When We Left Cuba

by Chanel Cleeton

Didn’t they lose everything? Fidel Castro nationalized all those sugar fields her father used to own.

There’s enough of a bite in his tone to nip at my skin.

My diamond smile reappears, honed at my mother’s knee and so very useful in situations like these, the edges sharp and brittle, warning the recipient of the perils of coming too close.

they can’t afford to cut us directly, but not nearly enough to prevent them from devouring us like a sleek pack of wolves scenting red meat.

My features are a hint too dark, my accent too foreign, my religion too Catholic, my last name too Cuban.

While most viewed Batista through a negative lens, our father chose friendship as a necessarily evil.

Despite the lack of familial relation between us, Eduardo has always had a way of ruffling my feathers in a manner only older siblings can achieve.

“The way I heard it, he spent the whole night watching you.” It shouldn’t make me feel a sense of satisfaction, but it does. “He spent most of the night getting engaged.” “Engaged men still have eyes.”

I’m not for sale. I’m here for Fidel, not to sleep with politicians to help you regain your fortune.”

You can love someone and still not lose your reason.

“I’m not going to sleep with Senator Preston for you, or for Alejandro’s memory. Or because my sisters and I are forced to re-wear our gowns. There are other ways to defeat Fidel. Besides, I knew my brother better than anyone, and I’m fairly certain he would have objected to me prostituting myself for the cause.”

we both know I never was one for resisting lost causes or walking away from a dare.

“Most women I meet these days spend their time flattering me,” he adds, grinning. “It’s exhausting, really.”

I tear my gaze away from his and scan the crowd. My breath hitches. A pair of blue eyes bore into mine, and Eduardo is momentarily forgotten.

it’s a Herculean effort, considering I feel his attention on me as surely as a physical caress.

I like him better for the fact that he, too, treats this as though it is little more than a foregone conclusion, as if we are two magnets drawn to each other, his arrogance tempered by the weight of his gaze on me all evening.

His fingers are momentarily unencumbered by the weight of a thick, gold wedding band.

there are different rules for those who were born into this enclave, and interlopers like me.

In the social hierarchy of the Palm Beach set, there is no higher an unmarried—or married—woman can reach than Nicholas Randolph Preston III. His is the lead they all follow. He knows it, too.

My mother barely approved of the dress, her concern for gossip warring with her need to marry her daughters off with military-like precision. Pragmatism won out over propriety, as it so often does.

I have a feeling you’re an old soul at twenty-two.”

It’s different going to a place and fighting, seeing the destruction men can wreak all around you, and then returning home, to the sanctuary of a country that will likely never descend into such madness. Harder to live it in your favorite haunts, to watch death touch your friends and family. And still, war is war and misery comes to all men, natives and foreigners alike.

Seeing them together like this, I am struck by the sensation that Eduardo is a boy, whereas Nick Preston is a man.

If I had a heart left to lose, I’d fear he’d eventually break mine.

Eduardo is the ultimate intersection of the pragmatist and the dreamer.

“Sometimes I don’t know what’s worse: feeling like you did nothing or failing in the attempt,” he acknowledges.

That’s the thing about Eduardo—we are the same in so many ways, sometimes it’s like looking at a mirror, and I’m not always prepared to face the reflection staring back at me.

Can I face my brother’s killer, and smile, and flirt in an attempt to steal his heart? Only if I get to watch the life drain from his eyes as I was forced to do with Alejandro.

“Fidel likes to cause trouble. His brand thrives on chaos, disorder, operating outside of the system. Don’t underestimate him,” I caution.

Men always want that which they cannot, or should not, have.

There’s a look of understanding between the two brothers, though, as if they were intimately familiar with Batista’s personal brand of hell. That Batista is living out his days in lavish exile in Portugal without answering for his crimes, the men he killed, his role in delivering us to Fidel, is yet another injustice we’re forced to tolerate.

The Cuban brothers are largely silent through this discussion, and I follow their lead, contributing little, taking the time to get the lay of the land in an attempt to understand the inner workings of the group.

I am tired of waiting, of making incremental progress like going to the meeting in Hialeah, while the world around us shifts, Cuba drifting farther and farther away.

Everyone knows an affair is impermanent; I would be foolish indeed to risk my heart under such circumstances. I’ve already committed myself to one lost cause. Two seems exceedingly reckless.

It is strange to live in a place where election results are not a foregone conclusion, to hear the excitement in the Americans’ voices as they wait to learn who their next president will be.

Kennedy challenges the position, labeling Castro’s regime as communist and decrying Eisenhower’s—and Nixon’s—inaction in preventing Cuba’s slide toward the Soviets. I admit to a degree of hope when I hear Kennedy’s thoughts on Cuba; there is comfort to be had in the fact that someone recognizes the political situation in my country for the farce that it is.

sometimes you fight the most with the people you love. It doesn’t mean you don’t love them. It just means you don’t always agree.”

I’ve not really made any friends here in Palm Beach, have social acquaintances more than anything else. I miss the companionship of being around people with whom I can be myself.

On the one hand, I have found the dialogue I craved when I argued for my parents to send me to university, but it comes at the expense of being unable to express my true opinions, unable to indulge the overwhelming desire to disagree when they cite communist rhetoric as gospel.

Is there anything more awkward than making polite conversation when there are other things you wish to say?

I’ve been on the receiving end of some truly magnificent flattery, but it is the truth in his words that speaks to me most.

If I’m going to have regrets in this life, I’d rather them be for the chances I took and not the opportunities I let slip away.

It is everything I remembered, and once again, we are a train hurtling off the tracks, and I don’t want to get off.

This is what Nick doesn’t understand when we fight about politics. For him, politics is an external entity. It is his job, but it is not who he is. And for me, none of this is just politics. It’s personal.

The first morning he brought me here, when the sheets covered the furniture, it seemed full of possibilities. Now everything is shuttered and dead.

“So this is it, then?” he asks, finally. I nod. There are so many things I want to say, so many feelings pushing inside me, but at the end of the day, it’s the urge to run that drives me. I’ve never been a coward before, but this time, I make an exception. I’ve never been in love before, either. We are truly, irrevocably over.

Parents aren’t supposed to have favorites, but they are human, after all, subject to the same flaws and foibles as the rest of us. I have always been my father’s favorite, an unspoken understanding existing between us that I could push him further than the rest of my siblings, test the limits of his patience—much like my mother had her favorite. The storm has been building for a long time, simmering in my family, the air crackling with it as we all dance around the one subject we cannot bear to speak of— “Alejandro might be alive—” I know what’s coming, cannot guard myself from the blow and the immense wave of pain it brings. “—if not for you,” she finishes.

The truth is, she cares not for the struggle of the average Cuban, only seeks to protect the private enclave she inhabits.

These people cling to power like barnacles on a boat, and he is the pinnacle of that power whether he is in Palm Beach or London.

It turns out eighteen months weren’t nearly enough to forget him.