The ocean symbolizes both healing and tragedy in the novel. After Celia’s love affair with Gustavo ends, casting her into depression, a Santería practitioner tells her that she envisions “a wet landscape” in Celia’s palm, signaling that Celia will survive her grief and go on to live a life by the sea. Indeed, spending years studying the ocean from her porch swing helps heal Celia, as she finds peace in its various blues and a suggestion of freedom in its shifting tides, even as the political landscape around her grows more chaotic. At the same time, it’s the ocean that separates Celia from her husband, Jorge, her daughter Lourdes, and her granddaughter Pilar, who are exiles in the United States because of political changes outside of anyone’s control. In this way, the ocean functions both as a hopeful symbol of change and a symbol of tragic and immovable fate. At the end of the novel, it functions ambiguously, as Celia wades into the ocean, letting go of her love for Gustavo that has tortured her for so long—but also possibly ending her life. Ultimately, then, the ocean represents the enduring and overpowering nature of tragedy, as even something as beautiful and therapeutic as sea is also a source of pain and an outlet self-destruction for Celia.
The Ocean Quotes in Dreaming in Cuban
If I was born to live on an island, then I'm grateful for one thing: that the tides rearrange the borders. At least I have the illusion of change, of possibility. To be locked within boundaries plotted by priests and politicians would be the only thing more intolerable.
Don’t you see how they're carving up the world, Gustavo? How they're stealing our geography? Our fates? The arbitrary is no longer in our hands. To survive is an act of hope.
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.
The Ocean Symbol Timeline in Dreaming in Cuban
