When We Left Cuba(100)
“Was this your very important date?” Marisol asks, her eyes wide as she leads me away from the rest of the family.
I’ve always considered my great-nieces to be like granddaughters to me, never having the opportunity to miss the children and grandchildren I never had with them around.
I smile, remembering our conversation when she came by the house last week. “Yes.”
“He was nearly president, wasn’t he?” A fair amount of awe fills her voice.
I smile. “Nearly. He would have been an excellent one, too.”
“How long have you known each other?”
“A very long time. Since I was a young girl.”
“Did you—”
“What? Love him before?”
Marisol nods.
“Always.”
“I’m glad he’s here. And that you’re happy.”
Lucia walks up to us, a glass of champagne in hand, and takes a seat next to me.
“Open your gift,” I tell her, gesturing toward the wrapped square package sitting against the dessert table.
“I thought I’d wait until later.”
“Forget etiquette. If you can’t do what you want on your birthday, then what’s the point? Besides, one of the benefits of being old is that the rules can hang. I give you full permission to open one gift—my gift—before the allotted time.”
Marisol laughs. “I have a feeling you never had much use for the rules.”
“Life’s simply too short. Open it,” I say, nudging Lucia.
She tears open the package, the paper revealing a pair of brown eyes, the curve of a cheek, glossy midnight-colored hair, a whispery gown floating around her, diamonds dripping from her neck.
“It’s a gorgeous painting,” Lucia proclaims.
“It is, isn’t it? I won it at an auction a few weeks ago. Well, won it back, I should say. It used to hang on the walls of our house in Miramar, although it’s had quite a journey. There was another painting, a companion piece—her husband.”
“Who was she?” Marisol asks.
“Isabella Perez. The first female Perez ancestor that we know about.”
“She married the corsair,” Lucia says.
“She did. In the mid-eighteenth century. She boarded a ship from Spain headed for Cuba, was sent off to marry a man she had never met, a man she had never seen.”
“Can you imagine?” Marisol muses. “She must have been so brave. And terrified.”
“I agree. This painting was always my favorite,” I add. “Your grandmother favored the corsair, but I always wondered about the woman who left her home, her family, everything she had ever known and set out across the ocean.”
“I love it. Thank you,” Lucia says, pressing a kiss to my cheek.
“Good. I’m glad.”
“Who took it from our home in Cuba?” Marisol asks.
“I don’t know. Somehow, it ended up in the estate of a man in Virginia. When he died, it went up for auction. The family might know more, and I’ve put in some discreet inquiries, but so far, I haven’t heard anything. At least she’s home now, where she belongs.”
As am I.
Nick and I link arms as we join the rest of the family in singing “Happy Birthday” to Lucia, as we raise our glasses in toast to the beginning of her thirty-fourth year. My gaze meets my little sister Maria’s across the party, and a smile passes between us, a gleam of pride in her eyes that matches my own.
I always thought Cuba would be my legacy. That I was destined to play a role in its future, that I was destined for great things. And perhaps, if things had played out differently, that would have been the case. But there’s power here, too. An enduring legacy that has been passed on to the next generation of Perez women.
Men come and go, revolutions rise and fall, and here we stand.
Maybe it will come in the waning hours of the night, those wicked, magical hours. Or perhaps it will come with the break of day, stirring the sleepy from their beds with a shout. It may come as a ripple spreading quietly through the countryside, cloaked in fierce whispers and bridled hope. Or perhaps with a spark in the city, carried through a crackling radio station, a song on the breaths of those who need it most.
But come it will.
Our time will come.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
From the first moment I introduced Beatriz’s character in Next Year in Havana, I knew she had to have her own book. At the time, there were no plans for another entry in the lives of the Perez family, but Beatriz changed that with her wonderful, passionate, headstrong manner. Halfway through drafting Next Year in Havana, I had to stop and write the first chapter of Beatriz’s novel, because her story was pushing its way out, demanding to be told. Whereas Next Year in Havana focused on the events of the revolution, I wanted When We Left Cuba to focus on what happened after, on the fight to reclaim Cuba and the role it played on the world stage.
While the Perez family and their friends are entirely fictional, the events in the novel were inspired by the tumultuous Cuban-American relations of the 1960s. Likewise, Mr. Dwyer is a fictional character, but he was inspired by many of the CIA’s efforts in Latin America at the time. Declassified documents have uncovered numerous CIA-sponsored plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, including using one of his weaknesses—beautiful women—to get close to him. While these attempts failed, they were the inspiration for Beatriz’s exploits.