51 pages • 1 hour read
Next Year In Havana
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Themes
The Cuban Revolution
Next Year in Havana is historical fiction, and the Cuban Revolution serves as the primary historical setting. Knowledge of significant events of the Revolution is crucial to understanding important moments in the plot and the motivations of the central characters.
Cuba was a part of Spain’s empire in the Americas. With the breakup of the Spanish empire, Cuba gained its independence near the turn of the 20th century. Unfortunately, the United States quickly assumed control and made Cuba a part of its empire in the Western hemisphere. Once Cuba managed to regain the power to hold elections, the United States intervened in its politics to protect American business and political interests.
During the 1920s, these interests were the production of sugar and rum; people like the Perez and Rodriguez families reaped the rewards of this system, placing them in conflict with the ordinary Cubans who gained nothing from this prosperity. Pablo and Alejandro’s critique of the role of the United States reflects many Cubans’ sense that their fates and resources were always in the hands of outsiders who did not have their best interests at heart. Their awareness of the unfairness of this system is a foundational part of Cuban identity, and the desire to make Cuba into a country for Cubans motivates the great sacrifices that Alejandro, Pablo, and their compatriots are willing to make.
The Great Depression, which had global impacts, also affected Cuba. The ensuing difficulties eventually led to a revolution in the 1930s, during which people like Batista came to prominence. Batista maneuvered himself to power by supporting the constitution of 1940, to which Alejandro and Pablo refer throughout the novel. This constitution was full of reformist promises, ones Castro would demand be met a decade later. This heady moment ended when Batista seized power through a military coup in the 1950s.
On July 26, 1953, young politician Fidel Castro led an attack against the military’s Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba after Batista canceled the country’s elections. The attack was a failure, and Castro fled to Mexico to build an army of rebels. The revolutionary movement he founded was dubbed “the 26th of July Movement” in honor of this first blow against the regime, and it is to this group that Pablo belongs.
The strand of the narrative that focuses on Elisa takes place during this historical moment. Elisa lives through the defeat of Castro and the adherents of the 26th of July Movement in 1953. In 1956, Fidel came back to Cuba to relaunch his revolution. The references to Pablo being in the mountains reflect that the 26th of July Movement regrouped by training in the Sierra Maestra Mountains of Cuba. By 1959, the rebels were ready, and the tide turned in their favor when they won the Battle of Santa Clara, the site of which Marisol visits decades later.
Castro came to power as a communist, and Cuba became a socialist state. The Cuban Revolution of the 1950s sent shock waves through the United States, which was committed to controlling the spread of communism to win the Cold War with the Soviet Union. When Cuban immigrants to the United States to escape Castro’s regime, welcoming these immigrants was an important part of the public relations war against communism. The United States eventually imposed an economic embargo to apply pressure to Cuba and isolate it. The predictable outcome of this isolation, especially once the Soviet Union couldn’t continue to provide resources, is the poverty and lack of access to resources that Marisol witnesses in 2017 when she goes to the island.
In Luis, Cleeton represents what it means to have inherited the aftermath of the revolution. Luis is inspired by the revolutionary ethos of the 1940 constitution and the ideals of the 26th of July, but he can’t reconcile these ideals with the oppressive apparatus of Castro’s regime, which places limits on freedom of movement and freedom of speech. The Rodriguez family and ordinary Cubans like Magda bear the brunt of the embargo rather than people like Pablo, who are part of a new elite. Pablo, who literally bled for his revolutionary ideals, is a bureaucrat who believes he is incrementally reforming the country rather than being co-opted by the authoritarian regime.
One last significant element of the historical setting is the Cuban thaw, which began during the presidency of Barack Obama. Fidel Castro stepped down as president near the start of Obama’s presidency due to illness. During his second term in office, Obama began easing the embargo, travel restrictions, and diplomatic isolation that were so key during the Cold War. Elisa’s ability to go to Cuba occurs because of the Cuban thaw.
Fidel Castro died in 2016, but another Castro (Raúl) maintained the regime, and the exiles’ dreams of returning to Cuba did not come to pass. With the election of Donald Trump as the US president in 2016, the thaw ended and some restrictions were reinstituted. The departure of Luis from Cuba and Marisol’s commitment to fight for modern Cuba as it deals with the problems caused by the embargo are reflections of shifts in Cuban and Cuban-Americans’ understanding that the long-hoped-for freedom promised by revolution is farther away than ever.
