A short life of the author
Cristina García (born 4 July 1958) is a Cuban-American novelist and journalist whose fiction explores the experience of the Cuban diaspora — the division between those who stayed and those who left, the persistence of memory across the Florida Straits, and the ways in which political history shapes private life. Her debut novel, Dreaming in Cuban (1992), was a National Book Award finalist and is now regarded as one of the essential works of contemporary Latino/a American literature — a multigenerational family saga that tells the story of the Cuban Revolution and its aftermath through the lives of three generations of women in the del Pino family, divided between Havana and Brooklyn.
Life
García was born in Havana, Cuba, and emigrated to the United States with her family in 1961, two years after the Revolution. She grew up in New York City — in Queens and Brooklyn — speaking Spanish at home and English at school, navigating the dual identities and competing narratives that characterise the Cuban-American experience. She studied political science at Barnard College and international relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
She worked as a journalist and correspondent for Time magazine, serving as bureau chief in Miami and covering Latin American politics, before turning to fiction. Her journalism gave her an intimate knowledge of the Cuban exile community and of the political complexities of the U.S.–Cuba relationship.
Dreaming in Cuban (1992)
The novel follows three generations of the del Pino family. Celia del Pino, the grandmother, remains in Cuba, loyal to the Revolution and to Fidel Castro, whom she addresses in unsent letters. Her daughter Lourdes has fled to Brooklyn, where she runs a bakery and embraces American capitalism with the zeal of a convert. Lourdes’s daughter Pilar, born in Cuba but raised in Brooklyn, is an artist who feels drawn to the country she barely remembers.
The novel moves between Cuba and Brooklyn, between past and present, and between the political and the personal with a fluidity that owes something to magical realism — there are ghosts, visions, and supernatural elements — but is grounded in the specific, concrete details of Cuban and Cuban-American life. García writes about food, music, weather, and domestic routine with a sensory precision that makes both Havana and Brooklyn fully present on the page.
The book’s achievement is its refusal to simplify the Cuban experience. Celia’s devotion to the Revolution is presented with sympathy — not as political naiveté but as a genuine commitment to social justice. Lourdes’s anti-Communism is presented with equal sympathy — not as reactionary politics but as the response of a woman whose life was destroyed by revolutionary violence. Pilar’s confusion — drawn to Cuba, rooted in America, fully at home in neither — is the characteristic condition of the second-generation exile.
Later Novels
The Agüero Sisters (1997) tells the story of two Cuban-born sisters — one who stayed in Havana, one who emigrated to Miami — and the family secret that connects and divides them. The novel is structurally more complex than Dreaming in Cuban, moving between multiple time periods and incorporating natural history, ornithology, and the landscape of Cuba into its narrative.
Monkey Hunting (2003) expands García’s scope beyond the Cuban diaspora, tracing a Chinese-Cuban family across three continents and 150 years — from a Chinese contract labourer in nineteenth-century Cuba to his descendants in Havana, Shanghai, and Vietnam. The novel explores the intersection of Chinese and Cuban identities with historical ambition.
King of Cuba (2013) is García’s most political novel — a dual portrait of a Castro-like dictator in his final days and an elderly exile in Miami who fantasises about assassinating him. The novel is darkly comic and structurally daring.
Here in Berlin (2017) collects oral histories and fictions about Berlin, reflecting García’s time living in the city.
Critical Standing
García is one of the essential voices of contemporary Cuban-American literature — alongside Oscar Hijuelos, Reinaldo Arenas, and Ana Menéndez. Dreaming in Cuban is her landmark work, widely taught and genuinely loved by readers who find in it a compassionate, complex portrait of what it means to belong to two countries and fully inhabit neither.
Collecting García
Dreaming in Cuban (1992, Knopf) in first edition with dust jacket brings $50–$150 — it is the key title. The Agüero Sisters (1997, Knopf) brings $15–$30. Later novels bring $10–$25. Signed copies are available at readings and bring modest premiums.