Next Year In Havana

“To be in exile is to have the things you love most in the world—the air you breathe, the earth you walk upon—taken from you. They exist on the other side of a wall—there and not—unaltered by time and circumstance, preserved in a perfect memory in a land of dreams. My Cuba is gone, the Cuba I gave to you over the years swept away by the winds of revolution. It’s time for you to discover your own Cuba.” 

Elisa’s task is putatively for Marisol to scatter her ashes in the land to which she couldn’t return. Her obsession—even after death—with returning shows that Elisa defines herself as an exile from Cuba. Elisa is aware that her notion of Cuba is not enough for her granddaughter, however. Her charge to Marisol is the inciting incident that forces Marisol to begin her pilgrimage.

“My grandparents are Cuban, my father Cuban, therefore I am Cuban. But will it matter here that my skin is lighter than many of the country’s citizens, that my blood is not fully Cuban? Am I an outsider here or is the ancestry I claim enough?” 

As Marisol goes through customs, she experiences a crisis of identity because she is not sure she has the right to make a claim to Cuban identity based on being a Perez. Her uncertainty in this moment is one of many when she questions the meaning of the Cuban part of her heritage.

“Havana is like a woman who was grand once and has fallen on hard times, and yet hints of her former brilliance remain, traces of an era since passed, a photograph faded by time and circumstance, its edges crumbling to dust. If I close my eyes I can see Havana as she was, enshrined in my grandmother’s memory. But when they open again, the reality of nearly sixty years of isolation stares back at me, and I’m grateful my grandmother isn’t here to witness the decay of the city she loved so faithfully.” 

The crumbling infrastructure of Cuba is Marisol’s first major encounter with a reality that challenges the vision she has of Cuba from Elisa’s stories.

“In the beginning, our legacy came from smuggling and the corsair’s more nefarious activities. Soon his children and grandchildren began diversifying the family’s fortune, and through an advantageous marriage in the late nineteenth century, the Perezes became sugar barons. For better, worse, and the truly horrific, sugar has molded Cuba’s fortunes. The corsair stares us down as we tiptoe through the hall, and while the rest of our ancestors.” 

The Perez family origin story is one rooted in imperialism and expropriation of the island’s goods and natural resources. This origin explains in part why the Perez family is so wealthy. Elisa is aware of this history and important symbol of the family’s membership in the elite.

“There are—were—the Organización Auténtica, an ill-fated group of guerrilla fighters; the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil, a group of students from the University of Havana; the mostly defunct Federación Estudiantil Universitaria, another group of students from the University of Havana who together with the DRE fought their way into the Presidential Palace and attempted to assassinate Batista last year; members of the Communist Party whose uneasy alliance with Batista wanes; the 26th of July Movement fighting Batista’s army in the Sierra Maestra mountains; and any number of other enemies Batista has garnered over the years.” 

There are many passages in the novel during which Cleeton provides significant historical detail about the Cuban Revolution. These details are to be expected because the novel is historical fiction. In this passage, the details are provided by Elisa as she walks along the Malecón with Pablo. Despite her relatively sheltered life, Elisa knows a surprising amount about these factions, a circumstance that indicates her growing awareness of the activities of the revolutionaries.

“[P]erhaps one day they will honor him in the annals of Cuban history, but I don’t want to love a martyr. I don’t want this war or bloodshed to touch my corner of the island more than it already has. I don’t want to lose him. And suddenly, I feel young and foolish, impossibly coddled.” 

Elisa reacts in this passage to Pablo’s vow to give up his life for his country if necessary. In this pivotal moment, the costs and violence of the revolution become real to Elisa.

“There is somewhat of a divide between the Cubans who left and the Cubans who stayed. There is affection and worry for family members and friends who remained behind, the intrinsic need to help anyone leave Cuba, but there is also a schism. Some believe those who stayed contributed to Cuba becoming what it is now, and in doing so, bolstered Fidel’s power and legitimized it. People like my grandmother saw that as another betrayal—one that hurt especially because it came from her fellow Cubans. It is much easier to forgive the stranger than it is one you love.” 

Even before coming to Cuba, Marisol is aware of the tension between those who stayed in Cuba and those who left. Marisol is thinking of Elisa’s hatred for Castro; Marisol is struggling in this moment to reconcile this hatred with her grandmother’s love affair with Pablo. Marisol’s growing knowledge of her grandmother’s life in 1958-1959 forces Marisol to see Cuban politics as more complicated than she imagined.

“It strikes me as surprising, considering exiled Cubans are intrinsic historians. They collect faded photographs, draw maps of Havana neighborhoods from memory, pass down family recipes and traditions as though they’re sacrosanct. So much of our history is oral, a by-product of Castro’s unwillingness to allow families to take anything but their memories with them when they left Cuba.” 

As she listens to Luis and walks through Old Havana, Marisol comes to a greater understanding of how learning Cuban history from exiles has shaped and distorted her perspective on Cuban history. 

“There’s a luxury in historiography most Cubans lack. They’re too occupied with surviving in the present to spend their time living in the past. Plus, there’s the added difficulty of how much the narrative of the past has been shaped for them and how difficult it is to get honest information out of the regime.” 

Marisol’s understanding of the differences between how exiles and those who stayed in Cuba differ is further refined when Luis explains in this quote the material and political conditions of life under the regime shape the ability and desire to record history.

“The legendary cars like the one we’re sitting in now are of course eye-catching with their bright colors and history, but perhaps more impressive is the amount of work that must go into making them run for over fifty years.” 

These classic Cuban cars are visible signs of the impact of the economic embargo on Cuba and the pragmatism of the Cuban response to the embargo.

