Next Year in Havana

by Chanel Cleeton

  I force myself to step away, slipping back into the room, running water over my face from a sink in the corner, fixing my makeup. My hair’s prone to frizzing in humidity, and it’s risen to the occasion provided by the Cuban climate, the black strands cascading down my back in a wild mix of curls. I grab a scarf from my bag, using it to tie my hair back. Minutes later I shut the door behind me, venturing out into the hallway.

  The sounds of the kitchen reverberate throughout the house, the footfalls of the residents in the apartment upstairs thudding through the worn ceiling. I follow the smell of food, making my way down the chipped marble staircase to the lower level of the house where the paladar is located. The kitchen is tucked in the back, a surprisingly small space for the amount of activity taking place inside it.

  The appliances are old and clearly well used, knobs broken off, piecemeal parts strung together. The walls are covered in hanging pots and utensils, the economy of space solved by ingenuity. There are no fancy copper pots and pans here, no double ovens or commercial stoves, no massive center islands, nothing like my grandmother’s kitchen in the house on Alhambra Circle in Coral Gables.

  The food, though, obviously doesn’t know the difference. Black beans, rice, maduros—sweet fried plantains—and roast pork await the tourists seated outside, and judging by the mouthwatering smell emanating from the kitchen, they’re in for a treat.

  Three women bustle around the kitchen—Ana Rodriguez, another woman who looks a lot like Luis, and a third, the waitress from earlier. The waitress has dark hair contained in a tight bun, strands escaping at intervals, a clipped expression on her face as she moves at a frenetic pace.

  I duck my head as her gaze runs over my appearance, taking in the sandals that cost more than most Cubans make in a year. When I packed for this trip, I intentionally chose the least flashy pieces in my closet, opting for comfort and simplicity over high fashion. Not that it matters. We both know the difference, and shame fills me at the condemnation in her eyes.

  She brushes past me, a plate of tostones in hand for the tourists, the scent of the salty fried plantains filling the tiny space. The older woman—she has to be Luis’s mother—eyes me as though I’m an alien dropped in her midst before grabbing more food and exiting the cramped kitchen.

  Ana turns, a smile on her face, spoon in hand.

  “Did you sleep well?” she asks me.

  “I did, thank you.”

  “Good. Are you hungry?”

  “A bit, but I can wait. Can I help you with anything?”

  I know a thing about Cuban pride, and yet, I feel like an interloper here, an unnecessary burden to a family who has likely faced more than their share.

  Ana waves me off and points to a tiny table shoved in the corner. “Sit, sit. You’ll eat and we’ll chat while I finish up the meal. We have one table left, and then we’ll be done for the night.”

  “How many guests do you serve each meal?”

  “It varies by day. About a hundred between lunch and dinner.”

  The expression on my face must say it all.

  She laughs. “You get used to it after a while.”

  “How long have you had the restaurant?”

  A twinkle enters her eyes. “Officially? Twenty years or so. Unofficially, perhaps a bit longer than that. Luis cooked here when he was in university and still does occasionally.”

  She scoops a heaping portion of beans and rice, and spoons them into a white bowl with a floral pattern along the rim, setting it on the table in front of me where a napkin and silverware lay. A glass of guarapo follows, the sweet drink coating my throat in sugar.

  Ana gestures toward the plate. “Eat. Then you can have some pork and some plantains.”

  “Thank you.”

  The beans have thickened, the taste familiar comfort food. There are subtle differences between Ana’s beans and those I’ve grown up eating in Miami, but their essence is inescapably similar.

  “This is amazing.”

  She beams. “Thank you.”

  Ana returns to the dinner service for a few minutes while I eat before turning to face me. “I received pieces of the story from my letters with Beatriz, but I gather there’s more to your visit than merely wanting to see Cuba or writing an article.”

  “There is. My grandmother left a letter spelling out her last wishes to me. Her attorney gave it to me when her will was read. Her desire was to be cremated and to have her ashes spread in Cuba.”

  Ana doesn’t seem surprised by this news, which leads me to think this isn’t the first time she’s heard of my grandmother’s request. When Isabel died, she asked to be buried in the United States beside her American husband who’d died a year before. I’d assumed my grandmother would want the same thing—to be buried beside my grandfather at the cemetery in Miami. We’d never discussed it, though.

  I’d always thought we’d have more time together. The stroke came on unexpectedly and swiftly, stealing her from us in the night. If we were to be comforted by anything, it was the knowledge that her doctor said it likely had been a painless way to pass.

  “And she chose you to do it,” Ana says. “You were always her favorite.”

  “Did she ever tell you why?”

  I’m curious for this side of my grandmother I otherwise wouldn’t have known.

  Ana smiles. “She did.”

  I wait while she peels and chops a plantain with shaky fingers.

  “Lucia is your father’s daughter—confident, determined, driven. She pushes herself constantly; for her, the accomplishment is in the attempt.”

