Passion, Romance, and Marriage Theme Analysis

In Dreaming in Cuban, Cristina García’s magical realist novel about three generations of the del Pino family, the heat of passion and the stability of marriage are often in conflict. The romance that dominates the novel is that of matriarch Celia for Gustavo, the lover who abandoned her following a passionate, youthful affair, sending Celia into a profound depression. Celia’s ongoing love for Gustavo overshadows her marriage to a good man, Jorge, even though her life with Jorge is real and her relationship with Gustavo is not. By framing the novel around Celia’s stubborn love for the absent Gustavo, García argues that passion, because of its tendency to fizzle out, obscures and even damages the more ordinary happiness that can be found within lifelong marriage.

Though Celia pines for Gustavo, her complicated feelings toward him suggest that romantic passion waxes and wanes. Celia’s love for Gustavo is the driving passion of her life: “For twenty-five years, Celia wrote her Spanish lover a letter on the eleventh day of each month, then stored it in a satin-covered chest beneath her bed. Celia has removed her drop pearl earrings only nine times, to clean them. No one ever remembers her without them.” Writing to Gustavo is an ingrained ritual, and the earrings which Gustavo gave Celia are her trademark, even long after her marriage to Jorge. Yet she never actually mails the letters to Gustavo—suggesting that even though she loves him in a way she doesn’t love Jorge, Celia views Gustavo as a theoretical lover, a safely abstract figure in whom she can confide her deepest feelings. Eventually, Celia acknowledges to herself that even her passion for Gustavo isn’t what it once was, writing, “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.” In other words, Gustavo is a deeply entrenched memory and a cherished habit for Celia, but Celia acknowledges that her feelings for him are illusory on a certain level, a “seduction” of memory that doesn’t correspond to reality. She doesn’t know the real him at all, nor does she maintain a genuine relationship with him. Meanwhile, this has lasting consequences for her actual marriage.

Celia and Jorge’s marital struggles further show that passion, if clung onto long after it has spent itself, is not harmless—it can damage potentially healthy relationships. When Jorge is injured in a car crash, Celia realizes that she does have feelings for him, writing to Gustavo: “Jorge is a good man, Gustavo. It surprised me how my heart jumped when I heard he'd been hurt. I cried when I saw him bandaged in white […] His eyes apologized for having disturbed me. Can you imagine? I discovered I loved him at that moment. Not a passion like ours, Gustavo, but love just the same. I think he understands this and is at peace.” Celia, in other words, realizes that there are different intensities of love, and she concludes that these can exist simultaneously. However, she draws the wrong conclusion about Jorge’s feelings. Pilar, granddaughter of Jorge and Celia, recalls that, while her grandfather lived in New York City and her grandmother in Cuba, “[My grandfather] used to write her letters every day, when he still had the strength, long letters in an old-fashioned script with flourishes and curlicues. […] They were romantic letters, too. […] He called Abuela Celia his ‘dove in the desert.’ […] Abuela Celia writes back to him every once in a while, but her letters are full of facts, about this meeting or that, nothing more. They make my grandfather sad.” In other words, it’s transparently obvious, even to Pilar, that her grandmother doesn’t share her grandfather’s romantic feelings. Yet even Celia’s coldness doesn’t stop Jorge from expressing his love for her on a daily basis, suggesting that a happy marriage could have been possible. Near the end of the book, Jorge’s ghost visits his eldest daughter, Lourdes, and confesses to her that he’s responsible for Celia’s unhappiness during their marriage and the suffering this subsequently caused the family: "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.” Despite Celia’s assumptions, in other words, Jorge has never been oblivious to the truth about Celia’s feelings for Gustavo, and that’s why he abandoned her to mistreatment at the hands of his jealous mother and sister. Celia’s and Jorge’s relationship, haunted by the lingering ghost of Gustavo, became a spiral of mutual harm and regret.

None of the major characters’ marriages are happy ones. Lourdes uses her husband for sex, objectifying him until her passion is briefly satisfied, but she doesn’t respect him as a man; more dramatically, Felicia serially marries men who ignite her passion, but she ends up maiming or killing them all. There isn’t an ideal marriage in the book—rather, there’s only the ghost of healthy marriages that might have been.