When We Left Cuba

by Chanel Cleeton

The CIA’s role in Latin America has been bloody and brutal, whispers of their involvement in places like Guatemala

In Cuba, people are suffering, dying,

the regime passed the agrarian reform law, limiting the amount of privately owned land, redistributing the remainder or seizing it for government use.

War should always be a last resort.

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.

you are sorely mistaken if you think you can carry on an affair with an American politician and not feel the ramifications of it.

A good spy sees everything, can peel back the layers to read a person’s motivations, and to understand how to achieve their aims.”

A good spy must be willing to do whatever it takes for the mission.

The nature of our affair doesn’t exactly lend itself to inquiring too closely about the other’s whereabouts.

“Don’t tell me your latent morality is outraged by an affair. Half the party is sleeping with someone they aren’t married to, and everyone knows it. You’ve certainly had no compunction over doing the same thing.”

Men are never quite as discreet as they like to think they are.

Keep your relationship confined to the bedroom, and we won’t have a problem. Flaunt it in society again, and you will learn what a formidable enemy my family can be.

The thing about hope is that when it fills you, when you hold it in the palm of your hand, the promise of it is everything. You can go for days, weeks, months, years on that hope, telling yourself everything will be fine, eventually, you’ll have what you’ve been waiting for, this is just a momentary setback in your life, one you will overcome.

Hope is such a beautiful lie.

Now that we’ve aired our true feelings, now that we’ve said too much, we cannot go back to the way things were, and so we exist in a state of détente,

“The Americans. From the beginning, they had to have known we were outmanned, outgunned, that we had no chance without their involvement and support. That the little they gave us was not nearly enough. They abandoned us, left us to die on that beach,

He hugs me, his hands fisting my hair, his mouth finding mine, his hands fumbling with my clothes as he bends me over the couch and we sink into oblivion.

Dreams never die all at once. They die in pieces, floating a little farther and farther away each day.

All you once clutched to your breast and held so deeply in your heart ceases to exist, slipping through your fingers like the sand that once lay beneath your feet.