Cubans in Exile and Cuban-American Identity
Next Year in Havana focuses on several essential themes one expects to find in migrant literature, namely, conflicts between first-generation exiles and their offspring in the countries to which they migrated, shifting meanings of a return to the country of origin, and differences between people who left the country of origin and people who stayed behind. Marisol is the primary voice through which Cleeton represents migrant identity. Marisol undergoes a series of experiences that force her to reevaluate what it means to be the child of a family of Cuban exiles.
Before going to Cuba in 2017, Marisol readily identifies herself as “Cuban,” and—lacking access to the geography of Cuba—grounds her identity in family, especially her relationship with her grandmother Elisa. Elisa weaves a Cuban identity for her granddaughter by telling her stories about the Cuba she left behind, teaching her granddaughter how to cook traditional Cuban food, and teaching Marisol songs, poetry, and history that celebrates the Cuban people.
Elisa’s identity is one rooted in exile—the trauma of being forced to flee her home, her longing to be back in Cuba even as she and her family establish roots in the United States, and the unfulfilled dream of returning to Cuba. Elisa dies an exile, and even the death of Fidel Castro is not enough to allow her to reclaim a Cuban identity that is rooted in geography rather than unfulfilled longing for return. Her last act, completed by her will, is to command Marisol to undertake this return on her behalf. Although Elisa is dead, Marisol is forced to engage with and contest her grandmother’s vision of Cuba as a result of a journey to Cuba.
The great irony of migrant literature, especially that which focuses on what happens when the descendants of exiles make pilgrimages to the exiles’ countries of origin, is that such returns inevitably force these children to confront the differences between the stories they learned about “home” and the reality on the ground. From the very beginning of her trip to Cuba, Marisol is forced to see that her grandmother’s nostalgic representation of Cuba does not agree with the reality of a modern, post-embargo Cuba.
The Cuba Marisol encounters is one that is still struggling with historic inequality, American imperialism, and oppression. Marisol’s pilgrimage to Cuba opens her eyes to how the Perez family benefited from American imperialism and how this privilege has merely replicated itself: When Marisol is forced to flee Cuba with Luis, she does so on a jet plane and with resources that go all the way back to sugar money that enabled Emilio to reestablish himself quickly in the United States.
While in Cuba, Marisol is also forced to recognize the differences in the lives of those who stayed and those who left. The Rodriguez family serves as a foil to the Perez family, in fact. While Ana ekes out an existence by running the paladar, Beatriz and Elisa lived comfortable lives in Cuba North—Miami. The lives of Magda, Cristina, and Caridad even more forcefully show how out of touch those nostalgic stories of Cuba are with the modern reality of Cuba. All three of these women are forced to make difficult decisions and sacrifices that neither Elisa nor Marisol were ever forced to confront. Cristina’s story of the failed attempt of her family to flee to the United States by raft drives home that staying is the result of lack of choice and the brutal realities women and poor people confront as they attempt to migrate.
Furthermore, Cristina’s frank discussion of sex tourism and the parallels between Marisol and Luis’s relationship and that which exists between rich tourists and Cubans is an explicit critique of the privilege of American sojourners to Cuba. Cristina points out, “To be a woman in Cuba is to suffer” (311), and her condemnation of Marisol’s nostalgia in the face of the “hell” (342) life is for those who remain finally forces Marisol to surrender an identity based on Elisa’s tales and become something else.
The sojourn to Cuba transforms Marisol into a Cuban-American. She looks toward Miami as home by the end of the novel, and she recognizes that the Cuba to which Elisa wished to return is one that perhaps never existed after all. This Cuba was an act of imagination rooted in nostalgia that papered over the inequality that destroyed Cuba and underwrote Elisa’s relatively sheltered childhood and young adulthood. Furthermore, Marisol is forced to recognize her own privilege as a person of Cuban descent who lives in the United States, which exercises outsized power over the fate of Cuba.
Marisol makes her peace with this privilege by using her voice as a journalist to bring attention to what this modern Cuba is; rather than assume that she has the authority as a Cuban-American to speak on behalf of Cubans, she collaborates with Luis, first by getting him out of the country and then by agreeing to co-author with him a series of articles on modern Cuba. Cleeton underscores Marisol’s transformation with this shift in genre from travel writing, generally aimed toward tourists like the woman Marisol meets before flying to Antigua, to writing that is more overtly political.