“You can gawk at the world’s largest cigar in the site where we bled.” 

Luis’s disgusted tone at the transformation of La Cabaña Prison into a tourist site shows his unhappiness with the way that the Cuban thaw has led to nothing more than shallow and disrespectful approaches to sharing Cuban history with the rest of the world. 

“I am Cuban, and yet, I am not. I don’t know where I fit here, in the land of my grandparents, attempting to recreate a Cuba that no longer exists in reality.” 

Having come back to Cuba, Marisol finally recognizes some of the blind spots in her grandmother’s version of Cuba. Now that she recognizes the difference between Elisa’s Cuba and modern Cuba, Marisol feels untethered from the identity she assumed was hers.

“Ana Rodriguez operates in both spheres—the before and the after—and while I struggle to understand this new iteration of Cuba, there are similarities between it and the one that developed ninety miles away. The same inherent sense of pride, the determination to be successful, the hard work, the pragmatism.” 

Although Marisol recognizes deep distinctions between the Cuban and Cuban-American experience, she still sees cultural connections between these two groups in the Cuban diaspora.

“[E]verything is political.” 

Pablo tells Elisa early on that his political ideals trump all else. When she is forced to part from Pablo, she finally accepts that their politics may serve as a barrier to love. Marisol is forced to learn the same lesson decades later, so this realization is one of the important parallels between the two characters.

“Not everyone has the luxury of tying their Cuban heritage to a place. For many being Cuban is something they carry with them in their hearts, something they fight to preserve even when all they have are their memories. When they left, they couldn’t take anything with them. No photographs, no official documents, no family heirlooms or mementos. That kind of exile makes you angry.’’ 

When Luis makes an argument for staying in Cuba as being a central part of his identity, Marisol pushes back against this idea of Cuban identity. As the grand-daughter of exiles and a Cuban-American, Marisol feels the need to offer a more expansive notion of what it means to be Cuban, one that is not tied to geography.

“And the whole time we were pretending our way of life was fine, the “paradise” we’d created was really a fragile deal with a mercurial devil, and the ground beneath us shifted and cracked, destroying the world as we knew it. Fidel has shown us the cost of our silence. The danger of waiting too long to speak, of another’s voice being louder than ours because we were too busy living in the bubbles we’d created to realize the rest of Cuba had changed and left us behind.” 

After visiting her father in prison and overhearing the sounds of firing squads, the last vestige of the bubble in which Elisa lived collapses. In this quote, Elisa acknowledges her family’s complicity in Batista’s corruption and violence.

“Some are more equal than others.”

When Marisol sees how comfortably Pablo lives as a party elite, and she compares it to how difficult it is for the Rodriguez family to live, she feels uncomfortable. This quote is a direct quote from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a novel in which an animal’s revolution is undercut when one group of animals asserts dominance over another. What Marisol is noting is the hypocrisy of cronyism and favoritism among revolutionaries who claim to be for the people.

“The older you get, the more you realize that change—meaningful, lasting change—doesn’t always come with violence and bloodshed, but with reform, however slow, however gradual. When I was young and rash I believed the only way to defeat Batista was to kill him, to take his country and government away from him by force. But now?”

Pablo has come a long way from the passionate revolutionary he was when he was young. In this quote, he rationalizes his co-option by the Castro regime by arguing that he can do more good from inside the government than out.

“So teach us. Come to Miami. Get involved with the movement there. Change the narrative. The discourse is changing. Fidel is dead. The enmity toward the regime is turning to a very practical approach on Cuba. We’re on the cusp of a new era in Cuban-American relations; perhaps there is an opportunity for something better. That article I’m writing? What if it wasn’t about travel? What if it was about contemporary Cuba? What if you told your story? Help us. Teach us about the problems facing Cuba now.” 

Marisol’s most powerful argument to Luis for what it means to be a good Cuban is one that emphasizes service to the country and loving critique over geographic location in the country. Here, she is making an argument for exile and diasporic Cuban identity as a reasonable and honorable alternative to death and persecution.

“One day I’ll bring our child here. I’ll show our baby the letters we wrote, the ring its father slid on my finger, give it this part of our history, our love. The earth will guard my secrets, preserve this piece of Havana for me, my memories—For when we return.” 

This quote comes in a moment when Elisa buries her box of treasures. The box is a concrete representation of the exile’s perennial hope for a return to his or her homeland. Her identity as an exile emerges in this moment.

“Cubans exist in a constant state of hope.” 

As she waits for the flight to Antigua with Luis, Marisol mediates on the meaning of Cuban identity for her now that she has been to Cuba and is facing a difficult exit from the country. The Cuban identity she describes here is based on acts of imagination, experience, and emotion rather than geography. This is her new Cuban identity.

“I imagine my family sitting here, waiting for a plane to take them to the United States, not knowing when—if—they would return. I understand a bit more the uncertainty they faced, the kind of pervasive uncertainty that invades your bones, that comes from not having a country to call your own, a land upon which you can lay your head.” 

As she flees Cuba, the shared experience of fear of persecution shores up Marisol’s sense of Cuban identity. The use of “bit” is her nod to the fact that her trip is one that is less fraught because she has an American passport and access to her money.

“We carry our home with us in our hearts, laden with hope. So much hope. When Fidel dies, we’ll return. You’ll see.” 

Marisol is embracing Luis in this moment and thinking about her grandmother’s long hope to return to Cuba. The hope for return, no matter how unlikely, is an experience that unites Luis, Marisol, and people like her mother as members of the Cuban diaspora.