“Revolutions Don’t Care Much for Broken Hearts and Shattered Dreams”

 (This article was originally published February 18, 2023, in the Southern Spice section of Times-Georgian.)

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For years, Cuba has remained near the top of my bucket list, partly because of Ernest Hemingway’s influence and partly because of the romanticized version of Old Havana that I have crafted in my mind. When I think of Cuba, I, and many others, I assume, envision colonial architecture, refreshing mojitas, vintage cars, warm breezes, and lovely mariposas fragrancing the sea air. 

Books like Chanel Cleeton’s Next Year in Havana reinforce these nostalgic visions of Cuba while also revealing the harsh realities that Cubans have faced over the past decades. 

Sixty-four years ago this week, Cuba ushered in a completely new era with promises of “honesty, decency, and justice” from its new leader. On February 16, 1959, Fidel Castro was sworn in as prime minister of Cuba after a lengthy campaign filled with political propaganda and guerilla warfare. Many Cubans rejoiced at the ousting of former dictator Fulgencio Batista, anticipating a better quality of life with Castro’s rise to power. 

What transpired instead was a dictatorship that seized property and indoctrinated Cuba’s youth through anti-American rhetoric and weapons training. Parents began to fear losing their rights regarding their own children. Mothers and fathers became so desperate to protect and save their children that when American religious and political activists promoted Operation Peter Pan, a massive, secret airlift in the early 1960s of thousands of Cuban children, they agreed to send their own kids to the United States. Cuban parents believed that this would be a short, temporary separation that would be remedied when the political climate changed. 

Unfortunately, many families never saw one another again. 

In the early 1990s, the early days of my teaching career, I learned that the Spanish teacher in the room next to mine had come to America through Operation Peter Pan. 

Carmen shared her personal story of being ten years old and put on a plane by her crying parents with her few precious possessions packed in a tiny red suitcase. One of the “lucky” ones, she was met in Miami by distant relatives who took her in, sent her to school, and loved her as one of their own. 

But then there were the children who arrived in the States with no one there to take them in - some of them even younger than she. She had no knowledge of what became of them, but was still troubled by their fates 30 years later. 

How desperate times must have been for their parents to send them to a new country with no safety net in place. 

Throughout her years in America, Carmen had used writing as a vehicle to express her deep feelings of loss and longing. She composed many poems about her homeland, some yearning for the natural beauty of the Cuban landscape, some mourning family members she missed tremendously, and some denouncing Castro’s politics and policies. The written record of her heartbreak felt fresh and raw, as if her pain was just as acute now as it was years ago when she separated from her parents. 

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I thought of Carmen, years later, as travel restrictions to Cuba relaxed in 2015 and wondered if she had any family left that she could go visit. Having long lost contact with her, I didn’t know, but I hoped that she could make at least one last pilgrimage to the country of her birth. 

My thoughts turned to Carmen again a couple of years later when limits on entering the country were tightened. Had she made a trip in time? Before it became too difficult to go?

For so many of us who didn’t make the voyage to Cuba during that very short window of opportunity, we now find ourselves locked out of the beauty and mystery of Old Havana. My parents, luckily, took a cruise in late 2015 and toured Cuba via highly chaperoned outings. I’m so happy that they were able to tick one more item off their bucket list, together.

For me, though, life proved too busy to afford me a chance to travel to Cuba before the tide turned once more. 

Now, I’ll content myself to live vicariously through authors like Chanel Cleeton who seek to reconcile Cuba’s irrepressible draw with its darker history.

 Sooner rather than later, I hope to stand on the Malecon, like Marisol and Elisa in Next Year in Havana, and lose myself in the promise of a Cuba that embraces her troubled and beautiful past while welcoming a new and progressive future.