The Veins of the Ocean

SIX

I exit the José Martí airport terminal and make my way to the corridor designated for arrivals through a crowd of waiting families and friends. At first, it’s as if everyone has his eyes, his broad smile. But then I see a hand reaching above all the others. He pushes through the wall of shoulders and elbows toward me, his long hair pulled off his face, temples and collarbones shining with sweat, pulling me close to him.

“I can’t believe it,” he says between embraces. “You’re really here.”

As he pulls me out of the crowd, Nesto looks different to me. Something in his eyes. Or the way the sun here has turned his skin a deeper amber than our sun back in Florida. I can’t place it, but before I say anything about it, Nesto turns to me and touches my face.

“You look different to me, Reina. Something happened to you in Cartagena.”

“The only thing that happened is that nothing happened.”

“Maybe that’s what you needed.”

Nesto rented a car from a neighbor, a discontinued miniature Korean Daewoo Tico left behind by Soviets in the nineties. He drives among other cars, Fords, Chryslers, and Pontiacs, most from the middle of last century, down a long road lined with billboards of socialist slogans: ¡Más Socialismo! and ¡La RevolucIÓn Sigue Adelante! splattered under images of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara — Nesto’s namesake — or Camilo Cienfuegos, and sometimes of the three men together.

Entering the city through Avenida Salvador Allende, I see peeling building facades, sun-bleached the color of ash, broken balconies, boarded windows, crumbling columns — some structures already imploded with only posts of their original foundation remaining, no fresh paint to offset the decay. Nesto tells me this is what happens when there is no money for repair and you take everything away, leaving a city to defend itself against time, storms, and the salt of the sea.

He turns onto narrower city streets in the direction of the hotel I’ve arranged. He’s invited me to stay with his family in Buenavista but I insist I don’t want to impose myself on his clan, show up as proof of his life on the other side of the Straits when he’s come to be with them, not play tour guide to me. Any time he has left over, we can spend together, but I don’t want to be a burden.

“But you’ll at least come over and meet them.”

To that, I agree.

Nesto parks the car and comes along so I can check in at the hotel and unload my bags.

Once in the hotel room, small with wooden-paneled walls and colonial furniture, Nesto says, “You know, it wasn’t so long ago that I wouldn’t have been able to walk into this hotel with you, or even walk on the street with you without getting stopped by police.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re foreign.”

“How would they know?”

“They know. They have a file on every person that enters the country. You just got here and I’m sure they’ve already got a file started on you.”

“Why are you whispering?”

“Remember where you are, Reina. The archipelago has ears.”

We leave the hotel, where Nesto eyes the employees, sure everyone is a chivato, an informer, and walk down to the Malecón, finding spots on the seawall under the last golden bits of daylight, the city at our backs.

Below our feet, young boys splash in the balnearios where Nesto says he learned to swim, shallow pools carved out of coral and stone buffering the seawall from the whipping waves of the open sea. There are no visible boats, there is nothing to indicate that anything exists beyond this island or that the sea ever ends.

Nesto says the Malecón is a city unto itself. Around us, Cuban families and tourists stroll; vendors offer peanuts in paper cones, and raspados of red and blue sugared ice; clusters of teenagers pass glass bottles around, sipping rum or matarata, moonshine. There are pairs of embracing lovers, the sounds of laughter, conversation, the music of guitars and tambores and voices singing songs to which everyone seems to know the words.

I’ve been waiting for him to explain. I don’t want to probe, but I can’t hold back the question I’ve been carrying with me from Cartagena.

“Are you going to tell me what happened with the marriage plans?”

“It’s like you said. Nothing happened and everything happened.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s Yanai. She doesn’t want to go.”

“I thought the plan was her idea too.”

“It was. But she changed her mind.”

“I don’t understand. All this time I thought she was trying to leave. The marriage to the German. The plan to marry you again.”

Nesto takes a deep breath, eyes fixed on the ocean.

“It’s not that simple, Reina. I had chances to leave this island before I finally took the step. In the nineties there was the Maleconazo right along this wall down by the port. There were boat hijackings and people protested so much the government said anyone who wanted to leave could leave and they wouldn’t put you in jail for trying like they usually do. I was nineteen or so. Sandro wasn’t yet born. I was young enough that I could have started a life somewhere else. It was the time to leave. But I was too scared. The boats were getting intercepted on the water by the Americans and the people on them sent to camps in Guantánamo or Panama. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t risk leaving just to end up in an army prison. I finally understood what my mother always told me. It’s hard to leave, to be the one to rip apart your family. So hard. No matter how much you hate where you are, no matter how much you curse your government or desire something better, leaving your home, your country, is like tearing off your own flesh.”

