When We Left Cuba

Beatriz enrolls at the University of Miami and lives in Palm Beach with Nick. She feels “the tension between our countries, the pressures from outside pushing at the seams of the private world we have created here” (291). One morning her father visits to scold Beatriz for living with Nick out of marriage and causing a scandal. He wants her not to get involved with Cuba; the US has made Castro a dangerous adversary. Beatriz insists that Castro killed Alejandro. She feels sympathy for her father, forced to rebuild his life in a new country, his son stolen along with his legacy.

The narrative flashes forward to November 26, 2016. In Palm Beach, Beatriz hangs up the phone, feeling there is still love and respect between her and Eduardo. She puts on the diamond earrings she bought to celebrate graduating from law school and goes out to celebrate, “a way of laying all she has lost to rest now that the villain has finally been brought to a justice of sorts for his crimes” (295).

In November, while Nick is in Dallas, Eduardo visits Beatriz to deliver a letter with instructions about her assignment in Cuba. He tells Beatriz that President Kennedy has been shot. Maria knocks on the door, crying. Nick calls to confirm what happened. Beatriz and Maria watch the news and hear the announcement that the president is dead. Beatriz feels numb, realizing that Kennedy gave the nation—indeed, the world—so much hope. Nick returns home and Beatriz consoles him.

The entire US is in a state of shock and grief. Beatriz recalls the same sense of turmoil in the days after Batista fled Cuba, before Castro arrived in Havana. She has been thinking about her assignment and realizes, where before she was ready to sacrifice her life, she doesn’t want to die anymore. Nick shares the theories that Lee Harvey Oswald, who shot President Kennedy, was a Castro sympathizer, or that the CIA was quarreling with Kennedy over how to deal with Cuba. Nick doesn’t want Beatriz to go to Cuba. He gives her the ring that he intended to use to propose marriage, a large canary diamond.

Beatriz tells Nick he can’t succeed as a politician if his wife works for the CIA, and she doesn’t want to give it up. “I like what I’m doing,” she tells him. “I like what it has made me, the power it has given me, the freedom it affords me […] I have been powerless for far too long” (307). Beatriz finally makes him see that a relationship cannot work out. Nick leaves for a flight to Washington but tells her to keep the diamond ring.

Beatriz, approaching Cuba, feels that she is looking at a stranger. The buildings are there, but everything feels different. Eduardo takes her to the hotel where she is to meet Fidel, and Beatriz passes through security. Fidel, and more security men, are waiting for her. Beatriz wonders how she is to slip the poison into his drink.

Castro says he knows Javier and Sergio, the Cuba brothers she met in Hialeah. He knows Beatriz was sent to kill him. Castro said he did what had to be done to overthrow Batista, but he did not kill President Kennedy, and he did not kill Beatriz’s brother. He tells her instead to think about motives the CIA might have had for Kennedy’s death. He lets Beatriz go, instructing her to tell the American government he was not involved.

Eduardo is not waiting for her outside the hotel. Beatriz walks to her family home and remembers finding her brother’s body. She wonders if the house still holds the portraits she remembers: the corsair who was the first Perez ancestor, and the wife who sailed from Spain to meet him. Beatriz digs where her father told her to look and finds a wooden box full of jewelry and money that her father buried. Beatriz thinks it is enough to buy her passage back to Florida. A man with a gun steps out of the shadows.

The man is Javier, who wants revenge for her killing of Ramon, his cousin. Eduardo, who followed Beatriz to the house, shoots Javier in the back, saving her life.

Eduardo arranges Beatriz’s passage back to Florida but reveals he is not going with her. Eduardo admits he set up the meeting between Fidel and Beatriz because Fidel wanted someone to communicate to the Americans. Eduardo doesn’t trust Castro, but he is tired of fighting and he wants to stay in Cuba; he arranged their meeting so Castro would end his exile. Beatriz feels betrayed but understands “how far one will go to return home” (328). She promises him they will dance at the Tropicana someday, and then she sails to her own home: “To brighter days, to the future, to freedom” (329).

Dwyer visits Beatriz at the Palm Beach house, which is now hers. She asks Dwyer how he can stomach all the lies and he says he trusts no one but himself. He admits that people surprise him, but he is good at his job. He offers Beatriz continued work with the CIA, preventing the spread of communism around the world. He mentions her mother’s cousin in Spain, married to a diplomat, and Beatriz asks when she will leave.

The narrative flashes forward to November 26, 2016. Beatriz returns to her Palm Beach home in the early morning and finds Nick standing on the veranda. He asks if she has been happy, and she says she has. She offers condolences on the loss of his wife. He invites her to dance as the sun rises.

Nick and Beatriz are dating, and she enjoys “rekindling a flame that never died” (339). She brings him to meet her family. Her great-niece Marisol has returned from scattering Elisa’s ashes in Cuba. Beatriz gives another great-niece, Lucia, a birthday present. She bought back the picture of an ancestor of theirs, Isabella Perez, that once hung in their home in Cuba. As they sing happy birthday to Lucia, Beatriz thinks that her legacy has not been in helping Cuba but in being one of the Perez women.