwater? What if this is a moment in which without a place for her in home or nation, Celia is becoming something else?
Monsters, Hauntings, and Horror in Latinx Literature & Film 