Dreaming in Cuban

This book itself is a good book, but I received the book with the first 29 ages missing out of it. I had to purchase another book to do my assignment for my Latin class which ended up costing me more money in the long run.

Be warned, if you though a book with this title, and from an author with such a Latino name, had to be originally written in Spanish, you are wrong. The Spanish version is a translation, with a Spanish-from-Spain spin, rather than a Cuban touch. If you want to read the original version, you are better of with the English original "Deaming in Cuban". Even the author herself agrees, that the book looses a bit in the translation.

Here is a truly unforgettable book. I was entranced from the very first sentence: "Celia del Pino, equipped with binoculars and wearing her best housedress and drop pearl earrings, sits in her wicker swing guarding the north coast of Cuba."From that moment on, I was drawn as surely into this book as the tides in the sea that Celia is guarding. "Dreaming in Cuban" tells the story of the Cuban Revolution from the point of view of three generations of women: the above-mentioned Celia, the grandmother; her daughters, Felicia and Lourdes; and Lourdes' own daughter, Pilar. Each of the three older women, and perhaps Pilar, a 20-ish New York artist, is quite totally mad. Thus we see and hear and feel the revolution from the hallucinatory perceptions of Celia, who worships El Lider (Castro) with ferocity; Felicia, who is torn between old Cuba--its superstitions, its voodoo, its passion--and the modern Cuba, where she is sentenced to a work camp; and Lourdes, who has escaped to Brooklyn and proudly owns the Yankee Doodle Bakery.There is violence, murder, passion, birth and death in this book, but all told in a sort of lyrical mist, so that the reader feels the torpid heat of the Cuban day, the gentle warmth of the sea, and the breezes that stir the palms. All is dreamlike, which makes the reality of modern Cuba almost impossible to grasp. As one of the main characters says toward the end of the book: "Cuba is a peculiar exile...an island-colony. We can reach it by a thirty-minute charter flight from Miami, yet never reach it at all."And yet, after reading this incredible book, I feel for the first time that I have some understanding of that small island nation. Or maybe it is all a dream.

Este libro refleja la problemática cubana con una realidad impresionante, no sólo es literalmente perfecto, sino que también contiene fragmentos de la historia de la isla. Los personajes, distintos unos de otros, se debaten entre sentimientos mezclados y política. No se puede dejar de leer.

A Cuban myself, I was deeply touched by this book when I first read it. Garcia masterly captures the inner conflicts that all her character experience when trying to find a point in this crazy family separation and bigotry. There are very subtle contrasts between the diverse forms of religions that presently coexist in Cuba; also, they play an important metaphorical element when analyzed in a political context. "El lider," as the author refers to Fidel Castro, plays a remote, mythical element, so distant, yet so tangibly close to the life of every Cuban, commanding, exerting his hypnotic power to enthral the masses in hysterical ecstacy. The story flows with ease and makes occasional transitions in time, going from the discursive moment to the past through Celia's letters, making a powerful cohesion of present past and future; attempting to find coherence in this shameful historical accident that segmented families and a whole culture in the sake of an ideology....

Este libro muestra muchas facetas de la vida y realidad cotidiana cubana. En una mezcla de real maravilloso Carpenteriano y un toque de Garcia Marquez la autora refleja la realidad de una familia dividida por problemas politicos, sociales y hasta culturales. Suenos realizados y suenos frustrados, amores dados y amores perdidos, secretos guardados y secretos divulgados. En realidad una obra tipicamente cubana.