Celia sees her daughters’ struggles and successes as tracing back to their acceptance or rejection of her as their mother and as a reflection of their loyalty to the Revolution, or the lack thereof. Celia diagnoses the problems of Felicia, her middle daughter who suffers from mental illness, as essentially political, and she therefore prescribes a political solution: “Everyone tells Felicia that she must find meaning in her life outside of her son, that she should give the revolution another try, become a New Socialist Woman. After all, as her mother points out, the only thing Felicia ever did for the revolution was pull a few dandelions during the weed-eradication campaign in 1962, and then only reluctantly. Her lack of commitment is a source of great rancor between them.” Felicia’s reluctance to get on board with the revolution, in other words, is an affront to Celia, and something to which Felicia’s lifelong problems can be conveniently attributed. Celia’s relationship with Lourdes, living in exile in the United States, is even worse. “Her daughters cannot understand her commitment to El Líder. Lourdes sends her snapshots of pastries from her bakery in Brooklyn. Each glistening eclair is a grenade aimed at Celia's political beliefs, each strawberry shortcake proof—in butter, cream, and eggs—of Lourdes's success in America, and a reminder of the ongoing shortages in Cuba.” The conflict between mother and daughter comes down to the mundane products of Lourdes’s new life abroad—instead of seeing the pastries as proof of her daughter’s success in which Celia can take pride, Celia sees them as proof that her daughter has betrayed Cuba, and her.
In post-Revolutionary Cuba, estranged from actual relationships with her children, Celia spends her spare time mediating community disputes as a civilian judge. For her, these disputes come to represent something about her own family and about human nature in general: “The auditorium vibrates with discord. Every combination of argument is going full tilt. Husbands against wives. Married women against the single and divorced. [The trial is] an excuse for everyone to unleash frustrations at family members, neighbors, the system, their lives. Old wounds are reopened, new ones inflicted. […] It seems to her that so much of Cuba's success will depend on what doesn't exist, or exists only rarely. A spirit of generosity. Commitments without strings. Are these so against human nature?” Celia sees the domestic turmoil in the court as a reflection of Cuba’s struggles more broadly, reinforcing the political view of family life that she takes throughout the novel.
Though conflict is no less pronounced in subsequent generations, mother-daughter relationships—especially that of Lourdes and Pilar—thrive better when they are untangled from politics. Despite the fact that conservative, anti-Castro Lourdes and her daughter Pilar are political opposites and are locked in constant discord, they transcend politics more notably than any other characters. When Pilar’s painting of a “punk” Statue of Liberty causes an uproar at Lourdes’s bakery grand opening, Lourdes jumps to her daughter’s defense: “A lumpish man charges Liberty with a pocketknife […] Before anyone can react, Mom swings her new handbag and clubs the guy cold inches from the painting. Then, as if in slow motion, she tumbles forward, a thrashing avalanche of patriotism and motherhood, crushing three spectators and a table of apple tartlets. And I, I love my mother very much at that moment.” Lourdes dislikes Pilar’s provocative painting as much as anyone present, but her love of her daughter overrides that hostility. Later, it’s evident that she lets the painting remain in her bakery. Lourdes, in other words, is fundamentally more loyal to her child than to her pro-America, anti-communist politics. García thus suggests that it’s possible to maintain staunch political beliefs without letting them damage relationships—and that perhaps Lourdes, observing her mother’s limitations in this regard, will break the pattern with her own daughter.
Celia views her granddaughter Pilar as bringing the family full circle. “Women who outlive their daughters are orphans, Abuela tells me. Only their granddaughters can save them, guard their knowledge like the first fire.” Celia sees Pilar as her rescuer, the repository of her wisdom. However, at the end of the novel, Pilar discovers that as much as she loves her grandmother and wonders how her life might have been different in Cuba, she can’t thrive there and can’t be the savior her grandmother seeks. Pilar’s experience suggests that every generation has to create their own “fire,” not simply guard that of its predecessors.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Intergenerational Conflict ThemeTracker
Intergenerational Conflict Quotes in Dreaming in Cuban
That's it. My mind's made up. I'm going back to Cuba. I'm fed up with everything around here. I take all my money out of the bank, $120, money I earned slaving away at my mother's bakery, and buy a one-way bus ticket to Miami. I figure if I can just get there, I'll be able to make my way to Cuba, maybe rent a boat or get a fisherman to take me. I imagine Abuela Celia's surprise as I sneak up behind her. She'll be sitting in her wicker swing overlooking the sea and she'll smell of salt and violet water. There'll be gulls and crabs along the shore. She'll stroke my cheek with her cool hands, sing quietly in my ear.
My mother says that Abuela Celia's had plenty of chances to leave Cuba but that she's stubborn and got her head turned around by El Líder. Mom says "Communist" the way some people say "cancer," low and fierce. She reads the newspapers page by page for leftist conspiracies, jams her finger against imagined evidence and says, "See. What did I tell you?" Last year when El Líder jailed a famous Cuban poet, she sneered at "those leftist intellectual hypocrites" for trying to free him. "They created those prisons, so now they should rot in them!" she shouted, not making much sense at all. "They're dangerous subversives, red to the bone!" Mom's views are strictly black-and-white. It's how she survives.
