Over the past couple of months, my reading list has unintentionally turned into a syllabus on identity, displacement, and the messy business of becoming American. I’ve gone from James Baldwin’s searing essays to Derrick Bell’s unflinching legal parables, from Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, to my current read Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban. Apparently, I’ve been curating a literary support group for people who live in the in‑between, the exiled, the hybrid, the children of diaspora who carry histories we didn’t choose but still feel responsible for. And honestly? It’s been hitting a little too close to home. As a Colombian‑American born here but raised in the gravitational pull of another homeland, I’ve been reading these books like someone looking for a map of a country that doesn’t exist on paper, only in memory, imagination, and family stories told over café con leche.

Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban is a multigenerational novel that follows the del Pino women, a family split not just by geography, but by politics, memory, and the emotional aftershocks of exile. The story moves between Cuba and the United States from the 1930s through the 1980s, weaving together the lives of three generations of women who are all, in their own ways, trying to make sense of the past they inherited and the futures they’re building. At the center is Celia del Pino, the family matriarch, whose unwavering devotion to the Cuban Revolution becomes both her anchor and her undoing. She writes decades’ worth of letters to her lost lover, Gustavo, letters her children never see until long after her life has hardened into myth. Celia stays in Cuba, but she becomes emotionally exiled from her own family.

Her daughters take opposite paths.

Lourdes, the eldest, flees Cuba after a traumatic assault and reinvents herself in New York as a fiercely patriotic, hyper‑American entrepreneur. She loves the United States with the intensity of someone who needs that love to mean something. Her Americanness is a shield, a performance, a survival strategy.

Felicia, the middle daughter, remains in Cuba but spirals into psychological turmoil. Her life is marked by an abusive marriage, mental illness, and a desperate search for spiritual meaning. She is exiled inside her own mind, and her children grow up trying to understand a mother they can never fully reach.

And then there’s Pilar, Lourdes’s daughter, the bridge between worlds. Born in Cuba but raised in the U.S., Pilar feels a psychic pull toward her grandmother Celia, a connection that transcends distance and politics. She grows up caught between two homelands, two histories, two versions of herself. When she finally travels to Cuba as a young woman, she finds clarity but not belonging. Her identity remains hybrid, layered, beautifully unresolved.

The novel moves through their memories, letters, dreams, and visions, showing how exile fractures families not just across borders but across time. Every woman in this family is shaped by what she knows, what she doesn’t know, and what she learns too late.

Cuba, Then and Now: A Country That Won’t Sit Still

Cuba has been in the news again, protests, shortages, political crackdowns, the same cycle of hope and heartbreak that has defined the island for decades. But none of this is new. Cuba’s modern history is a story of revolutions that promised liberation but delivered new forms of control; of families split across oceans; of people forced to choose between homeland and survival. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 reshaped the island, but it also reshaped Miami, New Jersey, New York, every place where Cuban exiles rebuilt their lives.

García’s Dreaming in Cuban captures this history not through dates and speeches, but through the emotional wreckage it leaves behind. Celia’s devotion to El Líder, Lourdes’s fierce rejection of Cuba, Felicia’s unraveling, these are the human consequences of political upheaval, and so, reading this now, in a moment when Cuba is once again erupting, feels like watching history refuse to stay in the past.

This is where García’s novel becomes almost too real. Exile isn’t just about leaving a country; for me it’s about leaving stories untold.

Celia’s unread letters.
Felicia’s daughters piecing together her life like detectives.
Pilar longing for a grandmother she barely knows but feels spiritually tethered to.

This is exile as inheritance.
Exile as a family secret.
Exile as a silence that shapes identity as much as any homeland, and if you grew up in a Latinx household, you know this intimately. Our families are full of stories that only come out in fragments, whispered, half‑remembered, or revealed decades later when the damage is already done.

What’s struck me most in these past months of reading, Baldwin, Bell, García, and now Díaz; is how their ideas braid together almost effortlessly, as if they’ve all been sitting at the same table arguing about identity, exile, and America long before I showed up with my highlighters. Baldwin reminds me that identity is forged in tension, in the friction between who we are and who the nation insists we be. Pilar lives in that friction. She isn’t American because she rejects Cuba; she’s American because she refuses to amputate any part of herself. She holds both worlds, both histories, both longings, without apology. Bell, on the other hand, exposes the contradictions baked into America’s racial and political systems. When I look at Lourdes through Bell’s lens, her hyper‑patriotism suddenly makes sense. Her Americanness isn’t naïve; it’s strategic. It’s armor. Reinvention becomes her survival tactic in a country that has never been neutral terrain for immigrants. Then Díaz enters the chat with the language of inherited trauma, the idea that history clings to families like a shadow you can’t shake. Pilar’s psychic pull toward Celia, or Luz and Milagro trying to decode Felicia’s life, feels like pure Díaz: the fukú of diaspora, the blessing and curse of carrying stories you didn’t choose but still shape you.

Together, these writers form a kind of chorus, not always harmonious, but always truthful. They tell us that identity is layered. That exile doesn’t end with the person who leaves. That belonging is a negotiation, not a birthright, and that America, for people like us, has never been simple.

This is the part we don’t like to say out loud, but we all know it’s true.

America loves immigrant labor, immigrant food, immigrant culture, but historically, it has not loved immigrants. From the Chinese Exclusion Act to the treatment of Cuban rafters in the 1990s to the rhetoric around Latin American migrants today, the pattern is painfully consistent. Immigrants are welcomed when convenient, scapegoated when politically useful, and rarely granted the full humanity they deserve. García’s novel shows us the emotional cost of this. Lourdes builds her Americanness out of discipline and defiance because she knows this country will not give her the benefit of the doubt. Pilar grows up negotiating two identities because America demands clarity where her life offers complexity, and in today’s political climate, where immigration is once again a battleground, their stories feel eerily contemporary. For those of us who grew up with one foot in the U.S. and one in Colombia, Cuba, the DR, Mexico, or anywhere else in the world, García’s novel feels like a mirror.

We know what it’s like to inherit stories in fragments.
We know what it’s like to feel nostalgia for a place we’ve only visited in memory.
We know what it’s like to navigate a country that loves our culture but not always our people.

Exile, for us, isn’t dramatic. It’s subtle.
A hum beneath the surface.
A reminder that identity is something we build and rebuild every day.

In the End…

Dreaming in Cuban doesn’t give us answers. It gives us language. It gives us permission to be plural. It gives us a way to understand the silences in our families and the fractures in our histories. In a moment when America is once again arguing about who gets to belong, García reminds us of a truth Baldwin, Bell, and Díaz have been shouting for decades:

Belonging is not something the nation grants.
It’s something we live, claim, and carry, across borders, across generations, across time.

Work Cited

Baldwin, James. Going to Meet the Man. Vintage International, 1995.

Bell, Derrick. Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. Basic Books, 1992.

Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Riverhead Books, 2007.

García, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban. Vintage Contemporaries, 1992.

Gott, Richard. Cuba: A New History. Yale University Press, 2004.

Pérez, Louis A., Jr. Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution. 5th ed., Oxford University Press, 2014.