“You never told me that.”

“It would take a lifetime for me to tell you everything there is to tell.”

He sighs.

“There were other chances after that too. You know marriage is a negocio here. People come from other countries offering to marry a person. At that time, it was five or six thousand dollars for a European or Mexican. Two or three thousand for a Peruvian or Costa Rican. Men, women, it doesn’t matter. Sometimes they disappear with the deposit, but sometimes it’s a legitimate transaction. I never considered it but I know plenty of people who left that way. After the Maleconazo, life became even more difficult. With the Special Period, we were all the thinnest we had ever been in our lives. I was at Santa María del Mar with a friend. People would go there hoping a tourist on the beach would buy you lunch. I was just there to swim, to forget about things for a while. But a woman swam over to me in the water. She said she’d been watching me. She was from Barcelona. She liked me, it was obvious. She was a pretty good-looking temba, at least forty-five. I wasn’t interested but she kept talking. She told me she worked with a theater company and could send a letter of invitation for me so I could get a visa to travel to Spain. She said she had a big apartment and I could stay with her. She didn’t want money. She said she didn’t want anything except to help me because she saw how miserable things were for us here. She would pay for everything until I got settled. She would give me a job at her theater or help me find work doing something else. I didn’t believe her but she later sent the letter and the money for the plane ticket and I was lucky and got the tarjeta blanca and permission from the Spanish embassy to travel. Even Yanai wanted me to go so I could send for her and Sandro later and we could have a new life together in Spain. But people kept telling us horrible stories about Cubans who went to Europe and ended up sleeping on the streets, in bus stations, how people abroad hated them and mistreated them and wouldn’t give them jobs so they had no choice but to become criminals or prostitutes. They said the cold weather would kill us and we’d beg to come back home to Cuba but by then, maybe the government wouldn’t let us in. They terrorized us. We didn’t sleep thinking about it.”

“So what happened?”

“I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave. In the end, I was too scared. Things were so bad on the island in those days, but I still believed it couldn’t get worse. By the time I realized how wrong I was, it was too late. Yanai had opportunities to leave too. She had a cousin in Chile who said he could bring us both there. He had a restaurant and said he would put us to work. But Yanai was afraid to go so far away, almost to the end of the earth, so she told him no. And then, after we divorced, she married the German. She said he was a good man and all he wanted was companionship and that he promised he would send the kids to a good school and they would live in a beautiful house in the countryside. Sometimes I think she didn’t study enough for those language tests on purpose. But when she said she’d marry me again herself so I could bring her and the children over together, I believed she was serious. Now I see she never wanted to leave and she’s only being honest about it now. She says she’d rather live in her family’s house, keep up with the daily lucha because she already knows how to survive here. She’s afraid of the world out there, even in a place as close as Florida. I understand because I was afraid for so many years too. Everyone here is.”

“Didn’t you tell her you’d help her?”

“She knows I can only help so much. She’d have to get a job.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Here she can go to her job at the women’s clinic and earn the equivalent of twelve dollars a month, but she would spend more than that on the buses or almendrones she’d have to take to get there. So she is able to not work and earn the same, which is to say, nothing.”

He points across the dark water and night horizon.

“There, everyone has to work and hard. Nothing is free. You get a small amount of help through the Adjustment Act but beyond that, you are on your own. She’s scared. She says she doesn’t want to drown out there. She prefers to drown at home even if our children drown with her. I tell her, ‘Yanai, there is nothing for them here,’ and she just says, ‘Look at you. What have you accomplished there in La Yuma? You’re a nobody over there just like you were over here.’ I don’t have anything to answer to that because she’s right. I am a nobody. But I only want for my children to be what they want to be, say what they want to say, have what they want to have. It’s a small ambition for anyone else, but for me it’s everything.”

I know there are no words that I can offer to comfort him, so I slip my hand over his as it rests on the smooth stone wall and we sit together a while longer in silence as the Malecón of the night begins to take form: pale Europeans walking by, arms draped around much younger local girls provocatively dressed; foreign women marked by sunburns and tan lines, elbows linked with dark, muscled young men. Farther down the road and a little deeper into the night, Nesto tells me, the real body commerce begins.

We start the long walk up Paseo del Prado to my hotel, passing prostitutes in arched walkways, the shadows of joined bodies in dim alleyways between crumbled buildings, behind graffitied barricades under signs indicating reparaciones, though Nesto says it takes an eternity for anything to get repaired, and often a building simply collapses, taking the lives inside with it.