But what could I say? That my mother is driving me crazy? That I miss my grandmother and wish I'd never left Cuba? That I want to be a famous artist someday? That a paintbrush is better than a gun so why doesn't everybody just leave me alone? Painting is its own language, I wanted to tell him. Translations just confuse it, dilute it, like words going from Spanish to English. I envy my mother her Spanish curses sometimes. They make my English collapse in a heap.
Felicia learned her florid language on those nights. She would borrow freely from the poems she'd heard, stringing words together like laundry on a line, connecting ideas and descriptions she couldn't have planned. The words sounded precisely right when she said them, though often people told her she didn’t make any sense at all. Felicia misses those peaceful nights with her mother […] Now they fight constantly, especially about El Líder. How her mother worships him! She keeps a framed photograph of him by her bed where her husband's picture used to be. But to Felicia, El Líder is just a common tyrant. No better, no worse than any other in the world.
Her daughters cannot understand her commitment to El Líder. Lourdes sends her snapshots of pastries from her bakery in Brooklyn. Each […] strawberry shortcake [is] proof—in butter, cream, and eggs—of Lourdes's success in America, and a reminder of the ongoing shortages in Cuba. […]
If only Felicia could take an interest in the revolution, Celia believes, it would give her a higher purpose, a chance to participate in something larger than herself. After all, aren't they part of the greatest social experiment in modern history? But her daughter can only wallow in her own discomforts.
Last Christmas, Pilar gave her a book of essays on Cuba called A Revolutionary Society. The cover showed cheerful, clean-cut children gathered in front of a portrait of Che Guevara. Lourdes was incensed.
"Will you read it?" Pilar asked her.
"I don't have to read it to know what's in it! Lies, poisonous Communist lies!" Che Guevara's face had set a violence quivering within her like a loose wire.
"Suit yourself," Pilar shot back.
A lumpish man charges Liberty with a pocketknife, repeating his words like a war cry. Before anyone can react, Mom swings her new handbag and clubs the guy cold inches from the painting. Then, as if in slow motion, she tumbles forward, a thrashing avalanche of patriotism and motherhood, crushing three spectators and a table of apple tartlets.
And I, I love my mother very much at that moment.
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.
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.
My mother told me that Abuela Celia was an atheist before I even understood what the word meant. I liked the sound of it, the derision with which my mother pronounced it, and knew immediately it was what I wanted to become. I don't know exactly when I stopped believing in God. It wasn't as deliberate as deciding at age six to become an atheist, but more like an imperceptible sloughing of layers. One day I noticed there was no more skin to absently peel, just air where there'd been artifice.
At night, Felicia attended our ceremonies. She didn't miss a single one. For her, they were a kind of poetry that connected her to larger worlds, worlds alive and infinite. […]
Felicia's mother discouraged her devotion to the gods. Celia had only vague notions about spiritual possession and animal sacrifice, and suspected that our rites had caused her daughter's mysterious disappearance. Celia revered El Líder and wanted Felicia to give herself entirely to the revolution, believing that this alone would save her daughter. But Felicia would not be dissuaded from the orishas. She had a true vocation to the supernatural.
Celia overturned the tureen with the sacred stones and crushed Felicia's seashells under the heels of her leather pumps. Suddenly, she removed her shoes and began stamping on the shells in her bare feet, slowly at first, then faster and faster in a mad flamenco, her arms thrown up in the air.
Then just as suddenly she stopped. She made no sound as she wept, as she bent to kiss Felicia's eyes, her forehead, her swollen, hairless skull. Celia lay with her torn, bleeding feet beside her daughter and held her, rocking and rocking her in the blue gypsy dusk until she died.
After we were married, I left her with my mother and my sister. I knew what it would do to her. A part of me wanted to punish her. For the Spaniard. I tried to kill her, Lourdes. I wanted to kill her. I left on a long trip after you were born. I wanted to break her, may God forgive me. When I returned, it was done. She held you out to me by one leg and told me she would not remember your name.
I wonder how different my life would have been if I'd stayed with my grandmother. I think about how I'm probably the only ex-punk on the island, how no one else has their ears pierced in three places. […] I ask Abuela if I can paint whatever I want in Cuba and she says yes, as long as I don't attack the state. Cuba is still developing, she tells me, and can't afford the luxury of dissent. Then she quotes me something El Líder said in the early years, before they started arresting poets. "Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing." I wonder what El Líder would think of my paintings. Art, I'd tell him, is the ultimate revolution.
I've started dreaming in Spanish, which has never happened before. I wake up feeling different, like something inside me is changing, something chemical and irreversible. There's a magic here working its way through my veins. […] I'm afraid to lose all this, to lose Abuela Celia again. But sooner or later I'd have to return to New York. I know now it's where I belong—not instead of here, but more than here. How can I tell my grandmother this?
