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Javier is the youngest of Celia and Jorge’s children; he’s Lourdes and Felicia’s brother and Irinita’s father. Unlike his sisters, Javier doesn’t figure prominently in the novel. He is a scientifically gifted young boy who is frequently criticized by Jorge. He secretly sympathizes with Celia’s communist politics and ultimately goes to Czechoslovakia, where he becomes a professor of biochemistry, marries, and has a daughter, Irinita. After his wife leaves him, he returns to Cuba, heartsick and cancer-ridden. He later disappears from Celia’s house and presumably dies.
Javier del Pino Quotes in Dreaming in Cuban
The Dreaming in Cuban quotes below are all either spoken by Javier del Pino or refer to Javier del Pino. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Baskets of Water Quotes
Could her son, Celia wonders, have inherited her habit of ruinous passion? Or is passion indiscriminate, incubating haphazardly like a cancer?
Celia hopes that the sea, with its sustaining rhythms and breezes from distant lands, will ease her son's heart as it once did hers. Late at night, she rocks on her wicker swing as Javier sleeps, and wonders why it is so difficult to be happy.
Of her three children, Celia sympathizes most with her son.
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Simón Córdoba, a boy of fifteen, has written a number of short stories considered to be antirevolutionary. His characters escape from Cuba on rafts of sticks and tires, refuse to harvest grapefruit, dream of singing in a rock and roll band in California. […]
Celia suggests to the boy that he put down his pen for six months and work as an apprentice with the Escambray Theater, which educates peasants in the countryside. "I don't want to discourage your creativity, Simón," Celia tells the boy gently. "I just want to reorient it toward the revolution." After all, she thinks, artists have a vital role to play, no? Perhaps later, when the system has matured, more liberal policies may be permitted.
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Javier del Pino Character Timeline in Dreaming in Cuban
The timeline below shows where the character Javier del Pino appears in Dreaming in Cuban. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Ocean Blue
...swim with her clothes on. She instructs Felicia to send a telegram to Felicia’s brother, Javier, who lives in Prague with a Czech wife and baby daughter. Celia hasn’t heard from...
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Celia’s Letters: 1942–1949
In 1946, Celia writes that her son Javier has been born. She’s named him after her father, whose appearance she only remembers from...
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The Meaning of Shells
Celia looks at a picture of her son, Javier. As a teenager, Javier had shared Celia’s enthusiasm for the Revolution, but they’d had to...
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Baskets of Water
The day after Felicia’s incident with Graciela, Celia’s son Javier comes home from Czechoslovakia, terribly sick. He sleeps for three weeks, occasionally telling her bits...
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After two months, Javier gets out of bed, but he spends wads of American cash on black-market rum, his...
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Celia now spends her time tending to Javier as if he’s a little boy. She doesn’t even think about Felicia, who’s gone missing,...
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Celia’s Letters: 1950–1955
In 1951, Celia writes of Jorge’s harshness toward Javier. He makes Javier study accounting from the time he is five years old, and he...
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...bastard Batista” stole Cuba and that it must be the Americans’ fault. She doesn’t want Javier learning about manhood from such men. She has started campaigning for the Orthodox Party. Salvador,...
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...young Cuban girls. She laments that this has happened to their country. Later that year, Javier wins a national science prize for children; Celia is proud when she’s told that Javier...
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