Next Year in Havana Quotes

“That’s the thing about death—even when you think someone is gone, glimpses of them remain in those they loved and left behind.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“Life is too short to be unhappy, to play it safe. To do what is expected of you rather than follow your heart”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“Havana is like a woman who was grand once and has fallen on hard times, and yet hints of her former brilliance remain, traces of an era since passed, a photograph faded by time and circumstance, its edges crumbling to dust.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is decide to leave when it is no longer wise to stay.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“We are silk and lace, and beneath them we are steel.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“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.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“You never know what’s to come. That’s the beauty of life. If everything happened the way we wished, the way we planned, we’d miss out on the best parts, the unexpected pleasures.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“You speak as though politics is its own separate entity,” he says. “As though it isn’t in the air around us, as though every single part of us isn’t political. How can you dismiss something that is so fundamental to the integrity of who we are as a people, as a country? How can you dismiss something that directly affects the lives of so many?”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“To be Cuban is to be proud—it is both our greatest gift and our biggest curse. We serve no kings, bow no heads, bear our troubles on our backs as though they are nothing at all. There is an art to this, you see. An art to appearing as though everything is effortless, that your world is a gilded one, when the reality is that your knees beneath your silk gown buckle from the weight of it all. We are silk and lace, and beneath them we are steel.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“You speak of passion, but what about companionship, mutual respect, friendship? Why do people always seize on the spark that can peter out as the measure of a relationship?”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“The line between hero and villain is a precariously fragile one.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“... but the older you get, the more you learn to appreciate the moments life gives you. Getting them certainly isn't a given, and I feel blessed to have carved out a life here where I could be happy even if it wasn't quite the happiness I envisioned, if the things I dreamed of never quite came to pass.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“revolutions don’t care much for broken hearts and shattered dreams.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“The Americans preach liberty, and freedom, and democracy at home, and practice tyranny throughout the rest of the world.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“Loyalty is a complicated thing — where does family fit on the hierarchy? Above or below country? Above or below the natural order of things? Or are we above all else loyal to ourselves, to our hearts, our convictions, the internal voice that guides us?”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“At the end of the day, the only thing you have left is what you stand for. If I said nothing, if I did nothing, I could not live with myself. I would not be a man. This is the position I choose to take, and for better or worse, I will accept the consequences of my actions.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“I am Cuban, and yet, I am not. I don’t know where I fit here, in the land of my grandparents, attempting to recreate a Cuba that no longer exists in reality. Perhaps we’re the dreamers in all of this. The hopeful ones. Dreaming of a Cuba we cannot see with our eyes, that we cannot touch, whose taste lingers on our palates, with the tang of memory. The exiles are the historians, the memory keepers of a lost Cuba, one that’s nearly forgotten.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“For some, there is only one true love. But not everyone is lucky enough to have that love work out for them. And for some, the love we cannot have is the most powerful one of all.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“On the surface, ojalá translates to “hopefully” in English. But that’s just on paper, merely the dictionary definition. The reality is that there are some words that defy translation; their meaning contains a whole host of things simmering beneath the surface. There’s beauty contained in the word, more than the flippancy of an idle hope. It speaks to the tenor of life, the low points and the high, the sheer unpredictability of it all. And at the heart of it, the word takes everything and puts it into the hands of a higher power, acknowledging the limits of those here on earth, and the hope, the sheer hope, the kind you hitch your life to, that your deepest wish, your deepest yearning will eventually be yours.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“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.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“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. He swore up and down that he wasn’t a communist. That he wanted democracy. Some believed him. Others didn’t.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“You think you know someone, imagine you know them better than anyone, and then little by little, the fabric of their life unravels before your eyes and you realize how little you knew.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“For many being Cuban is something they carry with them in their hearts, something they fight to preserve even when all they have are their memories. When they left, they couldn’t take anything with them. No photographs, no official documents, no family heirlooms or mementos. That kind of exile makes you angry.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“If she’s happy, that’s all that matters,”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“I told myself being a Perez meant more than being Cuban, that my responsibility to my family, to do what was expected, to be the woman my parents wanted me to be meant more than fighting for what I believed in, for speaking out against Batista's tyranny.

And the whole time we were pretending our way of life was fine, the "paradise" we'd created was really a fragile deal with a mercurial devil, and the ground beneath us shifted and cracked, destroying the world as we knew it.

Fidel has shown us the cost of our silence. The danger of waiting too long to speak, of another's voice being louder than ours because we were too busy living in the bubbles we'd created to realize the rest of Cuba had changed and left us behind.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“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 dd. 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... 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.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“The United States isn’t perfect; there’s injustice everywhere I turn. But there’s also a mechanism that protects its citizens—the right to question when something is wrong, to speak out, to protest, to be heard. It doesn’t always work, sometimes the system fails those it was designed to protect, but at least that opportunity—the hope of it—exists.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“I worry I’m surrounded by madmen who desire to burn the world down without thought for the consequences of their actions, without regard for all the innocent lives that will be charred by the flames.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“That’s the thing with grief—you never know when it will sneak up on you.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“There are natural pauses in conversations when one speaks of family estrangement—the inadequacy of words to convey the unnatural state of breaking from those to whom you are bound in blood, the pauses physically manifesting themselves in an empty chair at an ostentatious dining room table that hailed from Paris. I know all about those pauses—a relationship severed at the knees, a sibling lost to ideology, a family forever fractured.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana