Dreaming in Cuban

by

Cristina García

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Dreaming in Cuban: Enough Attitude Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
1975. Lourdes walks her five-block beat in Brooklyn. She’s become the first auxiliary policewoman in her precinct, and it makes her feel powerful. Pilar thinks her mother is prejudiced in her attitudes about crime, but Lourdes thinks her daughter only has abstract ideas about equality and doesn’t know anything about real life—like the faces, mainly black and brown ones, she sees at the precinct.
Lourdes is actually a lot like her mother Celia—except that while Celia is a volunteer helping implement a socialist revolution, Lourdes volunteers to patrol American neighborhoods to maintain her ideas about law and order (ideas apparently infused with racism).
Themes
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History and Personal Identity Theme Icon
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Lourdes has rarely had to use her nightstick. Once, she had to break up a fight that included the Navarro boy, the son of the woman who’d worked in her bakery for one afternoon. Now, that kid sells pot. Lourdes knows that if her son were alive—he’d be the Navarro kid’s age  now—he wouldn’t have been a delinquent. She knows he would have been a loyal son and a companion to her, the way Pilar is to Rufino.
Lourdes sees her dead son in every young man and idealizes what he and their relationship would have been like if she hadn’t miscarried. She feels a lack in her relationship with her only child and envies what Pilar and Rufino have—she never enjoyed such a bond with her own mother and has no outlet for one now.
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Rufino never adjusted to life in the United States—he wanted to be back on the farm. So Lourdes got a job, even though many Cuban women of her age and class would consider such work beneath them. In Florida, the other Puente women keep living their privileged, soap opera-watching lifestyles even amid their less affluent circumstances. But Lourdes began working on the ranch as soon as she got married, taking over the bookkeeping, redecorating the mansion, and building an aviary. This infuriated Doña Zaida, who promptly undid all of Lourdes’s efforts. The two women never spoke again.
Lourdes is an enterprising woman who takes initiative to realize her ideas—an attitude that isn’t always appreciated by others of her social standing. This attitude also looks different in Cuba than it does in the United States. In Cuba, Lourdes seemed to have more avenues open to her,  while in the U.S., she’s portrayed as almost a caricature of her younger self, obsessed with what she’s lost.
Themes
Passion, Romance, and Marriage Theme Icon
Intergenerational Conflict Theme Icon
Obsession and Devotion Theme Icon
Lourdes and Rufino barely speak anymore, and her husband is no longer familiar to her. Lourdes sometimes hears about his projects, tinkering with engines or daydreaming about artificial intelligence, from Pilar. She feels she can only be herself with Jorge. It was his idea for her to join the auxiliary police, so she can be ready to fight the Communists someday. Pilar just mocks her mother, which makes Lourdes furious—she’s trying to set an example for her daughter.
Lourdes fails to connect meaningfully with either her husband or her daughter. Her connection with her father’s spirit makes up what is lacking in those relationships. Jorge affirms Lourdes in her aspirations and ideals as no one else in her life does.
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Last Christmas, Pilar gave Lourdes a book of essays about Cuba called A Revolutionary Society. Its front cover is a picture of happy-looking children in front of Che Guevara’s portrait. Lourdes tells Pilar that she doesn’t have to read this book in order to know it’s filled with communist lies. Lourdes puts the book in a tub filled with hot water and then places the ruined volume on a platter with a note: “Why don’t you move to Russia if you think it’s so great!” She leaves this on Pilar’s bed. The next day, A Revolutionary Society is hanging from the clothesline to dry.
While this scene of mother-daughter conflict is humorous, there’s also more to it than that. Pilar doesn’t know about Lourdes’s past sufferings in Cuba, which is what fuel Lourdes’s passionate hatred of communism and Cuba now. She mistakenly reduces Lourdes’s views to politics alone. For Lourdes, it’s deeply personal, which helps explain her over-the-top response.
Themes
Intergenerational Conflict Theme Icon
History and Personal Identity Theme Icon
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Quotes
As Lourdes continues on her beat, she sees a figure running toward the river, jumping over the fence. She yells, “Stop!” and chases the figure “as if chasing a part of herself.” She can’t remember what codes to shout into her walkie-talkie. She jumps into the cold river. She makes it, but the Navarro boy doesn’t.
To Lourdes, though it isn’t rational, the Navarro boy’s suicide feels like losing her own son again. She can’t even protect the young man on her beat from harming himself, just as she was helpless to prevent her miscarriage.
Themes
History and Personal Identity Theme Icon
Obsession and Devotion Theme Icon
