Next Year In Havana

After Pablo leaves, Marisol treats Luis’s wounds and argues with him about the need to leave Cuba and go to Miami with her. Luis accuses Marisol of seeing Cuba through an exile’s lens—a place you can leave once the going gets rough, a place trapped in the past of their nostalgic memories. Marisol tries to make him see that he will die if he stays. It is better, she argues, for him to go to the US with her and perhaps help to shape the Cuban-American and American officials’ perspectives on what Cuba needs. She leaves without getting him to commit to escaping and has the insight that she has fallen in love with a passionate revolutionary, much in the same way Elisa did.

Marisol takes her grandmother’s ashes and is intending to meet with Pablo at the Malecón. Before she can leave, however, she runs into Cristina, who accuses her of being a basic American tourist who thinks she can use her wealth and freedom to buy Luis. Marisol feels this accusation may be unjust, but her own uncertainty about her motivations and Cristina’s story about being six and part of a failed attempt to escape Cuba by raft soften Marisol’s resentment. Cristina warns Marisol that Luis chose Cuba over his marriage, and that he will resent Marisol if she tries to make him choose life in America over his country.

Marisol then meets Pablo at the Malecón. Pablo tells her about what it felt like to fall in love with Elisa and how sad it makes him that she is gone. Marisol gives him her grandmother’s ashes, which Pablo pours into the sea. Marisol swears to come to Cuba again—with more family next time, and Pablo surprises her by giving her yet another sheaf of letters, ones from her grandmother and some for his newly discovered American descendants.

By February, Fidel Castro is prime minister. Elisa is still trying to hide her pregnancy but doing so grows more difficult each day. Emilio is finally spurred to action when Fidel threatens to nationalize all private property of wealthy families like the Perezes. While Emilio claims that the country will eventually realize that Fidel is a fraud and a tyrant, Elisa is not so hopeful. Emilio tells them that he has land in Florida and hopes to work in sugar in the United States. The family will leave the next day with no more than they can carry in a suitcase so that it looks like they are going on a vacation. Everything valuable must be left behind to preserve this façade. He expects Magda and the other servants to stay behind to care for their things.

That night, Elisa gives all of her jewelry to Magda and tearfully tells her to use the jewelry in case things go poorly while the family is on its supposed vacation. The sadness between them makes it clear that Magda is aware that they are going into exile. That night, Elisa enlists Ana to help her bury a box of her things in the backyard. Elisa makes Ana swear to dig it up if anything happens to her. As she buries the box, Elisa imagines coming back to Cuba one day with her child to unearth the box.

Marisol reads all of the letters she has in chronological order. Inspired by her grandmother’s regret at not having done more, Marisol goes to Luis once more to insist that he must leave Cuba. He refuses once again and explains that he believes leaving will take away his identity as a Cuban and expose his remaining family to harm and more poverty. Ana enters the room and convinces him that his duty is to survive. Later that afternoon, Marisol and Luis successfully make it through Cuban customs and fly to Antigua. As they wait for the final leg of their trip to begin, Marisol muses on the many ways that Cubans enter exile. She has a moment of white-hot anger when a female tourist tells her she is so glad to have seen Cuba before all the other tourists arrive and ruin it for people like her.

Luis and Marisol fly the rest of the journey in a corporate jet owned by Marisol’s family. Using even more of the family’s privilege, Marisol’s father manages to get a temporary visa for Luis and arranges for him to have an immigration attorney. As she considers all there is still to do help Luis, Marisol recognizes that “it is quintessentially Cuban to help another find a new life in the United States” (341). As they drive home, Marisol cries for the people she left behind in Cuba and all the losses of the Rodriguezes and the Perezes. Cubans walk around “laden with hope” (342) that they will return to Cuba when Fidel is gone, and they hold on to hope they can return despite the barriers that exist even after his death.

Marisol and Luis spend days in bed together, grieving their losses and getting used to being in Coral Gables, where Marisol lives. Marisol visits Beatriz to tell her about the events in Cuba during her trip, and she is not surprised to learn that Beatriz already knew about Elisa’s pregnancy. Beatriz is surprised to learn that Pablo is alive. Marisol asks Beatriz about what happened to the Perez family’s belongings that Beatriz retrieved during a trip to Cuba. Beatriz tells her that she had them briefly but lost them; furthermore, the true purpose of the trip during which Beatriz retrieved the Perez family treasures was to assassinate Fidel Castro.

When Marisol returns home, Luis has made dinner. As she thinks over her time in Cuba and the new life she is making with Luis, Marisol has an epiphany. She has now had the chance to see the “romanticized” (352-53) Cuba she learned from her exiled grandmother and the struggling Cuba for which Luis fights. She promises herself to be a part of the fight for modern Cuba as well, and the articles on modern Cuba on which she is working with Luis are a down payment on that promise. Luis and Marisol make a toast—“Next year in Havana” (353)—over dinner that night.

The narrative flashes back to Elisa at 30 years old, on a trip to Key West (the American city closest to Cuba) with her son, Miguel, and Juan, her husband. As she stands on the coast and looks out over the water where Cuba must be, she reminisces about falling in love with Pablo, the rebels coming into Havana, and leaving her life and Pablo behind. She imagines a dream future, a heaven in which she, Pablo, and Miguel will walk together on the Malecón and look out at the ocean together.