Interpersonal And Familial Relationships In Dreaming In Cuban By Gabriel Garcia

Dreaming in Cuban explores the interpersonal and familial relationships of one Cuban family. The matriarch Celia and her American granddaughter Pilar serve as the two main protagonists. Much of the novel focuses on their struggles with identity and their relationships with their families, though the novel dedicates a significant amount to tell the story of Lourdes Puente, the mother of Pilar and the daughter of Celia. Throughout Dreaming in Cuban, Lourdes is shown to be unable to properly cope, which began with the trauma of miscarrying her son shortly before the family fled to the United States. She lacks the proper familial support system outside of her father to do this, so she is shown using sex and food to cope with her helplessness as

This was a happy event, until an accident forced her to miscarry. This leaves Lourdes with the grief of losing her son, who she had originally planned to name in honor of her beloved father Jorge. The reflecting pool at the Frick Museum reminds her of this, “[she] remembers what the doctors in Cuba told her. That the baby inside her had died. That they’d have to inject her with saline solution to expel the baby’s remains. That she would have no more children” (Garcia 174). Her son represented hope and a chance for a positive maternal bond with one of her children, her very last. Lourdes notices a delinquent boy on her walk one day and imagines her son and what she hopes he would have been like. “He would have come to her for guidance, pressed her hand to his cheek, and told her he loved her. Lourdes would have talked to her son the way Rufino talks to Pilar, for companionship. Lourdes suffers with this knowledge” (Garcia 129). Lourdes has no one in America that she truly connects to. She lacks the closeness that Rufino and Pilar share with one another which in turn serves to further isolate Lourdes. These relationships are similar those of Lourdes and her parents, as Lourdes had a close relationship with her father and a difficult relationship with her