Luis, for his part, is the new voice of Cubans in exile. While he embraces revolutionary idealism, he is willing to state aloud that the authoritarian regime that came from the revolution can be just as much the enemy of the people as the imperialists. His vision of Cuba is far from romanticized. The story that Marisol and Luis will tell is one that will be realistic, grounded in firsthand experience of life in Cuba, but one that will acknowledge the role that Cuban-Americans have played and will continue to play in the fate of Cuba.
Idealism Versus Pragmatism
Next Year in Havana is packed with high-flown but passionate arguments about the Cuban Revolution and how best to respond to it. Cleeton uses men with revolutionary aspirations to represent the idealism of Cuban and Cuban-American culture and women who are left to pick up the pieces as the pragmatic voices of Cuban and Cuban-American culture.
From the very start of their relationship, Pablo and Elisa are at odds over the wisdom of the revolutionaries in attempting to change Cuba. Pablo is young and committed to making Cuba into a country governed by the reforms promised in the 1940 constitution. These ideas are rooted in Western political philosophy about the rights of man and the people and more recent expressions of Cuban aspirations in the works of people like Jose Martí. Pablo’s idealism moves him to action, much of it violent. He is willing to risk all for the sake of his ideals, even his relationship with Elisa; such idealism seems to be the purview of men, however, and reflects the greater mobility men had in 1950s Cuba.
Elisa is much more conservative and embraces pragmatism. She sympathizes with and is even drawn to Pablo’s ideals, but when she attempts to read about the philosophers that inspire Pablo, she falls asleep. When given the choice between ideals and pragmatism, she almost always makes the pragmatic choice. When Pablo needs rescuing, she makes the pragmatic choice to agree with her father’s demand that she break off her relationship with Pablo because she knows she has no intention of ending the relationship—she just tells Emilio what he needs to hear. She refuses to run away with Pablo because she wants to avoid Alejandro’s fate as a family outcast. She is one of the first Perezes to recognize the need to leave Cuba. She marries Juan to avoid being an unwed mother.
More so than the men, women have limited resources with which to live revolutionary lives, so they tend to take the course of least resistance. Beatriz is the exception who still mostly proves this rule. Beatriz’s involvement in rebellion and revolution during the 1950s seems mostly to be in support of her brother—she steals money from Emilio’s desk to support Alejandro because she has little money of her own. When she needs to gain access to her father during Emilio’s imprisonment, she puts on a cute dress and trades a kiss or sex for access. Beatriz reveals at the end of the novel that she was involved in a plot to murder Fidel Castro. Her ability to engage in this plot is made possible by her pragmatic appropriation of the family’s buried wealth; the exile of the family and disruption caused by revolution at last enable her to assume a larger role than usually available to women, especially those of her class.
In modern, post-revolutionary Cuba, there is still idealism at work, but all of the characters—including an older and wiser Pablo—more readily embrace pragmatism over idealism. Pablo explains to Marisol that he has tempered his idealism with experience. Changing Cuba is about “reform, however slow, however gradual” (301). Luis is still chasing revolution with the way he teaches history and explicitly in writing his blog, on which he posts articles that are critical of the government. His idealism gives way to pragmatism as well, however. He blogs anonymously to shield his family, and when Ana and Marisol insist that sacrifice of one’s life violates the most basic responsibility of writers—to survive to tell another story—he agrees to flee to the United States.
There are many other examples of Cuban pragmatism. Ana perpetuates the myth of colonial Old Havana in her paladar to ensure the economic survival of the family. Magda keeps up her religion inside her house despite the anti-religious ethos of the regime. Cristina lives with her ex-husband to survive economically as well. These are the compromises of people struggling against seemingly insurmountable oppression.
Despite idealism giving way to ruthless pragmatism, hope is central to Cleeton’s representation of modern Cuban and Cuban-American identity. Marisol’s meditation on Cuban and Cuban-American identity reveals that to be Cuban is to “exist in a constant state of hope” (321). Luis and Pablo have been forced to surrender some of their revolutionary ideals, but both still hold on to hope that the country can change, no matter what conditions are on the ground. Elisa’s hope back in 1970 is the exile’s hope—that one day she will return to Cuba, and that hope sustains her all the way to her death. The New Year’s toast from which the novel draws its title is like the Jewish Seder toast, “Next Year in Jerusalem,” in that the hope embodied does not depend upon literal return. By untying Cuban identity from the literal ground of Cuba, Cleeton is making the case for an expansive Cuban identity built around an imagined community to which both Cubans and Cuban-Americans can belong.
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