Dreaming in Cuban

Lourdes Puentes awakes at four in the morning next to her husband, Rufino. She rises and puts on one of her six identical white uniforms. She enjoys the sense of authority that she feels while wearing them. Lourdes owns a bakery in Brooklyn, which she purchased five years ago from another immigrant to New York, a Jewish man with Franco-Austrian roots who settled in Brooklyn after World War II. Lourdes enjoys the early mornings, the pastries, and the work involved in running the bakery, but today, she leaves a note for her daughter Pilar to help her out after school. She has just fired an employee and needs Pilar to fill in. At the bakery, Lourdes receives a call from Sister Federica, one of the nuns who had been caring for her father. The nun tells Lourdes that her father was “a saint” and that in his final moments, he thanked her for her help and told her that he would shortly begin another journey.

Lourdes tries to reach her mother in Santa Teresa del Mar, but she is unsuccessful because heavy rains have washed out the power lines. She instead phones Felicia in Havana. Lourdes recalls her father’s early days in Brooklyn and reflects on how the stress of taking him to the hospital for treatments caused her to gain 118 pounds. She also developed a powerful craving for sweets and carbs, and gave in rather than fighting the urges. Lourdes used the last of her savings to move Jorge into a private hospice, and now, she takes comfort in the fact that although he was deathly afraid of germs, he died clean and was well cared for.

Pilar Puente

Pilar does not come to work at the bakery, nor does she come home. Worried, Lourdes finally alerts the police. She recalls her daughter’s birth, not long after “El Líder” had come to power in Cuba. At the time, she had trouble keeping nurses, because each woman that she hired left with an injury of some kind after swearing that Pilar was bewitched. She thinks back to her own first year of life, which she spent in the care of her father because her mother had been committed to a psychiatric hospital due to a mental health crisis.

The narrative reveals that pilar did not show up to her shift at the bakery because she happened to see her father with another woman. Pilar then used her savings to purchase a bus ticket to Miami. From there, she intends to make her way to Cuba to stay with her grandmother, Celia. On the bus to Miami, Pilar thinks about her mother. Their relationship is difficult, for Lourdes does not give Pilar any privacy; she reads her daughter’s journals and even interrupts her in the bathtub. Although Pilar is a talented artist, Lourdes initially refused to allow her daughter to attend the art school to which she won a scholarship. Rufino ultimately intervened and also purchased an old warehouse so that he could have a workshop and Pilar could have a studio. Lourdes and Celia also have a fraught relationship. Their difficulties stem from Celia’s devoted adherence to El Líder and Lourdes’s staunch, anti-communist beliefs.

Celia is waiting for her granddaughters at their school. Waiting strikes her as recurring motif within her life. As a young woman, she fell in love with a married man from Spain; she first waited on him at the electronics counter where she worked in Havana. He bought a camera from her. Although she thought that he had loved her too, he returned to Spain without her. After being jilted, she purchased potions at the botánica, took to her bed, and began to waste away. Her great-aunt Alicia brought a santera who read her palm, found a “wet landscape” there, and promised that Celia would eventually recover. Celia soon married Jorge instead, but she never removed the drop pearl earrings that her Spaniard gave to her.

After Celia and Jorge married, he left her alone in the house on Las Palmas street with his mother and sister. The two women treated her wretchedly, giving her only scraps to eat and openly speaking ill of her. They both repeatedly tried to bleach their skin so as to disguise their diverse heritage, and when Celia became pregnant, her sister-in-law stole much of her clothing, claiming that Celia would no longer be able to fit into it. Shortly after Celia gave birth to Lourdes, Jorge took her to an “asylum.”

Now, Celia is once again living in the house on Las Palmas, which her daughter Felicia owns. Felicia is deeply distraught over her father Jorge’s death and has not been taking care of her own children—her son Ivanito and the twins, Luz and Milagro. Celia cannot seem to find or feel her own grief, and her response to Jorge’s death has been to redouble her efforts to support El Líder. To this end, she has been cutting sugar cane with agricultural workers. Believing that her daughter needs more time to grieve, she decides to take her grandchildren to her home in Santa Teresa del Mar. Ivanito refuses to go, but Luz and Milagro agree, and she sets off home with the girls.

The narrative shifts to Celia’s youth. The young Celia writes her Spanish lover Gustavo one letter for each month of her life. In March of 1935, Celia writes that she is about to marry Jorge del Pino. He is a good man, and he wants her to forget Gustavo, but she cannot. She writes again on her honeymoon, and again when she becomes pregnant. She writes to Gustavo that if she gives birth to a boy, she will bring him to Spain. From there, her letters begin to show her declining mental state, and she confesses her belief that her baby girl can read her thoughts. She writes cryptically that felicia has been killed and that she is going home the following day. In 1938, Celia writes that she has a new baby named Felicia and that Lourdes is now two and a half. She states that Jorge is a good man.