98 ELENA MACHADO SAEZ

exile, I think, as an island-colony. We can reach it by a thirty-minute
charter flight from Miami, yet never reach it at all" (219). Cuba's exile
is derived from its geographic isolation as an island, and yet, Pilar hints
that there is a further "pecularity" regarding Cuba's position. Celia simi-
larly depicts Cuba in terms exile:

 What was it he read to her once? About how, long ago, the New World
 was attached to Europe and Africa? Yes, and the continents pulled
 away slowly, painfully after millions of years. The Americas were still
 inching westward and will eventually collide with Japan. Celia wonders
 if Cuba will be left behind, alone in the Caribbean sea with its faulted
 and folded mountains, its conquests, its memories. (48)

 The world moves westward in a geographic flow, while Cuba is left
alone, apparently the only island in the Caribbean. Cuba is marked by
a singularity, its inability to enter into this transcontinental movement.
In effect, the novel's Cuba is isolated because it is not part of the glo-
bal marketplace; the Revolution severed its ties to the world market,
and therefore it is not involved in this westward progress, the globalism
reconnecting the world's continents and nations.' Celia's description
of Cuba's exile is preceded by her hopes for Cuba's reintegration into
global capitalism, via the processing of sugarcane (45). However, this
dream is not a reality, since the narrative emphasizes Cuba's connec-
tions to the global marketplace and American imperialism are a thing
of the past. Within the novel, the Revolution not only results in the
painful separation of families, but also removes Cuba from the influ-
ence of the United States and the sea of global capitalism.
 The novel's nostalgia for Cuba, the Cuba that Pilar can never reach,
is for a pre-Revolution time, when Cuba was the island-colony of the
United States. Celia's letters are all written before the Revolution, and
serve as the underlying structure and voice of the novel. In these let-
ters, Celia describes Cuba as "a place where everything and everyone


 4 Not only does the novel ignore the economic and political ties between Cuba
and the rest of the Caribbean, but also the island's access to a larger global market
by downplaying the significance of Cuba's relationship to the USSR. Dreaming in
Cuban depicts this relationship as having negative consequences on the Cuban
people via the characterization of Javier and his death. His broken relationship
with his wife and child serve as a reflection of the broken political ties and loss of
subsidies after the dismantling of the Soviet bloc. The narrative isolates Cuba's ties
to the USSR as unsustainable and not compatible with entrance into global market.