  It isn’t an unfair assessment of my sister. I love Lucia, but she’s always blazed her own path, determined to make her way despite our family’s last name. Her world is her horses, her friends, distinct from the one the rest of us inhabit. She shows up for major family events, is never more than a phone call away, but we’ve never been that close despite the mere two years between us.

  “Daniela is—”

  “Trouble,” I finish with a smile, no condemnation in the word. Daniela is my favorite sister, the eldest, the adventurous one. She’s the closest to our mother, perhaps by virtue of her age, and as far as I know, has never backed down from a challenge.

  Ana laughs. “I might have heard something to that effect.”

  And then there’s me.

  “Your grandmother saw herself in you. Always. You’re the romantic, the dreamer, the one who’s searching for something. She always prayed you would find it. You were the most affected by your parents’ divorce.” Her mouth tightens in a firm line. “By your mother leaving. You needed Elisa and she you.”

  “And now she’s gone.”

  I’ve become unmoored with my grandmother’s passing; Ana is right—my grandmother was my anchor, and now that she’s gone, I’m adrift.

  “She was so proud of you, Marisol. Always.”

  She slides a plate of maduros and lechon asado in front of me.

  “Will you eat, too?” I ask.

  “Perhaps a bit.”

  I wait while she serves a smaller plate for herself, taking the seat opposite mine. Behind her the two women reenter the kitchen, dumping plates into the sink with loud clunks before exiting again.

  Ana begins eating, and I follow suit. The pork is the perfect mix of succulent meat and fat, the plantains a sweet, sharp bite washed down with the saccharine drink.

  “Where will you spread her ashes?” Ana asks.

  “I don’t know. I hoped you could help me with that. I asked Aunt Beatriz and Aunt Maria, and they offered a few ideas.”

  I asked my father, as well, but he’d had little to propose beyond the Perez home. He loved my grandmother, but he was much closer to my grandfather in childhood and adulthood.

  “What did they say?” she asks.

  “They suggested the house where she
grew up.” The very house that is now inhabited by a Russian diplomat and his family. I can’t help but think that my grandmother, my proud grandmother, would view the Russians as interlopers.

  Ana smiles. “She would be close by, then. It’s a good choice. It was in the Perez family for generations. In its day it was one of the finest homes in Havana, a distinction your great-grandparents were proud of.”

  “Do you think she would be happy there?”

  “Perhaps. Where else have you considered spreading her ashes?”

  “I’m not sure. Somewhere in the city, I guess. It seems like she belongs here.”

  “Yes, she does. She loved Havana, even after it broke her heart.”

  Ana gets up from the table, clearing our empty plates.

  “What was your grandfather like?” she asks from her position at the sink, her back to me.

  I rise, ignoring her protests as I help her wash the dishes. The need to stand on ceremony with Ana Rodriguez feels superfluous; despite the fact that we just met, there is an ease to her manner, conveying the impression that a part of my grandmother—a chapter of her life—is here in her childhood best friend.

  “I didn’t know him as well since he died when I was ten,” I answer. “They were happy, though. In love. She didn’t date or anything after he died. Wasn’t interested in it. She had us—her granddaughters—my father, and her causes. Besides, they were married for almost forty years. I think it was hard for her to move on after spending so much of her life with him.”

  I remember my grandmother’s grief even now, standing beside her in the pew of the Church of the Little Flower as we laid my grandfather to rest, my hand clutched in hers as we mourned. Twenty-one years later I stood in the same pew, staring at the gleaming coffin where my grandmother lay, consoling myself in the fact that they were together again.

  Given my own parents’ disastrous marriage, my grandparents were the ones I looked up to. Their story was filled with so much love and respect, giving me hope that one day I would find a good man, one I could trust, who would be both friend and partner, who would love me with as much devotion as I loved him.

  “Everything Elisa told me about him made it sound like he was a lovely man.” Ana smiles at me. “Your grandmother wrote to me when she could throughout the years. She asked me to hold something for you. Let me get it from my room.”

  She shuffles out of the kitchen, leaving me alone. I sit back down at the table, anticipation filling me. This is what I came for—to let a piece of my grandmother go and to perhaps find new pieces of her that I could clutch to my breast once I did.

  The two women from earlier reenter the kitchen, neither one glancing in my direction, as though I’ve become part of the table and chairs.

  I stand and introduce myself.

  They both stare back at me; the elder woman speaks first.

  “I’m Caridad. You met my son, Luis, earlier.”

  So I was right; this is Ana’s daughter-in-law. She possesses her son’s height and his angular face, his graceful manner of moving.

  “Yes. He was kind enough to meet me at the airport.”

  “We needed him here at the restaurant. It was busy today.”

  She delivers the words with dart-like precision, the remainder unspoken—and we needed Ana’s help today while you were busy chatting with her during the dinner service.

  My cheeks heat at the subtle rebuke as she passes by me without another glance.

  The younger woman meets my gaze with a flinty stare.

  “I’m Cristina. Luis’s wife.”

  Disappointment shoots through me with a particularly lethal and effective stab. Silence fills the kitchen as we stare at each other. Here I feel the resentment I feared when I first planned my trip to Cuba, the unspoken censure that I’m not a real Cuban, that I’m a traitor to my people because my family left this country behind.

