Dreaming in Cuban: A Matrix Light Summary & Analysis

1977. A month ago, Lourdes stopped eating—she’s lost 34 pounds. During a long morning walk, Lourdes thinks about Pilar, away at art school in Rhode Island. Lourdes is sickened by the kinds of men—hippies—with whom Pilar associates. She doesn’t understand how Pilar turned out as a bad seed, rejecting rules and religion just like Celia does. Lourdes stops in a diner and uses the pay phone to dial up Pilar and call her a whore for sleeping around.

Though Lourdes didn’t plan to stop eating—she’s simply repulsed by the smell and sight of food nowadays, and she longs for emptiness. Eventually, she loses 82 pounds after switching to a liquid protein diet and obsessively riding her exercise bike. Jorge still visits Lourdes at twilight and worries about her condition, but Lourdes won’t admit that anything’s wrong.

With Jorge’s encouragement, Pilar begins to imagine a nationwide chain of Yankee Doodle bakeries. She and Jorge also chat about the ongoing communist threat and the leftist media conspiracy in support of El Líder. They blame the Democrats for allowing communist influence in the U.S.; it’s time for another Joe McCarthy, they think.

Lourdes disapproves of Pilar’s painting, but when journalists question her about it, she becomes even more determined to keep it on display—she won’t let anyone tell her what to do on her own property. In fact, if it weren’t for the safety pin in Liberty’s nose and the bugs in the background, it would be a nice painting. Lourdes doesn’t understand why Pilar always goes too far—did she inherit that from Celia?

By Thanksgiving Day, Lourdes has lost 118 pounds, meeting her goal. Today, she’ll eat for the first time in months. She’s even bought a size-six Chanel suit for the occasion. Lourdes beams when Pilar comes home and sees her physical transformation. When Pilar picks a fight about Cuba at the dinner table, Lourdes resists the urge to reply. Instead, she starts eating turkey and yams feverishly.

The next day, Lourdes is back to eating sticky buns. On a family outing to the Frick Museum, she eats hot dogs, shish kebabs, and pretzels as if she’s afraid of starving. At the museum, she sits beside a reflecting pool and feels an inner wound reopening. She remembers learning that she’d miscarried and that she would be unable to have any more children.

Pilar (1978). Pilar grew up hearing that Abuela Celia was an atheist, and she liked the sound of that. Pilar herself stopped believing in God imperceptibly, without quite realizing it.

Pilar looks at lots of old photographs of Celia, which Lourdes keeps hidden. In the pictures, Celia looks like she could be either happy or sad. Pilar has a trick to help her determine someone’s public face from their private one: if they’re left-handed, like Celia, the right side of her face reveals her true feelings. In each photograph, Pilar covers the left side of Celia’s face and sees the truth every time.

Pilar feels much more connected to Celia than to Lourdes, even though they haven’t seen each other for 17 years and no longer communicate at night. From afar, Celia has given Pilar self-confidence and the ability to trust in her own perceptions. Pilar finds this difficult around Lourdes, who Pilar thinks rewrites history to suit her own purposes. For example, Pilar remembers the incident in the Miami airport when she was a toddler differently—it was Lourdes who ran away from her that day.

Lourdes’s Yankee Doodle bakeries have become meeting places for “shady Cuban extremists” to discuss anti-Castro politics. They even celebrate the murder of a Miami journalist who supported the reestablishment of diplomatic ties with Cuba. Pilar can’t understand how her mother could be Celia’s daughter, or how she could be Lourdes’s daughter—she thinks something got mixed up among the three of them.

Even after studying abroad in Italy, Pilar feels she doesn’t know enough about the world to communicate anything meaningful about it, and she senses she’s still waiting for her life to begin. Right now, she’s dating a guy named Rubén, from Peru; he, too, is from a politically divided family. They met at Barnard, to which Pilar transferred after Italy. As Pilar thinks about Rubén in the library, she decides to surprise him in his room. But when she gets there, she finds him having sex with a Dutch exchange student.

An hour later, sitting in a coffee shop, Pilar reads the classified ads and sees one for someone selling an acoustic bass. She remembers her old boyfriend, Max, telling her she’d make a good bass player. She buys the bass and lugs it all the way home. Immediately, she puts on a Velvet Underground album and starts playing along, even though she doesn’t know what she’s doing, and she finally feels her life begin.