Next Year in Havana Read online

  “Were you with Fidel on the Granma?” I ask.

  “Yes. I’ve been with him throughout the journey.”

  “He’s your friend.”

  I don’t bother hiding the fact that I’m mildly appalled. My mother has always cautioned us that we are to be judged by the company we keep, and it is difficult to not do the same to Pablo. Just as it appears difficult for him to not do the same to me.

  “He is,” Pablo answers. “He’s also one of Cuba’s best chances at stepping out from under Batista’s shadow. He’s a good man, a lawyer, a reformer, a constitutional scholar, and a student of history.”

  The bombs going off around Havana—some of them have belonged to Castro’s 26th of July Movement. Some of the Cuban blood that has spilled on the streets, the lives lost, have been at their hands, too. Either directly or indirectly, he’s been responsible for those deaths.

  How can I admire such a man? How can I care for him?

  “Isn’t Castro in the mountains? Shouldn’t you be with him now? What are you doing in Havana?”

  He’s silent for a long time. “I was with him in the mountains for a while. I was needed here. It’s best if you don’t know why.”

  “What happens if you are caught?”

  “They question me. Throw me in prison.”

  “Shoot you?”

  He doesn’t flinch. “Maybe. Probably.”

  He takes my hand, lacing our fingers together, his gaze on me. He leans forward, shattering the distance between us, his voice lowering again. “If you don’t want to see me again, if you can’t understand . . .” His voice trails off. “My family—” Emotion splinters the words. “My family wanted no part of this, either. Wanted no part of me now that this is my life. I understand. They’ve gone to America. To Florida. We don’t speak.”

  “I’m sorry. That must be hard for you. I can’t imagine my life without my family.”

  “It is.”

  “When my brother—” I take a deep breath. How much will I trust him with? How much of myself, of my family, should I give? Pablo just shared enough to see himself hanged. Can you have a relationship where you exist in half measures, or does the very nature of love demand you throw yourself into it with gusto?

  “It’s been hard on everyone.” I twist the white linen napkin around in my hands. “He wants nothing to do with our parents, the money, his legacy of running our family’s sugar company.”

  “He’s with the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil,” Pablo says.

  The DRE, who a year ago stormed the Presidential Palace and attempted to assassinate President Batista. With the death of their leader José Antonio Echeverría after he took part in an assault at the National Radio Station of Cuba, the group all but collapsed, many of its members choosing to join the 26th of July fighting in the mountains. My brother has remained in Havana with his friends who refuse to join Fidel and his men.

  My stomach clenches. “Yes. How did you—”

  “I asked around. Discreetly, of course.”

  My eyes narrow. “My parents have told everyone he’s studying in Europe. Everyone thinks he’s studying in Europe.”

  “The people who know of your brother run in very different circles from the ones you likely see at the yacht club. We’re a small, disreputable lot, but word travels quickly.” He hesitates, the smile slipping. “Your brother has gained notice lately. His writing is . . .”

  “I know.”

  “You’ve read his papers?” Pablo asks, his tone fairly incredulous.

  “He is my brother.”

  “But you don’t share his views?”

  “Of course not. He’s still my brother. I don’t always like him, don’t always agree with him, but I love him.” I think about it for a moment. “I’m proud of him for believing in something so passionately, even if it isn’t something I believe in. Even as his beliefs drive a wedge between him and the rest of the family. He wouldn’t be happy to be a replica of our father; he needs to be—is—his own man. And at the same time, I worry about him. Constantly. With each day he’s gone, it feels like he’s further and further away from us.”

  “And where do you fit in all of this?” Pablo asks.

  “It’s different for me. It’s different to be a woman in Cuba.”

  “Perhaps. But it doesn’t have to be.”

  I shake my head. “You hope for too much.”

  “And you ask for too little.”

  “Perhaps,” I acknowledge.

  We break apart as the waiter sets our plates on the table. Pablo ordered us a dish that looks and smells wonderful, chunks of meat mixed into the rice.

  When the waiter leaves, I say calmly, “How long will you be in Havana?”

  “A few weeks, maybe. I’m not sure.”

  Then we’ll have a few weeks.

  “I want to see you again,” he says, his gaze intent. “Can I see you again?”

  Perhaps I fell in love with him while walking on the Malecón. Or maybe it was at the party, or a few minutes ago when he spoke of his dreams for Cuba. Or maybe this is merely a precursor to love, an emotion singularly difficult to identify by name when you’ve yet to experience it; maybe there are stages to it, like the moment when you wade into the ocean, right before the waves crash over your head. And maybe—

  “Yes.”

  Relief shines in his gaze.

  Pablo takes my hand, his thumb stroking the inside of my wrist, teasing the soft skin there.

  “You’re going to be difficult to walk away from, aren’t you?” he asks, his voice resigned.

  My heart thuds.

  “I hope so.”

  * * *

  • • •

  He drives me back to Miramar in a car he says he borrowed from a friend, dropping me off a few streets away from my house to avoid anyone seeing us together.

