Prólogo

Almost four generations later, we landed in Havana, Cuba—the island that so many people, like us, like my great-grandparents, had to flee, leaving behind dreams, family, the sea, the sand... and the beautiful sunsets.

And there I was, breathing in the sea air my Toya—what I called my great-grandmother—had spoken of so often, hearing the birds singing, seeing the warm smiles, and the teary eyes filled with freedom. The immigration officer welcomed us with a "Bienvenidos."

“Cubans?” he asked afterward. Maybe my grandmother was right, maybe it was something you could just see in our faces, like a sign that screamed “Caribbean!”

“Yes,” my husband answered, another descendant of immigrants, of the persecuted, of the oppressed. We weren’t Cuban anymore—not by birth, not by law. Four generations for me, two for him. But in our hearts, we were, every time I danced salsa in the kitchen or when my husband greeted his friends with a hug and an “Asere, qué bolá.”

“Welcome home then, coño,” the officer added with a smile. It didn’t sound offensive—it was a reaffirmation. We could finally come home. The regime had fallen, the dictators were gone, and finally, those airport halls were filled not with Cubans fleeing, but with Cubans returning to their island, ready to rebuild it.

My home. My free home. Finally.

We stepped outside, people were greeting each other, smiling, families reuniting after seventy years. Most didn’t recognize those relatives who claimed to be cousins, uncles, the lost brother of their father who had to flee after being imprisoned—just like my grandfather.

I didn’t know these streets, but I felt they were mine. My spirit finally felt at home.

We drove toward the Havana hotel, now in ruins, first snatched from my ancestors by a corrupt government, then left to decay by the same regime. Rodrigo and I stood in front of the remains of what was once a majestic hotel, a club where the most important figures of society would gather. A place that had also been a refuge for so-called “opponents” and “rebels.”

Rodrigo placed a hand on my shoulder, and I rested my head on him, just as I had done for the past six years. We had a giant task ahead of us.

“Look at it this way—the Havana has returned to its original owners.”

I tightened my grip on the urn containing my grandmother’s ashes, the same woman who had longed to return for so many years but never could, never was allowed. Or her mother before her, who had her right to be Cuban stripped away, who had her citizenship stolen. “I am Cuban. No one can take that away from me—never. It’s my birthright,” she would repeat at every family dinner when someone jokingly suggested that she was more American than Cuban now. And one day, her eyes closed for good, and she never saw another sunset on her beloved island.

“We’ll never know what might have become of the Havana, of all of us, if those bastards hadn’t taken over the government,” I murmured.

His fingers tightened on my shoulder, a comfort. “We can’t dwell on that.”

But as we looked around, after all the initial excitement, I saw a country in ruins, in shambles, and citizens thinking about how to rebuild everything, without money—but with hope, a hope that had been lost for so long. Rodrigo and I had come to rebuild the hotel, to reconstruct the past, and to write a new story for the future.

Sometimes I think of my great-grandmother, when she was just a 20-year-old, walking through those streets that still held their splendor, full of shops, restaurants, businesses of all kinds. I imagine her in the dance halls, in the lobby of the hotel that once belonged to her family, perhaps welcoming new guests.

I see her as she looked in an old photo from that dusty album—wearing a red dress, her curls loose, with a small sunflower tucked behind her ear. Sitting on the edge of her father’s study chair, one hand on his shoulder, with her brother Antonio on the other side, holding a puppy. And they were smiling, and they were happy. And a year later, everything turned upside down.

And now, we, the descendants of those who fought, who were exiled, had returned to rebuild what was left.