The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba(102)

I’ve already had to break Isabella’s heart once telling her that her grandmother Luz has passed away. I can’t tell her she’s lost her father, too.

As we near the gathering, it’s clear that we aren’t the only family hoping to be reunited today. There are other women and children who appear as desperate as I feel, searching for loved ones.

Isabella holds on tightly to me as we search the crowd, looking for Mateo.

I don’t see him in any of the men who walk by us. Their expressions are haunted, their bodies gaunt, their clothes in tatters. There is talk that provisions will be made for the men who fought in Cuba’s military, but for now it looks as though they’ve lost everything.

“Do you know Mateo Sandoval?” I ask one of the men.

He shakes his head.

I approach more of the soldiers, asking them if they know of my husband, but no one does.

Am I to be one of the widows of this war?

The sun is nearly setting, and I turn away from the crowd, leaning down so I am eye level with Isabella.

“We should go. It’s getting late. We can keep searching for him. I promise.”

Isabella doesn’t respond, but she takes my hand, and we walk back the way we came, dusk settling over Havana.

The jewelry my mother gave me will go a long way toward giving us a new start, to rebuilding our home. In this, we are luckier than many, at least.

We walk near the water, and I am reminded of the day Isabella and I looked out onto the harbor, when I told her that our memories, our love, our hope is enough to sustain us through these difficult times.

There must be better days ahead.

It’s a beautiful night in the city, others clearly taking advantage of the opportunity to be outside, enjoying the cooler air. In the distance, a man approaches, his silhouette but a speck against the sea.

I stop in my tracks, Isabella stilling beside me.

There is something in his gait, the familiar set of his shoulders, his bearing—

I’d know my husband anywhere. I’ve loved him nearly my whole life.

I quicken my pace until I’m running, Isabella doing the same, and then he’s in front of us, looking a bit older, new lines on his face, a slight limp in his stride. In a step, his arms are wrapped around us as he holds us close to him, as he embraces his daughter for the first time in years, as my tears begin to fall.

“You’re home.”

I don’t say the rest of it—how I feared I’d never see him again, how I feared he’d died, that all was lost, that I don’t know how we have survived all that we have. Isabella has been through enough. When we are in private, we will speak of our experiences. We will tell each other our stories.

I will tell him about his mother. We will grieve.

For now, we hold on to one another.

“Where will we go?” Isabella asks us.

“Home,” I reply. “We’ll go home.”

“And if nothing is left for us there?”

I squeeze her hand tightly in mine, my other hand linked with my husband’s.

“Then we’ll rebuild.”

I stare up at the Havana sky, at the mighty flagpole that once heralded Spain’s dominion over Cuba, the Spanish flag flapping in the breeze for all of my life.

It’s been replaced by a flutter of red, white, and blue.

Not the flag we bled for, that proud Cubans died for, the blue stripes interspersed with white ones symbolizing Cuba’s provinces and the purity of our cause as patriots, the red triangle of strength, the blinding white star of independence. Not the flag we raised in battle for decades, the flag we dreamed of, the future we hoped for.

Instead, different stars and stripes exercise their influence on Havana.

The American flag flies over Cuba now.

And still, we dream. That we will have a voice in this new country for which we have sacrificed so heavily.

That one day we will be free.

Viva Cuba Libre.





AUTHOR’S NOTE


In the summer of 2018, a few days before Next Year in Havana was announced as Reese’s Book Club pick for July 2018, I was down in the Florida Keys researching the book I was writing at the time, The Last Train to Key West. While I was in Key West, I came across numerous references to the sinking of the USS Maine—an event I vaguely remembered from my history classes in school. I also visited the San Carlos Institute in Key West, a Cuban heritage center and museum honoring the fight for Cuban independence. I instantly became intrigued with the idea of writing a book set during the Cuban fight for independence from Spain and the Spanish-American War. As I began researching the book, I thought about the characters who would populate the novel. And then in my research, I came across the true story of a Cuban revolutionary named Evangelina Cisneros.

As an eighteen-year-old Cuban revolutionary exiled with her father to the Isle of Pines and later imprisoned in the horrific Recogidas prison in Havana for rejecting the advances of a Spanish colonel, her story has been largely forgotten over time, but during her life Evangelina Cisneros was an international celebrity. When her plight came to the attention of the New York newspapers who were locked in a fierce circulation battle, she instantly became famous, and nearly four hundred articles were published about her in the New York Journal. Her imprisonment, prison break at the hands of Journal reporters, and subsequent celebrity are all real-life events that were detailed in Evangelina Cisneros’s autobiography, which was published by William Randolph Hearst and likely ghostwritten by members of his staff shortly after her escape from Recogidas.