  Pablo turns in his seat to face me. “Would you like to go for a walk with me tomorrow? I have some business in the morning, but we could meet in the afternoon if you’d like. On the Malecón, near the Paseo del Prado.”

  With each day we spend together, the risk of discovery grows—and yet—

  “Yes.”

  We decide to meet at two o’clock, and then with a brush of his lips against my cheek, he is gone, leaving me walking down the streets of Miramar, my skin warm from his kiss.

  My home looms ahead, the pink edifice framed by looming palm trees. I walk toward the gate—

  A little scream escapes my lips as a hand closes down on my forearm, tugging me to the side of the fence, away from the view of the house.

  “Elisa.”

  Alejandro is suddenly there in front of me, his hand gripping my arm, pulling me out of view of the street until we’re hidden by the massive walls flanking our estate.

  My brother’s voice is low, urgent, so different from the teasing, mischievous boy I grew up beside. I’m not sure exactly when the change began, when he started looking at the society we inhabited with a different gaze than the rest of us. University, perhaps? He made it through a year at the University of Havana before its doors shuttered, and at some point during that time, he transformed from future sugar baron to revolutionary.

  “What are you doing here?” I hiss.

  My father made it clear the day he threw Alejandro out of the house—my brother could leave with the clothes on his back and nothing more, never to return again, his name expunged from the family bible, the sugar empire left to whichever one of our future husbands was most deserving in our father’s eyes, making us eminently marriageable. While our father’s edict hasn’t been strictly followed, Alejandro’s visits are typically relegated to evenings and days when our parents aren’t in residence. That our father is somewhere in the cavernous mansion, our parents returned from Varadero, makes this even more brazen.

  “What are
you doing with him?” Alejandro asks, his eyes dark, ignoring my question completely. His gaze runs over my appearance as though I am a stranger to him.

  My heart pounds.

  Brothers, too, are both a curse and a blessing.

  “Nothing.”

  “That didn’t look like nothing.”

  What did he see? Me in the car? Walking away from Pablo? That moment when Pablo pressed his lips to my cheek?

  “Well it was,” I lie. “And it’s not like you’re in any position to lecture me about being circumspect in my behavior.”

  “This isn’t about being circumspect; it’s about your safety. He’s dangerous.”

  “Not to me.”

  “Especially to you. Do you know what they’re doing in the Sierra Maestra? They’re animals. Do you know how close he is to Fidel?”

  That name drips with scorn falling from my brother’s lips. I’m not entirely shocked that my brother knows of Pablo; despite their ideological differences, my brother is every inch my father’s heir—he appreciates the value of information: hoarding it, trading it, using it to his advantage.

  “He’s a good man.”

  Alejandro snorts. “Aren’t we all?”

  Something in his tone breaks my heart—what has Batista done to us? What have we done to ourselves?

  “You’re still a good man.”

  Alejandro runs a hand through his hair, grimacing. The hand falls to his side and he stares at it, pained, as though blood drips from his gaunt fingers.

  Beatriz and I stood on the other side of the door, our ears pressed to the wood, listening as Alejandro and our father fought that fateful day in his study after the attack on the palace. I know my brother has killed in his private war for Cuba’s future—does he dream of the faces of the lives he took? Does he wonder if they had families—wives, children?

  Beatriz and I have never spoken about what we overheard that day. Speaking words gives them an unimaginable power, and we’re full up on horrible things at the moment.

  Alejandro curses beneath his breath.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask again, my tone gentler.

  “I need to speak to Beatriz.”

  “Beatriz needs to be more careful. I caught her in Father’s study. If it had been someone else who saw her rifling through his desk . . .”

  Alejandro lets out another oath. “I’ll talk to her. Tell her to be more careful.”

  He’s the only one she listens to, and even that isn’t saying much.

  “How much longer is this going to continue?” I ask, sagging against the wall.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Aren’t you tired? Don’t you want to come home?” I reach out, grabbing his arm, searching his eyes for the brother I’ve known for nineteen years.

  Pain stares back at me.

  “How can I? What am I supposed to do?”

  “We’re your family. We love you.”

  “Do they love me? Perhaps you do. And Beatriz, and Isabel, and Maria. But our parents? He threw me out.”

  “You tried to kill the president,” I whisper. “What was he supposed to do?”

  “Understand.”

  “He doesn’t. They don’t. What you’re trying to do—this system you want to destroy—is everything to them. It’s our heritage.”

  “That’s not something to be proud of.”

  “Not to you, but it is to them. The things you revile are the things they seek to maintain.”

  He sighs, his expression haggard. “You think I don’t know that? That I don’t see that there is little chance for us to be anything other than natural enemies?”

  “It’s just politics,” I argue.

  “No, it’s not. Not anymore. It’s a part of me now. I can’t bury it and I can’t destroy it. I can’t go back to being the pampered prince who was set to inherit a sugar empire forged in other people’s blood and sweat. I can’t.” He pushes off the wall, frustration etched all over his face. “Tell Beatriz I’ll meet her here tomorrow at noon.”