The hotel bar is full of foreigners and a few locals among them. Once in the room, Nesto flops onto the bed as if it’s already his and I lie beside him, kissing him. He won’t stay the night. He wants to see his kids in the morning to walk with them to school. We enjoy each other for the part of the night we do have together.

“I have to admit, I didn’t think you would come.”

“I told you I would.”

“I thought you would change your mind, or you would lose your way somehow. I didn’t think there would ever be a day when I’d see you in Havana, with me.”

That night, my first on Nesto’s island, I dream of walking at dusk through a thick green forest where trees burn down to their roots, each one spiraled by smoke and fire. In my dream, I don’t run or panic, but remain still, heat on my face, watching the forest burn until all that is left is seared earth.

Two days in Havana. Nesto says he can take me where the tour groups go — to see the lovely painted and restored plazas of Old Havana where musicians perform “Chan Chan” and “Guantanamera” on street corners, where tourists drink daiquiris at government-run cafés and buy communist memorabilia from government-licensed vendors running shops out of their living rooms. The Havana of illusions, he calls it, packaged for foreign consumption.

“I’d rather see your Havana.”

“You will. Tonight I’ll take you to dinner at my mother’s house.”

“What do they know about me?”

“That you’re important to me. And that I invited you here.”

“Okay,” I say. “But what can I bring? I don’t want to show up empty-handed.”

“You won’t. You and I are the ones bringing the food.”

Today Nesto has borrowed another car from a friend, a boxy brown Russian Lada with windows that don’t roll up or down, and a backseat that slides off its rails hitting the car’s unpadded and oxidized metal shell. We are on our way to the tree-lined streets of Vedado, on what Nesto says is the daily mission of every citizen on the island, to put food on the table that night.

We start at an agropecuario, a market built on a lot amid mansions in varying states of disrepair and decay, abandoned by the rich who once inhabited them. The better-maintained ones are government offices or foreign firms, but most have been split from single-family homes into tenements holding up to twenty families. Nesto buys a plastic bag from a lady selling them on the curb and inside the market, and we make our way down rows of produce piled onto crates and tables. Nesto picks onions, yuca, malanga.

“Are there potatoes?” Nesto asks a vendor.

“No, amigo. Maybe next month or the month after.”

“How about lemons?”

“No lemons in the markets since November. Only for tourists.”

At the back of the market, Nesto buys several pounds of rice and beans.

“I thought you got that stuff free,” I say.

“The State gives just five pounds of rice and beans per month, and it comes full of pebbles and worms. Even the coffee they give us is cut with peas.”

We pass the butcher stand where a man with blood on his apron swats flies gathering around thin slabs of beef hanging on hooks and fillets resting on his splintered wooden counter, Todo Por la Revolución painted in red across the front.

Outside the market, as we walk back to where he parked the Lada, a man approaches Nesto with a stack of egg crates on his shoulder. Nesto negotiates for four dozen eggs and the man helps him arrange the cartons on the floor of the Lada so they won’t crack.

“Do you really need that many?” I ask.

“With the Libreta, a person is only allowed five eggs a month, but right now there are no eggs in any dispensary or market in all of Playa or Marianao. So we have to get them here while they have them. Next week or next month, there might not be any.”

Just as the egg vendor walks off with the money Nesto paid him, another man arrives at Nesto’s side whispering that he has in his possession potatoes, which only tourist restaurants have had access to in months.

“Bueno, amigo,” Nesto says. “Show me what you’ve got.”

The man disappears around a corner, reappears a few minutes later with a paper sack in his arms, and presents it to Nesto, who pushes down the flaps to get a glimpse of what look to be real potatoes, fat as fists.

“Give me a dozen,” Nesto says, and the man is thrilled to be paid in CUCs.

“Black market potatoes,” I say, once we are in the car and on our way again.

“Black market everything.”

We hit three supermarkets where you can buy food, clothes, furniture, and appliances at inflated prices in the tourist currency, but are unable to find milk for Nesto’s children beyond condensed or the powdered kind. Finally, at a diplomercado out in Miramar where the expats and diplomats shop, we find real boxed milk and Nesto buys an entire case along with a few other luxuries — cheese, salami, pasta sauce, cookies, and crackers — food he says will hold up after he’s gone and won’t spoil easily in the tropical heat. We wait in line to pay among foreign-looking shoppers, their carts full of bottled water, wine, and packaged meats.

