mother and daughter

939 Words2 Pages

The novel, “Dreaming in Cuban” by Christina Garcia, is about a Cuban family. This novel is structured around the Cuban Revolution, everything from politics, family life, and spirituality. The women in the family all have strained relationships. They all have very different personalities and different reactions to the revolution. Lourdes, the daughter of Celia wants nothing to do with the revolution and wants nothing to do with Cuba. She also doesn’t keep much contact with her mother. Everything she has gone through is why she is the way she is, and why her daughter also has a strained relationship with her.
One of the main reasons that Lourdes has some issues is because how Celia treated her. When Celia got married to Jorge, she was completely heartbroken because of Gustavo. She writes to Gustavo saying, “They poison my food and milk but still I swell. The baby lives on venom.” (50) She is also claimed later on that if she has a boy then she will leave if she has a girl; then she will stay. “She would not abandon a daughter to this life, but train her to read the columns of blood and numbers in men’s eyes, to understand the morphology of survival. Her daughter, too, would outlast the hard flames.” (42) Celia kind of breaks that promise when Lourdes is born when she has a mental breakdown and Jorge sends her to a mental institution. When Lourdes is born, Celia told Jorge that she had no shadow. Celia even held Lourdes by one leg and said that she will not remember her name. She also suffers from abandonment and separation when Lourdes leaves Cuba with her daughter Pilar. This hurts Celia because she has a close connection with Pillar and hopes one day that she will eventually comes back to Cuba. Their connection with each other ...

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...ally accept Pilar as they way she is. It takes awhile but it happens. Towards the end of the book though, Celia does realize that her efforts towards the revolution hurt her children. For Celia to escape her suffering, she decides to commit suicide.
“Celia reaches up to her left earlobe and releases her drop pearl earring to the sea. She feels its absence between her thumb and forefinger. Then she unfastens the tiny clasp in her right ear and surrenders the other pearl. Celia closes her eyes and imagines it drifting as firefly through the darkened seas, imagines its slow extinguishing.” (244)

Also in the beginning Lourdes seems kind of crazy and she is very unlikable. It’s not until you read more that you realize that she has been through a lot and she actually a likeable character. She has a lot to her, and you start to understand why she acts the way she does.

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