Dreaming in Cuban
SynopsisPlot
Cristina García’s acclaimed book is the haunting, bittersweet story of a family experiencing a country’s revolution and the revelations that follow. The lives of Celia del Pino and her husband, daughters, and grandchildren mirror the magical realism of Cuba itself, a landscape of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption.
Story
About this book
Dreaming in Cuban follows three generations of the del Pino family, split between Havana and Brooklyn from the 1970s through the 1980s. At the center is Celia del Pino, a woman whose loyalty to the Cuban revolution shapes her daily life on the island. Her daughters and grandchildren carry different attachments: some remain in Cuba, others have settled in the United States. The distance between them is geographic but also political and emotional, and the novel traces how those divides deepen or shift over time.
Cristina García's first novel blends domestic detail with elements of magical realism. The story moves between locations and time periods, and between the interior lives of its characters. Santería, dreams, unsent letters, and personal memory all appear alongside the concrete realities of rationing, exile, and family estrangement. The women of the del Pino family occupy the foreground. Their choices about love, belief, creativity, and allegiance carry the narrative forward, while the men in their lives often recede into the background.
The novel is set against Cuba's post-revolutionary landscape, a place where political idealism coexists with material scarcity. García draws on both Havana and Brooklyn as settings that shape her characters in distinct ways.