Pilar (1976). Pilar is at a Lou Reed concert in the Village with her boyfriend, Max, a musician whose real name is Octavio Schneider. They started dating after Max, whose mother is Mexican, saw Pilar in a club and casually started speaking Spanish to her. Lourdes hates Max’s beads and long hair and immediately rejects him, but Rufino is friendly to him. Pilar likes going to Lou Reed concerts because Lou has so many personalities, and Pilar feels like “a new me sprouts and dies every day.”
Pilar is a New Yorker and is immersed in the punk scene there, yet she’s often reminded of her Cuban roots at unexpected moments, suggesting that she can’t sidestep the complexity of her identity. She identifies with people who, like her, have a complicated sense of identity, as her own sense of self feels as if it’s constantly evolving, unable to be contained by a label.
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Passion, Romance, and Marriage Theme Icon
History and Personal Identity Theme Icon
Pilar loves punk music because it gets in people’s faces, an attitude she tries to convey in her painting. She likes to confront people and has no problem showing she doesn’t like someone—she thinks that this is the only she has in common with Lourdes.
Though Pilar’s identity feels complicated, Pilar is confident in what she likes and doesn’t shrink from telling anyone exactly what she thinks. This defining trait seems to come straight from Lourdes, suggesting that Lourdes has had a bigger influence on Pilar than Pilar admits.
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History and Personal Identity Theme Icon
Lourdes recently bought a second bakery and is going crazy with patriotic themes, given the upcoming bicentennial. Pilar thinks her mother joined the auxiliary police “out of some misplaced sense of civic duty.” She also knows that Lourdes talks with Abuelo Jorge.
Though Pilar doesn’t talk with Celia anymore, mysterious spiritual communications with absent loved ones is something else Pilar and Lourdes have in common. Yet Pilar and Lourdes don’t communicate openly with each other about what drives their respective actions. Pilar attributes Lourdes’s police work to “misplaced […] civic duty,” not suspecting that Lourdes has personal, trauma-related reasons for desiring control and caring about law enforcement.
Themes
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Obsession and Devotion Theme Icon
Pilar doesn’t think about Cuba so much lately, but sometimes she longs to go there. She resents the military and political leaders who have so much sway over other people’s lives. Because of that, both Cuba and Celia fade inside Pilar, and she can only imagine what they’re like. Lourdes won’t talk to Pilar about Celia, and Rufino can’t tell Pilar much about her.
Pilar is effectively cut off from her Cuban roots, because of both familial and political roadblocks. Her sense of Cuban identity lies dormant, existing mainly within her imagination.
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Quotes
Lourdes commissions Pilar to paint a pro-American mural for her Yankee Doodle Bakery grand opening. Pilar, baffled at first, finally agrees—but on the condition that Lourdes can’t see the painting before it’s unveiled.
Lourdes couldn’t have asked something more difficult of her cynical daughter, yet her request seems to be a genuine attempt at finding a connection and showing respect for Pilar’s interests and talents.
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That night Pilar gets started on her painting. She starts painting Lady Liberty, adding background markings that look like barbed wire, putting a safety pin through Liberty’s nose, and captioning the image with the “punk rallying cry, I’M A MESS.” Pilar booby-traps her studio in case Lourdes spies on her work, but Lourdes never does. Lourdes has even taken out a full-page ad in the paper about the grand opening and art unveiling. Worrying about her mother’s reaction to the painting, Pilar can’t sleep before the grand opening.
Pilar, immovably true to her convictions (much like her mother), can’t make the straightforwardly patriotic painting Lourdes wants to see—she has to be true to her own punk ideals and identity as an artist. Still, she feels conflicted about hurting Lourdes, showing that she really does care about her mother, too.
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At the grand opening, the new bakery is full of patriotic decorations, a Dixieland band, and free desserts. Lourdes brags to customers about her daughter, the artist, causing Pilar to sweat. At noon, Lourdes climbs on a stepladder and pulls the sheet off the painting. As the crowd takes in the sight of “punk” Liberty, people start buzzing disapprovingly. When a man moves toward the painting with a pocketknife, yelling “Gaaahbage!” in a Brooklyn accent, Lourdes suddenly swings her purse at the man and knocks him flat. Then, she tumbles off the stepladder onto both spectators and apple tartlets. Pilar is filled with love for her mother.
Lourdes shows that although she’s devoted to her convictions, she’s loyal to her daughter above all else. Surprisingly, she’s more capable than her own mother of transcending political beliefs in her relationship with her daughter. This suggests that Lourdes’s estrangement from her own mother has yielded not just pain, but an understanding of what true loyalty should look like. And Jorge’s prediction comes true—Pilar does learn how to love her mother, given the right opportunity.
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History and Personal Identity Theme Icon
Obsession and Devotion Theme Icon
Quotes