I love Cuba; it is the most memorable holiday I’ve taken, most impressionable, most special and for all the writing that there is about Cuba there isn’t nearly enough about the people and the sacrifices and feelings, whichever side of the revolutions they fall upon. Next Year In Havana manages to intertwine history and romance and secrets and stories, just right. This book is something special.
Emotion. History. Romance. All check, check, check.
Cleeton brings Cuba to life in a way that having been there, you can see and feel it because Cuba never really leaves you once you have been there, much less when you have lived and grown up there and been forced to leave because of circumstances outside your control. She gives us both perspectives; those who left and those who stayed; the feelings of betrayal and complexities between them. It gives you pause to rethink the relationships us as immigrants have to the roots we have left behind and the ones we are building in new lands.
Elisa has passed away and has tasked her granddaughter, Marisol to go back home to Cuba and spread her ashes; it was always her hope to return home to Cuba, having been forced to flee during the revolution, to Miami. Learning about Elisa through Marisol gives Marisol room to learn about herself in a way she never really has; she is out of her comfort zone despite being home. This Cuba is not the country she grew up hearing about from her grandmother, those stories that mean so much to her. Cuba that exists in the memories of those who left and Cuba that exists in the realities of those who stayed and the Cuba that exits for those who have never been but belong are vastly different. The conflicts and the loyalties remain tested.
The story alternates between Elisa’s last year in Cuba as a nineteen year old and Marisol’s first time in Cuba. She feels that sense of not really belonging; she is the offspring on abdicator after all “…I am Cuban and yet, I am not.”
What I loved; Elisa’s story through Marisol and the glimpses of the world she left behind for her granddaughter to hopefully discover in a country shrouded in sadness but with peaks of light in the laughter and the stories. How Marisol finds herself journeying back into a strange past to emerge into her present. Rooting, the roots of who we are, this story centres itself around that, that fundamental understand of home, where home is, what home means. Fundamentally, going back home for the first time.
What I could have done without; The new love story; I am sucker for romance but I felt sucked into the past much more than the present. Elisa’s story was intriguing and memorable and so it did not leave much room for me to delve into the blossoming romance for Marisol. And that is to the credit of Cleeton, most writers do not know how to write a past without it being convoluted and well, boring, this was not at all.
Life is filled with complexities, choices that will have consequences to all involved even if not directly; life through the lens of the past brings with it skeletons but also beautiful memories as we decipher what to hold on to and what to let go of. Read about a woman who gets to know herself through the eyes of a beloved grandmother and a the story of the land of her lineage where she is both a stranger and a daughter returned home.
This book was all of that so much more.