Cristina García is a Cuban American novelist and journalist. She was born in Havana to a Cuban mother and a Guatemalan father, and her family was part of the first wave of émigrés to leave Cuba after Fidel Castro’s rise to power. They fled the country in 1961, when she was just two years old, and Cristina grew up in New York City. She earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Barnard College and a master’s degree in international relations from Johns Hopkins University. She worked as a journalist for many years before writing Dreaming in Cuban, her debut novel. Although all of her fiction is deeply committed to depicting the experiences of the Cuban diaspora in the United States and around the world, García has noted how surprised she was to discover how “Cuban” her writing felt. She had grown up without any particular sense of her Cuban identity, had always considered herself American, and had not “longed” for the Cuba of her parents. When drafting Dreaming in Cuba, she discovered her inner sense of having been exiled from her home culture and realized that she wanted to reconnect with Cuban history and culture.

All of her novels engage with the same themes that are represented in Dreaming in Cuban.