ELENA MACHADO SAEZ


 I'm lucky, I can tune in the Wolfman Jack show on Sunday nights.
 Sometimes I want to be like the Wolfman and talk to a million people
 at once. (191)

 Wolfman can speak to a large audience because of the distribution
of his show through the medium of radio. In addition, Ivanito pairs
Wolfman's radio success with the acquisition of English, despite the
proliferation of Spanish-language radio in the U.S. and especially in
South Florida. The novel locates the market as a space dominated by
English as the global language; success therefore entails learning En-
glish and leaving Cuba behind.' While in the United States art is even-
tually co-opted by the mass market, there still remains the potential of
reaching a global community, or creating a community through art (as
is the case with Pilar and Franco from the record store). Meanwhile, in
Cuba, art is confined to the political, linguistic and geographic bor-
ders of Cuba-in Dreaming in Cuban, the rest of the Caribbean does
not exist. Cuba is represented alone in the Caribbean Sea, stuck be-
tween its colonial histories with Spain and the U.S., drowning in the
perpetual Revolution of Castro.
 In the end, Pilar cannot stay in Cuba, or she will be restricted to
being Cuban, which the novel continually associates with sickness,
stagnance and death. On the other hand, the United States offers Pilar
access to commodified Cuban culture (such as Beny Mor6 and Santeria)
and also to a marginalized American identity (via Lou Reed). There,
Pilar can be Cuban and American. Pilar's formulation of this in-between
identity via globalization prompts her to help Ivanito escape Cuba on
the Mariel boatlift. By telling Celia that she was unable to find Ivanito
at the Peruvian embassy, Pilar accepts Lourdes' decision to initiate
him into exile and nostalgia. Ultimately, the novel suggests that Ivanito
is better off being Cuban somewhere other than in Cuba. In doing so,
Pilar accepts her own self-conflicted identity and the intrusion of both
history and distance onto the family. Through Pilar's final betrayal of
Celia, and Celia's subsequent drowning, Dreaming in Cuban melancholi-
cally posits nostalgia as a product of entrance to the global world, and
a better fate than never being part of the global marketplace.


 7 It is no accident that when Celia drowns herself at the end of the Dreaming in
Cuban, she recites a Lorca poem in English for the first time in the novel. This literary
translation at the moment of Celia's death signifies the novel's pessimistic prediction
of Cuba's future in a global world. Within the novel, translation means death. If
Cuba is translated, it will die. However, Cuba is also figured to be doomed by the
language it speaks, Spanish, because it is not the language of globalization.