Next Year in Havana

by Chanel Cleeton

To be in exile is to have the things you love most in the world—the air you breathe, the earth you walk upon—taken from you. They exist on the other side of a wall—there and not—unaltered by time and circumstance, preserved in a perfect memory in a land of dreams.

But where is the difference between sin and survival? Does the benefit we receive from his position of power automatically damn us?

“Terrible things rarely happen all at once,” she answers. “They’re incremental, so people don’t realize how bad things have gotten until it’s too late.

“We survive by not calling attention to ourselves, by being good little soldiers. I am tired of putting on the uniform, pretending I’m someone I’m not, unable to think for myself, burying these thoughts so they don’t get me or my family killed. I’m thirty-six years old, and each day the fight filters from my body, the effort to exert myself, to get through a day and meet my basic needs, to care for my grandmother, for my family, to put food on the table, robbing me of much else. They ensure we’re so preoccupied with the daily struggle that there’s little left over for the most important one, for taking control of our future.”

Both sides love Cuba, they just do it in different ways. Some love it so much they can’t leave; others love it so much, they cannot

There are dozens of ways you can betray your country—broken promises, failed policies, the sound of a firing squad pumping bullets into flesh. And then there’s the silent betrayal—the most insidious one of all.

The older you get, the more you realize that change—meaningful, lasting change—doesn’t always come with violence and bloodshed, but with reform, however slow, however gradual.

“The problem with revolution, with the wave of violence it carries with it, is that it’s like a flash flood—it sweeps everything away, and nothing looks the same as it once did. And you think this is good, change was what you wanted in the first place, change was what you needed. But suddenly you have a country you must govern, people whose basic needs must be met. You must stabilize a currency, and create a legal system, and reform a constitution. Those are not the things young men dream of. They dream of dying for their country; dream of honor in battle. No one dreams about sitting at a desk and arguing over phrases.