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women of the del Pino family. The idea of Cuba is a shifting, ambiguous dream for

all four: the different ways in which they try to come to terms with that dream

determine their lives and describe quite different strands in the Cuban-American

experience. The oldest of the four, Celia del Pino, for instance, stays in Cuba, where

she transfers an unrequited passion for a lost love to “El Lider,” Fidel Castro. Her

daughter Lourdes, on the other hand, moves to Brooklyn where she embraces

American opportunity, becoming a successful entrepreneur, head of her own

“Yankee Doodle Bakery” chain. The daughter of Lourdes, in turn, Pilar, the signature

voice of the novel, experiences a dual exile, caught in the interstices between Cuban

and American cultures. By the close of the story, she has returned to Cuba. “I’ve

started dreaming in Spanish,” Pilar confesses. “I wake up feeling different, like

something inside me is changing,” “there’s a magic working its way through my

veins.” Nevertheless, she realizes that “sooner or later” she will return to New York.

“I know now,” she says, “its where I belong – not instead of here, but more than here.”

Recent novels by Cuban-Americans are packed with characters like Pilar, who labor

just as she does, not just under the opportunity but the necessity of reinventing

themselves, dreaming their way into a new identity. There are, for instance, the

characters in two other novels by Garcia, The Aguero Sisters (1997) and Monkey

Hunting (2003). There is also the protagonist of The Doorman (1987) by Reinaldo

Arenas (1943–1990), a surreal tale of exile in New York. Trapped in what he describes

as “an immense underwater city” full of people who look “like fish seeking temporary

refuge,” he is constantly seeking some way to keep himself afloat. There is the family

in Raining Backwards (1988) by Roberto Fernández (1951–), who experience their

life between cultures as a kind of montage, a clash of different aesthetic forms and

styles. And there is, in turn, the central character in The Pérez Family (1990) by

Christine Bell (1951–): Dorita, an enterprising “Cuban madonna hip” who declares

“the second I stepped into the United States, I am a new woman.” “She was going to

have a second chance to live the way she dreamed life should be,” Bell says of Dorita,

“and not the way it turned out.” That strikes a recurrent chord in the fiction by and

about Cuban-Americans, although it is not by any means a constant, invariable one.

Dreaming mostly in metropolitan spaces, the characters in this fiction may have

trouble weaving their way between memory and longing; “there’s only my

imagination where our history should be,” the narrator of Dreaming in Cuban

complains. But they never entirely surrender or relinquish their dreams; on the

contrary, they sometimes manage to give them momentary, magical life.

Improvising America: Asian-American writing

As late as 1960, there were less then nine hundred thousand people of Asian descent

in the United States. Thirty years later, there were more than seven million. The

(^) largest group, in terms of national origins, were and are Chinese-Americans,
followed by Filipinos, Japanese, Asian Indians, Koreans, Vietnamese and, much
lower down the numerical scale, Laotians, Cambodians, and Hmong. With
profoundly different histories, what these immigrants from a Greater Asia and the
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