Dreaming in Cuban

One of the things I like about literature is its perennial nature. By this I mean not only that themes are relevant years after being portrayed in a book, but also that a book always has something for its readers. As an illustration, I have just finished reading Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban (1992) and the book is still relevant 28 years after being published. Although it is neither the best novel I have read about feminism, Cuban history, magical realism and santeria, nor the greatest book in terms of literary artistry, there are still aspects that are worth remembering & mentioning, and aspects that are still valid nowadays:

Franco and I commiserate about how St. Mark's Place is a zoo these days with the bridge-and-tunnel crowd wearing fuchsia mohawks and safety pins through their cheeks. Everybody wants to be part of the freak show for a day. Anything halfway interesting gets co-opted, mainstreamed. We'll all be doing car commercials soon. 

While I have felt that characters lack substance, the author strove to create unique personalities and relationships. I particularly liked the fact that in trying to have different personalities, Garcia used not only multiple narrative voices, but also music, and so as the characters unravel in front of us we are introduced to Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Beny More, The Ramones, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Herb Alpert and others.   

The story is concocted from the relationships between Celia, the matriarch, and her daughters, grandchildren, El Lider, America, her community, her husband and Gustavo. She is the most important character in the novel, she judges, nurtures, punishes, worships, protects, remembers, loves, suffers and writes letters: 

I still love you, Gustavo, but it's a habitual love, a wound in the knee that predicts rain.

I was surprised to find instances of humor and irony. I always appreciate them in books, this being one of the reason I like Saramago a lot:

Felicia approaches the bleached, crumpled heap that will be her husband. He looks like a colorless worm, writhing on his stomach in a synthetic tan suit with precisely matching socks, his steel glasses smashed against the pavement. Felicia is smitten. She helps him up and, without a word, pats his hair until his face flushes the color of beets. She takes him by the hand and leads him to her 1952 De Soto parked a few yards away. 

 or 

Mom makes food only people in Ohio eat, like Jell-O molds with miniature marshmallows or recipes she clips from Family Circle. And she barbecues anything she can get her hands on. Then we sit around behind the warehouse and stare at each other with nothing to say. Like this is it? We're living the American dream? 

 And, last but not least, I even found myself in two different fragments:

Lourdes enjoys patrolling the streets in her thick-soled black shoes. These shoes, it seems to her, are a kind of equalizer. She can run in them if she has to, jump curbs, traverse the buckled, faulted sidewalks of Brooklyn without twisting an ankle. These shoes are power. If women wore shoes like these, she thinks, they wouldn't worry so much about more abstract equalities. 

 And

I'm not religious but I get the feeling that it's ,the simplest rituals, the ones that are integrated with the earth and its seasons, that are the most profound. It makes more sense to me than the more abstract forms of worship. 

Overall, this book is a pleasant experience, but if you are interested in latina literature and magical realism, I recommend Ana Castillo's So Far from God.