  The exiles in Miami and around the world hate Castro because he took their country from them, because he took everything, really. But I see a different kind of anger here, simmering below the surface, contained in Luis’s mother and his wife. For the most part, Cubans who left prospered whereas those who stayed behind still appear to be struggling despite the promises they received from the government.

  Cristina walks past me, leaving me alone in the kitchen that’s stuck in a time warp, a product of the fifties modernized by makeshift repairs and a make-do attitude.

  How would my grandmother have fared in this version of Cuba? Somehow I can’t imagine her making black beans and rice on an old stove. My grandmother was a study in contradictions depending on her relationship with you—the affectionate constant of my childhood juxtaposed against the woman who ran Miami’s exiled society with a jewel-covered hand.

  Her family had struggled after the revolution, of course. She told me stories about adjusting to an entirely new way of life in the United States, mourning the one she’d left behind in Cuba. Still—

  It took my great-grandfather years to build back all he lost from the revolution, the tangible things at least, but once he did he bought one of the grandest estates in Palm Beach to show the world that not even communism could take down the Perez family.

  “Did my grandmother go to bed?” Luis asks as he walks over the threshold to the kitchen carrying a pile of dirty dishes.

  “No, she went to her room for a moment.”

  He sets the plates down on the tiny counter, his mouth in a firm line, his eyes tired. “She needs to rest. Try telling her that, though. She lets us help to a point, but she still works harder than she should at her age.”

  Luis washes the dishes, his back to me, and I walk over to the sink, picking up one of the rags and drying the ones he’s already cleaned. He shoots me a curious look but doesn’t say anything. My hands tremble as I wipe the cloth over a plate.

  The dishes are a hodgepodge. Some are clearly the remnants of expensive sets with elegant stamps on the back. Others are plain and cheap. Luis treats them all the same, his soapy fingers methodically scrubbing them with a worn cloth. His nails are neatly trimmed, his fingers lean, devoid of a ring.

  How long have they been married?

  The need to fill the silence tugs at me.

  “You play beautifully.”

  He doesn’t respond.

  “I heard you earlier on the saxophone,” I add.

  Nothing.

  “Have you been playing long?”

  The side of his mouth quirks up. While the women in the house—Ana excluded, of course—appear to view me through a filter of mistrust and disdain, he seems indulgently amused, as though I am some bizarre creature taken out of her habitat and dropped in the middle of an environment where I clearly don’t belong.

  “Since I was a child. My father taught me.”

  The father who died in Angola. I feel a pang of sadness for his mother who was left to raise a child in Cuba as a widow—surely no easy feat.

  “How old were you?”

  “When he died?”

  “Yes.”

  “Seven.”

  I swallow. “I’m sorry.”

  Luis rinses one of the plates, handing it to me, his fingers ghosting over mine for a moment before he turns to the next one, repeating the motions as though he’s producing parts on an assembly line.

  I search for something else to contribute to the conversation only to come up short, silence filling the kitchen save for the rush of water and the clunk of plates being set on the tiny countertop.

  Ana returns a moment later, a box in her hands.

  I finish drying the last dish and join her at the table while Luis excuses himself.

  The box is a dark wood with a small gold clasp, a little bigger than a shoe box. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect to reside in a gentleman’s study holding cigars or cash or jewels with mysterious proven
ances.

  “It was your great-grandfather’s.” She smiles, handing it to me. “Elisa borrowed it.”

  My great-grandfather Emilio Perez. Sugar baron. Batista supporter.

  He died before I was born, but I’ve seen old family photos of him. He was handsome, tall, and distinguished. The stories I’ve heard from my grandmother and great-aunts give the impression of a man more concerned with business than family, but a man they loved just the same.

  “When families left Cuba, they didn’t know how long they would be gone,” Ana explains. “Most thought Fidel’s regime would be temporary. They weren’t able to take items out of the country, but they also weren’t comfortable leaving them in their homes for fear the government would seize them or others would steal them. So they buried them in their backyards and hid them in the walls of their homes for when they returned.”

  My heart pounds.

  “Your great-grandfather buried a large box of items in the backyard.” She hesitates. “Beatriz has it now.”

  This is the first I’ve heard of Beatriz having some secret box of family possessions.

  “How did Beatriz end up with it?”

  “That’s Beatriz’s story to tell. Let’s just say your great-aunt has led an interesting life. More so than you probably realized.”

  Considering the myth-like quality surrounding Beatriz, I’m not entirely shocked.

  “The contents of this box, though, were your grandmother’s. We buried the box together under a banana tree the night before she left Cuba. When the Russians moved into your family’s home, I snuck back over there and dug it up before they could find it.”

  I gape at her.

  She chuckles. “Beatriz isn’t the only one willing to take risks.” Her hands stroke the wood. “It was the right thing to do. Elisa wouldn’t have wanted it to fall into someone else’s hands. Especially the people who took her home. I told her years later that I had the box, and she asked me to keep it for her. To keep it for you.”