Celia’s communist commitments, particularly her devotion to Fidel Castro, are an expression of her personal loss and unfulfilled desire. Feeling uprooted in her life, a newly widowed Celia finds refuge in political action. “Celia hitchhikes to the Plaza de la Revolución, where El Líder, wearing his customary fatigues, is making a speech. […] Celia makes a decision. Ten years or twenty, whatever she has left, she will devote to El Líder, give herself to his revolution. Now that Jorge is dead, she will volunteer for every project—vaccination campaigns, tutoring, the microbrigades.” Now that Celia doesn’t have anyone else to live for, in other words, the affections and energies she once poured into her family will now go into Castro and his revolution. This devotion to Castro is further illustrated in the way Celia carries out her revolutionary duties: “Three nights per month, too, Celia continues to protect her stretch of shore from foreign invaders. She still dresses up for these all-night vigils, putting on red lipstick and darkening the mole on her cheek, and imagines that El Líder is watching her, whispering in her ear with his warm cigar breath. She would gladly do anything he asked.” Celia’s idealism, even romanticism, about Castro shapes the way Celia approaches her duties, as politics becoming blended with personal desire.
The nature of this devotion isn’t lost on other family members. Lourdes’s daughter Pilar relates, “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 says ‘cancer,’ low and fierce. She reads the newspaper page by page for leftist conspiracies […] Mom's views are strictly black-and-white. It's how she survives.” Interestingly, though, this black-and-white outlook is something Lourdes has in common with her mother, though it’s very differently expressed. Lourdes’s outlook is not only opposite to her mother’s politically, but darker in its origin. This is gradually revealed over the course of the novel. After Lourdes flees Cuba for the United States, she becomes ever more obsessed with her belief in the evils of communism. “Above all, Lourdes and her father continue to denounce the Communist threat to America. Every day they grow more convinced that the dearth of bad news about Cuba is a conspiracy by the leftist media to keep international support for El Líder strong. Why can't the Americans see the Communists in their own backyards, in their universities, bending the malleable minds of the young! The Democrats are to blame[.]” Lourdes does what she can to resist communism from abroad, even if it’s largely paranoid and ineffectual, not based in an imminent threat.
Though Lourdes is undoubtedly an obsessive character, sometimes comically so, García does not portray her as a caricature. She provides crucial background into the impetus for Lourdes’s hatred of the revolutionary government: “ [Her husband] Rufino was in Havana ordering a cow-milking machine when the soldiers returned. They handed Lourdes an official sheet of paper declaring the Puentes' estate the property of the revolutionary government. She tore the deed in half and angrily dismissed the soldiers, but one of them grabbed her by the arm. […] The other soldier held Lourdes down as his partner took a knife from his holster. Carefully, he sliced Lourdes's riding pants off to her knees and tied them over her mouth. […] Then he placed the knife flat across her belly and raped her.” This traumatic event can’t be disconnected from Lourdes’s feelings about the Revolutionary government. Though Lourdes’s anti-communist political ideology is genuine, it’s unavoidably connected to the violation she experienced at the hands of revolutionary soldiers, who acted as if she could be seized, used, and tossed aside as unfeelingly as her land. Ultimately, Lourdes admits this even to herself: “What she fears most is this: that her rape, her baby's death were absorbed quietly by the earth, that they are ultimately no more meaningful than falling leaves on an autumn day. She hungers for a violence of nature, terrible and permanent, to record the evil. Nothing less would satisfy her.” In other words, Lourdes longs for resolution surrounding her miscarriage and for justice for the rape. Though she fears that these things are unattainable, she grasps for whatever measures—even obsessive resistance of communism—that can serve as a stand-in.
In a letter to Gustavo, Celia writes, “I asked myself once, ‘What is the nature of obsession?’ But I no longer question it. I accept it the way I accept my husband and my daughters and my life on the wicker swing, my life of ordinary seductions.” Celia means that she no longer asks questions about her obsessions in life; they have become absorbed into her daily existence and her understanding of who she is. Perhaps, García suggests, this is the case with most people’s obsessions—they are “ordinary seductions,” or things that gradually become inseparable from one’s sense of self.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Obsession and Devotion ThemeTracker
Obsession and Devotion Quotes in Dreaming in Cuban
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.
Celia hitchhikes to the Plaza de la Revolución, where El Líder, wearing his customary fatigues, is making a speech. Workers pack the square, cheering his words that echo and collide in midair. Celia makes a decision. Ten years or twenty, whatever she has left, she will devote to El Líder, give herself to his revolution. Now that Jorge is dead, she will volunteer for every project—vaccination campaigns, tutoring, the microbrigades.
Lourdes considers herself lucky. Immigration has redefined her, and she is grateful. Unlike her husband, she welcomes her adopted language, its possibilities for reinvention. Lourdes relishes winter most of all—the cold scraping sounds on sidewalks and windshields, the ritual of scarves and gloves, hats and zip-in coat linings. Its layers protect her. She wants no part of Cuba, no part of its wretched carnival floats creaking with lies, no part of Cuba at all, which Lourdes claims never possessed her.
I still love you, Gustavo, but it's a habitual love, a wound in the knee that predicts rain. Memory is a skilled seducer. I write to you because I must. I don't even know if you're alive and whom you love now.
I asked myself once, "What is the nature of obsession?" But I no longer question it. I accept it the way I accept my husband and my daughters and my life on the wicker swing, my life of ordinary seductions.
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.
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.
Celia del Pino settles on a folding chair behind a card table facing the audience. It is her third year as a civilian judge. Celia is pleased. What she decides makes a difference in others' lives, and she feels part of a great historical unfolding. What would have been expected of her twenty years ago? To sway endlessly on her wicker swing, old before her time? To baby-sit her grandchildren and wait for death? She remembers the gloomy letters she used to write to Gustavo before the revolution, and thinks of how different the letters would be if she were writing today. Since her husband's death, Celia has devoted herself completely to the revolution.
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.
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 envy this woman's passion, her determination to get what she knows is hers. I felt that way once, when I ran away to Miami. But I never made it to Cuba to see Abuela Celia. After that, I felt like my destiny was not my own, that men who had nothing to do with me had the power to rupture my dreams, to separate me from my grandmother.
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?