  “Alejandro—”

  “I can’t wait any longer. I meant what I said earlier—that guy is no good for you. Stay away from him.” He leans forward, embracing me in a quick hug. His body is much slighter than I remember. What has he been eating? Where has he been living? How is he surviving on his own?

  “Alejandro, wait.”

  He releases me abruptly, turning away, his strides lengthening with each step away from me. It hurts more than I thought it would to watch my own brother nearly run away from me, and minutes pass before I’m able to move again, standing on the pavement between the mansion that feels a bit like a mausoleum and the brother who seeks to tear it down piece by piece.

  chapter eight

  Weeks pass, my brother absent once more, my life a cycle of ordinary events interspersed with life-changing moments with Pablo. Whatever Pablo does for the revolutionaries, he steals into the city like a thief in the night, providing us with hours together before he’s gone again. There’s no rhythm to his schedule, at least none I can see, and while I could likely search for a pattern in the news of the day, there are some things I am unwilling to examine too closely. Sometimes he is in Havana for a few days at a time and we are able to see each other once or twice; other times I can get away for a few moments and that is all.

  The letters have become a method of keeping him with me when we are forced to part. They exist between dates on the Malecón, two times when he took me to the cinema, the occasional furtive meal.

  There’s a tension in our interactions together that is stripped away when we write each other, an intimacy to the act of passing our most private thoughts to each other, creating pages and pages of familiarity. I turn his words over in my head when we are apart, inventing imaginary conversations between us, carrying him with me throughout the day, including him in parts of my life the flesh-and-blood man would never be allowed to experience. Our romance plays out as much in our letters as the few times we are able to see each other, so much so that at times the two blend together—the man who clasps my hand and walks beside me along the shore and the version I’ve conjured in my mind from ink and paper. As greedy as I am for his words, though, there are some worries they can’t soothe.

  It seems fair that my joy would be tempered by the reality of the situation, as though fate has stepped in and ordered this in a more equitable fashion. My family will never accept him. His friends will likely never accept me. Unless Batista falls, Pablo has no place in Havana. If Batista falls and the rebels succeed, what then? They have declared war on our way of life, on the wealthy, decried the position of families like mine, have urged the Cuban people to rise up against those in power. They have caused a rift in my family I now worry will never heal.

  “You’re quiet today,” my best friend, Ana, says, sipping a soda across from me. We’re having lunch outside at a restaurant off the Plaza Vieja. We’ve been next-door neighbors my entire life; only nine months separate us. Our parents are cordial with one another, social contemporaries, but our friendship has developed organically, two dark-haired girls playing beside each other in the backyard, plotting adventures within the confines of the high walls that contain us. My siblings are my friends because we are joined by birth, the bond strong and unbreakable, but there is freedom in having a friend with whom I can be myself, without the expectations and strings of family dynamics and drama.

  “Sorry,” I reply. “I hope I’m not poor company.” We have the sort of friendship where there’s no need to fill the silence; we’re content just being in each other’s company, but I fear today I am stretching the limits of that. “I have a lot on my mind.”

  Alejandro came by the kitchen the other day and met with Beatriz. He was always a favorite with the staff; do they suspect his real motives for staying away? Do they support his cause? Their lives would likel
y be better under Fidel.

  “You’re not poor company. Is it your brother?” Ana asks, sympathy in her voice.

  My brother and Pablo.

  With each day, each moment, I find myself falling for Pablo more and more. I’m in awe of him, I think. His convictions, his passion, his intelligence. He’s so determined, so driven, his dedication admirable even if we disagree on the best direction for Cuba’s future.

  I’ve always told Ana everything, but I can’t tell her the whole truth—not about my brother and certainly not about Pablo. I want to protect her, yes, but I’m also afraid she’ll condemn me for getting involved with one of them. Her family isn’t as close to the president as mine is, but still. Imaginary walls are forming in Cuba, running through families, marriages, friendships.

  “My brother came by the house the other day,” I answer. “He doesn’t look good.”

  I’ve told Ana a different version of the story my parents have floated around, a bit closer to the truth—that Alejandro and my father had a falling-out, prompting him to leave the house. Perhaps she suspects the rest of it and is merely too good of a friend to say anything. Who knows? I have far too many secrets these days to unravel them all.

  Her eyes widen. “Were your parents home?”

  “No, they’re in the country. My father’s dealing with a strike in one of his factories. My mother’s playing lady of the manor, sipping coffee and sitting on the veranda.”

  “I wish my parents would go to the country,” she comments. “They invited Arturo Acosta over for dinner tonight, and I’m fairly certain they have nefarious intentions.”

  “Still trying to get you engaged?”

  Her lip curls. “With fervor. I envy you the older sisters. It would be nice to have some pressure taken away.”

  “I don’t think Isabel is far from getting engaged,” I comment.

  “Really?”