Dreaming in Cuban Themes

Love hurts. Love scars. And not to mix idioms, but love also bleeds. Love commits you to an insane asylum. It holds you out by the ankle and drops you in the lap of whoever happens to be there. It...

In Dreaming in Cuban, both Celia and Lourdes fear that their lifetime of experiences—especially the tragic and painful parts—will be "swallowed by the earth" and never have any meaning. Pilar a...

Read the first three pages of Dreaming in Cuban and you'll realize something very important. There are dead people. Walking over the ocean. Living people can hear the sounds of the universe operati...

From Lourdes' lazy eye, which takes in things that others can't see, to those in power who construct their own versions of national histories, Dreaming in Cuban challenges the concept that anyone c...

We'd like to suggest that you reach beyond the obvious definition of exile as you explore this theme in Dreaming in Cuban. In addition to the political exile suffered by Lourdes and Pilar (and poss...

While it's true that this thematic thread is most thoroughly explored through Pilar's character in Dreaming in Cuban, we want to caution you not to overlook other members of her family who are cont...

It's kind of a field day for us to talk about transformations in a book that so heavily employs magical realism. In Dreaming in Cuban we have gigantic blue grandpas wearing panama hats and walking...

The Del Pino family hasn't exactly cornered the market on suffering—we even see them acknowledging the greater horrors that happen every day around the world—but they do take their fair share o...