In Letters from Cuba, characters Luis and Fran try to remain connected with each other amid emotional and physical gaps that have developed through expressing their dreams and desires in their respective individual talents: Fran is a dancer while Luis is a poetic wordsmith. By expressing desires, especially in Luis’s and Fran’s case, it is about expressing love to that person. To wish is to imagine and imagination transcends time and space. They both also express their desires through objects.

One of the primary ways that Luis and Fran attempt to bridge their gap is through letters. This storytelling device helps convey deeper thoughts that cannot always be conveyed in conversation and because they are contained within certain parameters, such as the white paper, time, and space, one’s words and sentences are limited and so it is a brief but punctuating reminder that life’s moments and life itself are not going to last forever. This is indicated in the first letter that Luis sends to Fran, in which he reads,

“Each time I looked at the letter, I felt embarrassed./ I tried to be cheerful, but it sounded insincere./ Last week I visited Titi. She’s very well.

In my letter, you told me that you went to the Metropolitan Museum with a friend and I imagined I was there looking at the paintings with you. What a lovely thought. I wish I had been there with you.

Your loving brother, Luis” (11)

Luis’s expressing reflections on his thoughts from the original letter demonstrate the essence of letters: of being freely and openly honest in bridging emotions to words. Luis creates a separate stanza of three lines stringed together like musical poetry, punctuating his feelings towards Fran, and echoing sentiment of Joseph’s dialogue about listening to “word spirits” and allow them to flow in one’s mind “as if words had desires, and they want to join other words to express something… of beauty, longing, and despair (10). I think that this may be alluding to the unconscious part of our minds in that we can’t force ourselves to be cheerful if something sounds insincere; we have to listen to our desires and dreams wholesale to create possibilities with other people like Luis communicating and spiritually connecting with Fran through words to reunite together.

Another primary way that Luis and Fran bridge their emotional and physical gap, with Fran working in New York as a dancer and Luis writing while living on the rooftop of Cuba, is through dance. As Fran is dancing to Cuban music in the apartment, she talks about a performance act by Ruth St. Denis, saying,

“…she dropped a rose. At first Martha thought it was an accident, but it was planned. Why did she decide to drop the rose…? Martha was puzzled. She learned that those moments in a dance can make it magic” (14).

This is then followed by Luis’s wife Ana spotting a woman with grey stockings that she really wanted and realizing – just like magic – that package from New York in the post office had grey stockings (15). I connect these two moments not just because they are within proximity to emphasize parallels in both lives through the ways they try to impact each others lives, namely, in this instance, Fran more than likely providing the grey stockings. Even though the quotation and events afterward doesn’t focus on Fran literally dancing, it focuses on the one of the lessons she gleaned from dancing which is that you make meaning through your performance, your role in someone else’s life. And like Ruth St. Denis, Fran is committing a religious act of sending a gift that seems like it’s out of nowhere to give them hope and fulfill someone’s desires and dreams to continue connection with them.

They both exact their own magic onto each other through their talents of dance and writing and of knowing each other so well that they demonstrate the resilience of the human spirit in the face of separation. Their shared longing for connection underscores the universal nature of love through the role of imagination.

Fornés, María Irene. “Letters from Cuba,” in Letters from Cuba and Other Plays. First edition., PAJ Publications, 2007.