The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba - Chanel Cleeton Page 0,129

speck against the sea.

I stop in my tracks, Isabella stilling beside me.

There is something in his gait, the familiar set of his shoulders, his bearing—

I’d know my husband anywhere. I’ve loved him nearly my whole life.

I quicken my pace until I’m running, Isabella doing the same, and then he’s in front of us, looking a bit older, new lines on his face, a slight limp in his stride. In a step, his arms are wrapped around us as he holds us close to him, as he embraces his daughter for the first time in years, as my tears begin to fall.

“You’re home.”

I don’t say the rest of it—how I feared I’d never see him again, how I feared he’d died, that all was lost, that I don’t know how we have survived all that we have. Isabella has been through enough. When we are in private, we will speak of our experiences. We will tell each other our stories.

I will tell him about his mother. We will grieve.

For now, we hold on to one another.

“Where will we go?” Isabella asks us.

“Home,” I reply. “We’ll go home.”

“And if nothing is left for us there?”

I squeeze her hand tightly in mine, my other hand linked with my husband’s.

“Then we’ll rebuild.”

I stare up at the Havana sky, at the mighty flagpole that once heralded Spain’s dominion over Cuba, the Spanish flag flapping in the breeze for all of my life.

It’s been replaced by a flutter of red, white, and blue.

Not the flag we bled for, that proud Cubans died for, the blue stripes interspersed with white ones symbolizing Cuba’s provinces and the purity of our cause as patriots, the red triangle of strength, the blinding white star of independence. Not the flag we raised in battle for decades, the flag we dreamed of, the future we hoped for.

Instead, different stars and stripes exercise their influence on Havana.

The American flag flies over Cuba now.

And still, we dream. That we will have a voice in this new country for which we have sacrificed so heavily.

That one day we will be free.

Viva Cuba Libre.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

In the summer of 2018, a few days before Next Year in Havana was announced as Reese’s Book Club pick for July 2018, I was down in the Florida Keys researching the book I was writing at the time, The Last Train to Key West. While I was in Key West, I came across numerous references to the sinking of the USS Maine—an event I vaguely remembered from my history classes in school. I also visited the San Carlos Institute in Key West, a Cuban heritage center and museum honoring the fight for Cuban independence. I instantly became intrigued with the idea of writing a book set during the Cuban fight for independence from Spain and the Spanish-American War. As I began researching the book, I thought about the characters who would populate the novel. And then in my research, I came across the true story of a Cuban revolutionary named Evangelina Cisneros.

As an eighteen-year-old Cuban revolutionary exiled with her father to the Isle of Pines and later imprisoned in the horrific Recogidas prison in Havana for rejecting the advances of a Spanish colonel, her story has been largely forgotten over time, but during her life Evangelina Cisneros was an international celebrity. When her plight came to the attention of the New York newspapers who were locked in a fierce circulation battle, she instantly became famous, and nearly four hundred articles were published about her in the New York Journal. Her imprisonment, prison break at the hands of Journal reporters, and subsequent celebrity are all real-life events that were detailed in Evangelina Cisneros’s autobiography, which was published by William Randolph Hearst and likely ghostwritten by members of his staff shortly after her escape from Recogidas.

There were times in telling Evangelina’s story that truth felt stranger than fiction. It was important to me to follow the details of her life as accurately and faithfully as possible, and here there was no need for dramatic embellishment. That said, while I utilized over one hundred sources to research the different aspects of the novel, I used Evangelina’s autobiography as my primary source for her story line, choosing to tell her story as she saw fit. At times, that made for some additional investigation. In order to protect some of the individuals who helped her escape from prison, Evangelina used code names to describe them, so it took some digging through the historical record to match