Dreaming in Cuban

"Dreaming in Cuban" is the first novel by the Cuban-American writer Cristina García, published in 1992. The narrative covers three generations of a Cuban family, that of Célia and Jorge del Piño, in the context of the Cuban Revolution, while most of them were exiled to the USA. We read the story through the eyes of Pilar Puente, and the places that come up in the story emerge not only out of their presence at the mentioned locations but also through their memories and imagination. As suggested, they not only dream of Cuba, but in Cuban: they dream in a language particular to their historically and culturally constructed memories. These mental images, though, are also a product of their experiences, such as Pilar's. The following sections will then explore through visualization tools, especially mapping, the movement that Pilar does first literally and then in her language, while she speaks of her remembered and imagined experiences.

Tracking Pilar Puente's movement between Cuba and the USA.

Pilar Puente is geographically represented as Miami - a place of desire, an artificial home, an extension of Cuba and all the conflicts that crossed the country and its people. Even though Pilar and her family spend little time in Florida, Miami has the centrality of a bridge, somewhere to be inevitably crossed and marked by those who go over it. Therefore, Florida, and especially Miami (both understood as two completely different unities for the Cuban community) are the setting of many of Pilar's memories.

Even after returning home from her teenage fleeing experience, Pilar still has Miami and Florida in mind. In addition to remembering the places she has actually been to, she narrates events that are marked in the American state by Cuban presence. The map below is intended to make visible the specific locations according to Pilar's memories and imagination. When specific locations are not mentioned in the novel, I chose locations that, according to editorial choices, were representative of the actions, feelings, and events in Pilar and her family's history - which might coincide with the experiences of many Cuban-Americans like them.

Click on the places in the map to see information about how, when, and where Miami is mentioned in the novel "Dreaming in Cuban"

It is almost a consensus in the Cuban community that Miami and Florida are not simply capital city and state; they are read as culturally different. While Miami is seen as an extension of Cuba after the many exile waves from there to the capital of Florida, the state feels as foreign as the United States, and that's where you should find "los gringos". That is reflected in the ways Pilar addresses Florida.

Click on the map to see the locations in Florida mentioned by Pilar, the elected representative places, and the information about its mention in García's novel.

This visualization tool is the result of a Digital Humanities summer fellowship to work on an ongoing DH project led by Prof. Allison Schifani, at the University of Miami. It also owes credit to the Digital Caribbean course, taught in the Fall of 2022 also at the University of Miami, where I learned a lot and became familiar with the particular scholarship necessary to discuss the implications of moving digital when addressing the Caribbean context, the role of DH in geography and mapping, in addition to ethical concerns. I also want to thank the assistance of Abraham Parish, part of the digital team at the University of Miami library, without whom it would have been nearly impossible to grapple with the skills minimally necessary to develop the maps and the present story map.

Initially, when I started engaging with the mapping of "Dreaming in Cuban", I envisioned this project as a means to connect Cuban-Americans, making them see themselves as the characters of the novel, for having very similar exile experiences. However, the more I delved into the stories within the "del Piño" family, the more I learned about my own ignorance, and I found more potential in informing other readers who, just like me, could be fascinated by the cultural richness of Cuban-American culture and terrified by the tragedies of death and conflict that were part of the chaotic flux of people seeking refuge.

The first step was to map the novel's references to places. It must be said that the geographies of "Dreaming in Cuban" extend way beyond the borders of Florida, Cuba, or the United States. The characters will often refer to places as they imagine them to be, repeat stereotypes common to the time and make associations with the places they already know. However, for the purposes of this particular project, mapping the novel's Caribbean Miami, and Florida, I selected all the references of neighborhoods, streets, roads, avenues, and other locations inside this limited space. Afterward, I created a spreadsheet (click here to see it), adding the data that would later give life to the maps. Yet I soon found out that, to populate the map, I would need specific geographical locations, including latitude and longitude, though the novel did not always provide such a level of precision in the description of the locations mentioned, given that most of them came up out of memories.

Therefore, I ran lots of bibliographical research to find out the places in the history of Miami, Florida, and Cuba that could represent the events narrated. For example, I chose to represent the reference to the Jewish community in Miami on the map as the city's first synagogue, Beth David, today a museum of Miami's Jewish history; for the bodies of immigrants found in Key Biscayne, iI marked the Cape Florida lighthouse, a place that would inspire hope to survive in those who risked a boat escape from Cuba to the USA through the Straits of Florida. That was certainly the stage of the project that was the most time-consuming. Consulting historical maps online, and finding out pictures and maps for specific time periods, carefully enough to provide a reliable visualization tool has been both the major drawback and gift of this visualization project. I realized that it would be just not possible to illustrate all the events or find a representative GPS coordinate for every location. Therefore, my main aim remains to be providing a model to be further developed.

In the future, I envision the addition of other features to the maps, and the creation of new layers to foster comparative literary mapping. It will be interesting to see how Miami has been differently (or similarly) represented by different authors and characters along time. This is just a contribution to the field of literary mapping and digital humanities, intended also to function as a pedagogical tool to help students and teachers to get immersed in Cristina García's masterpiece.

Duany, Jorge. “Cuban Communities in the United States: Migration Waves, Settlement Patterns and Socioeconomic Diversity.” Pouvoirs dans la Caraïbe Revue du Centre de recherche sur les pouvoirs locaux dans la Caraïbe 11 (1999): 69–103. Web. Available at https://journals.openedition.org/plc/464 .

García, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban. Random House Publishing Group 1992.

McHugh, Kevin E., et al. “The Magnetism of Miami: Segmented Paths in Cuban Migration.” Geographical Review, vol. 87, no. 4, 1997, pp. 504–19. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/215228. Accessed 5 Dec. 2022.

WBAP-TV (Television station: Fort Worth, Tex.). [Station Rating Chart], photograph, June 20, 1970; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1336287/m1/1/: accessed December 13, 2022), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.