92 ELENA MACHADIO SAEZ

 Within Dreaming in Cuban, nostalgia emerges as the desire to recon-
 nect with the original objects of memory's gaze, to possess an alterna-
 tive history, one that is personal and familial, over the national and
 public History. The experience of exile accentuates this desire for a
 return to the past. In Questions of Travel, Caren Kaplan notes that,
 "When the past is displaced, often to another location, the modern
 subject must travel to it, as it were. History becomes something to be
 established and managed through...forms of cultural production. Dis-
 placement, then, mediates the paradoxical relationship between time
 and space in modernity (35). It is this kind of nostalgia that informs
 Pilar's mission in Dreaming in Cuban to record what "really happens."
 For example, Pilar asserts:

 If it were up to me, I'd record other things. Like the time there was a
 freak hailstorm in the Congo and the women took it as a sign that
 they should rule. Or life stories of prostitutes in Bombay. Why don't
 I know anything about them? Who chooses what we should know or
 what's important? I know I have to decide these things for myself.
 Most of what I've learned that's important I've learned on my own or
 from my grandmother. (28)

 Pilar realizes history is a subjective narrative process, one she shapes
to include what has not been recognized as official History. She is par-
ticularly interested in recovering the events marking women as active
in the creation of history as well as personal stories about female ex-
perience. This desire to record the marginal is linked to Pilar's rela-
tionship with her grandmother, Celia. What comforts Celia at the be-
ginning of the novel is that, "Pilar records everything" (7). When Pilar
finally arrives in Cuba to meet her grandmother again, Celia greets her
by saying, "I'm glad you remember, Pilar. I always knew you would"
(218). The last letter Celia writes, and which completes the novel, reit-
erates Pilar's inheritance: "The revolution is eleven days old. My grand-
daughter, Pilar Puente del Pino, was born today.. .I will no longer write
to you, mi amor. She will remember everything." (245). But why is Pilar
chosen for this mission? Since Celia's children are either dead (Felicia
and Javier) or deaf to her needs (Lourdes), she tells Pilar that as her
granddaughter, she is Celia's last hope for salvation: "Women who out-
live their daughters are orphans, Abuela tells me. Only their grand-
daughters can save them, guard their knowledge like the first fire" (222).
Pilar certainly excels early at her recording task, claiming that she re-
members everything that's happened to her since she was a baby, even