“Jeanette,” she says as if she reads my thoughts, “don’t believe the mercenary media—we struggle, but we are happy here.” Squint, slant.
Maydelis has left the kitchen and joined us again by the doorway, waiting for a breeze. She rolls her eyes but my grandmother can’t see her. I’ve heard Maydelis rant about how she is frustrated here. I know how she feels.
Abuela makes coffee even though outside it is dark as the chicory-laced grounds. She tells Maydelis that Yosmany invited me to ride his horse, and Maydelis snorts.
“Don’t be silly, Jeanette,” she says, scrunching her hair into a fat pouf atop her head. “He just wants to woo you so you can whisk him off to La Yuma. Or he will spend all evening riding horses with you and then ask for a pair of sneakers and an iPhone, ha ha ha.”
Maydelis had asked me for a pair of sneakers, but I don’t mention that. I brought her a pair of Nikes tucked in one of those fifty-pound canvas bags the Cubans call gusanos. Gusanos are worms. Back in the Cold War days, they called Cubans who left the country for Miami gusanos. I, daughter of a worm.
“You can’t trust Black men,” my grandmother says, and I nearly choke on my cafecito.
This I still haven’t gotten used to, the blatant racism, how it commingles with revolutionary fervor at times in the older generation in a way that seems unlikely. But perhaps I am naïve and racism among even revolutionaries is as obvious as me sticking a lacy thong in my pocket at sixteen. As obvious as the fact that I am no good.
I say nothing.
I want to love my grandmother, but my mother has poisoned me. She said once my grandmother loved her country more than her blood. She said my grandmother was a murderous devotee of a regime. She said I could never speak to my grandmother.
My mother slapped me when I said I loved Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries, when I said Fidel Castro was handsome in his youth. My mother told me I should never go to Cuba until That Man is dead, she wouldn’t see me to the airport. I know that she likes me here only because there is no heroin here. I know that she likes me here because Suboxone has failed me once already.
And me? What am I doing here? I thought Cuba could be some kind of connective tissue, maybe even show me my mother. Make a piece of her make sense. I remember pressing her about why she left as the girl, Ana, watched cartoons last year, as my mother let me fail yet another person. Or perhaps I just needed somewhere to run to in this moment and only Cuba felt faintly familiar. There is no Meaning here. Only questions.
I want to love my grandmother, but she is blank faced, spreading rice on her splintered kitchen table, picking out the black kernels and the grit. Crooked arthritic fingers, tight-lipped and unsmiling face. I want to love her but it is too quiet in this house.
But it isn’t as though Black Cubans fare better in Miami, where racism is just slightly more polite, a little quieter. This is fact: In Miami, Cuban is synonymous with white. In Miami, Cubans will scoff when you call them Latino. “I’m not Latino, I’m Cuban,” they will say. By which they mean, I am white, another kind of white you don’t know about, outsider.
I was ignorant. In high school, I saw a documentary about the Buena Vista Social Club, and before that I hadn’t known there were many Black Cubans. And then I asked my mother, “How come there are so many Black Cubans in Cuba and so few in Miami or are there more but they live somewhere else?” and she looked at me like the question wasn’t a question at all but bordered on insult. (Don’t ask my mother about her curly hair. Don’t ask my mother about some of her features. Don’t ask her why she hates to tan.)
I say nothing to my grandmother. Maydelis talks about how she wishes she could travel, maybe even live somewhere else for just a little while, so she could make some money to bring back to Cuba, or maybe just get a visa to visit so she could buy stuff to sell. She reiterates for the millionth time that the average salary for a Cuban government employee is ten dollars a month. “Ten dollars!” she says.
My grandmother pays Maydelis no mind. She cuts her off. “I know you’re probably wondering about your mother and me, Jeanette,” my grandmother says, abruptly.
Another fact: I want to look as effortless as these women. It isn’t until Cuba that I realize how uncomfortable I am in my neatness. It seems to me the classier the outfit, the more it hides. I am neat and a thief, recovering from a substance-use disorder, a term I didn’t know until rehab. Straight out the airport, in La Habana, I marveled at the women in their tiny sequined jeans shorts, their bra tops that exposed dimpled stomachs. Effortless. Here I am in all my imperfection, motherfuckers, their sweat-glistened skin proclaimed. Maydelis in her bootleg polo shirt. My grandmother in a satin housedress, her cone-shaped bra peeking through the armholes, her cone-shaped bra barely containing the skin that seeps over its elastic.
“I know it’s about politics, Abuela,” I say. “I don’t care about that.”
“It is sad,” she says, “that I haven’t spoken to her since she left. It is sad that I didn’t know you until now.”
Maydelis exhales a wisp, sucks an ocean. “Very sad,” she adds.
I flap my fan. Flap, flap, flap. Then I set it down. “She doesn’t know I’m here,”
