100 ELENA MACHADO SAEZ

with this historical record, and blurs the boundaries between the pub-
lic sand-history, and the private homes of the families. Celia's insis-
tence on not bringing the shells into her home is futile-Felicia laughs
at how, after the tidal wave, the house was full of them.
 Throughout the novel, Felicia functions as a representative subject
of Cuba and its relationship to time and history. Felicia's deterioration
due to her syphilis is linked to a loss of memory that is framed and
contextualized by the Revolution. Waking up from an episode of amne-
sia, Felicia finds herself in a room she had apparently decorated with
history, with outdated calendars, "each month taped neatly to the ceil-
ing" and "in the center of ceiling, affixed with yellow tape, is January
1959, the first month of the revolution" (151). Felicia's amnesia mir-
rors a national one, identifying the Revolution as a break within Cuban
time. After her initiation as a santera, Felicia "lost consciousness, fall-
ing into an emptiness without history or future" (187). She wastes away
and dies, having fallen into the time(lessness) of the Revolution, a space
devoid of historical progress. Due to its isolation from the global mar-
ket and the progress of capitalism, Cuba is a space of unproductiveness,
sickness and death. The novel thus revises Walter Benjamin's formula-
tion of Marxist time within revolution from his "Theses on the Philoso-
phy of History." According to Benjamin, a revolution is meant to halt
or break progress and time: if time is structured by class struggle and
the revolution should create a classless society, it can by extension
create a timeless society, or a shift in the conception of time, investing
it with true meaning. Dreaming in Cuban figures the revolutionary break
in time as a form of trauma that puts Cuba in limbo, erasing the possi-
bility for remembrance through cultural production.
 The novel also indicates that the Revolution's effect upon Cuban
time, history and progress influences the role of art in Cuban society.
Pilar continually classifies art as a space for recording, interpretation
and translation. Nevertheless, the narrative implies that art cannot
perform these functions within the context of the Cuban Revolution.
Celia's last case as judge in the People's Court is of

 Sim6n C6rdoba, a boy of fifteen, [who] has written a number of short
 stories considered to be antirevolutionary. His characters escape from
 Cuba on rafts of sticks and tires, refuse to harvest grapefruit, dream
 of singing in a rock and roll band in California (158).

 In her sentencing, Celia aims to "reorient [his creativity] toward the
revolution," stating that it is only "later, when the system has matured,