“You do this every time you come here?”

He nods. “This is what I save up for. I try to leave my mother’s and children’s refrigerators as stocked as I can. They go through it quickly though. When you live with rationing you panic because what remains uneaten today might not be where you left it tomorrow.”

Nesto takes me into the hills where a forest folds around the Río Almendares, the river that slices through Havana and pours out to the ocean through the end of the Malecón. Here in the bosque, spreading into a grassy field curtained by trees feathered in Spanish moss, air lush and clean, as if we’ve traveled very hard to get here, away from the noise of the city and smell of diesel and petrol, Nesto tells me people come to meet with the orishas, for a limpieza or a despojo, bathing for purification in the waters of Ochún, laying down offerings of fruit and flowers on the riverbank, gathering stones, beating drums, singing alabanzas for the orisha’s continued blessings.

Others, he says, come to conjure Ogún who dwells in forests like this one. Some come to place ofrendas at the feet of the Changó’s Ceiba trees — the only tree resistant to lightning and left untouched when the great flood covered the earth, giving shelter to mankind and animals so that life would endure — with bark so potent it can cure infertility: a tree so sacred one should not dare cross its shadow without first asking permission.

Nesto says the bosque is a popular place for small sacrifices, under trees dripping with branches and vines. People arrive to feed the saints with live chickens in cloth bags, leaving behind bloody ones, and nobody, not even one of the guards at the military post across the road, looks twice. At our feet are pieces of broken animal bones, even some chicken claws intact, shards of broken pottery, knotted ropes of all colors, decomposing fruit, and small pools of dried blood staining the soil. In dusty patches on the forest floor are painted white lines and circles among branches and twigs, which Nesto says are interpretations of the cowries, and in the gentle river current, I see sunflowers from upstream glide past us.

It’s because so many come here to meet with the orishas that Nesto says nobody would ever suspect we’ve actually come here to meet with the beef broker.

We watch a man walk down the hill sloping evenly like a set of stairs and make his way toward us on the edge of the river. He’s an older guy, maybe in his fifties, who Nesto told me is a trusted manager of one of the government slaughterhouses, running his negocio by slipping cuts of beef into a briefcase or satchel and taking them on the three-hour drive back to Havana for distribution. There are other men who run the same enterprise for fish, which comes from Africa, unavailable in the island food dispensaries for months, and another guy who brokers the plump chicken breasts meant for tourists, since the only cuts available with the Libreta are bony thighs or legs, and each person is only entitled to up to a pound per month.

The man arrives at our side and presents a newspaper-wrapped bundle to Nesto, who peels back a corner to get a look at the quality, counting six fillets.

“You’re looking at Fidel’s best,” the man tells Nesto. “Canadian Holstein crossed with Indian Zebu.”

A few vultures gathered around a chicken carcass farther down the riverbank seem to have noticed the smell of the steaks and move toward us.

“Not bad,” Nesto tells the meat man. “I’ll take them all.”

He slides a few bills of CUCs into the man’s palm with a handshake.

The beef broker heads back up the hill to his car, but Nesto stalls a bit, wrapping the bundle in a plastic bag he brought with him.

Through the trees I see the afternoon light is starting to dim, casting the forest in a pale golden film, similar to the forest of my dream. I try to picture the fires I saw last night in my sleep, try to feel for a connection.

Nesto walks to the edge of the riverbank, handing me the bundle of beef as he slips off his shoes and steps into the water, getting wet up to his knees. He leans over and dips his hands into the current, pulling smooth round stones off the river floor. He rubs them on his arms and neck, and places them on the ground by my feet.

“Many years ago in Africa, when the orishas watched as the first slaves were being packed into ships to be taken across the ocean, Ochún asked her mother, Yemayá, where they were going and Yemayá told her to a faraway island called Cuba. Ochún begged to be allowed to accompany the Africans on their journey. She didn’t want them to travel alone. This is why we love her so much. And they say if you are alone and wait patiently next to her rivers, you can hear her sing the song her father, Obatalá, taught her, which holds the secret of life. To hear it with your own ears is a special blessing.”

“You and your stories, Nesto.”

“I prefer this history to the one they force on us.”

“So, what’s the secret of life?”

“You don’t know? It’s so simple.”

I shake my head.

“Love.”

He stands in the river, his legs haloed by the current. He waves me over to him. I step as close as I can with my feet still on the hard earth. He cups water into his palms and lifts it to my face so the water drips off my forehead and cheeks.

“For protection.” He lets his fingers linger on the curves of my face, cool with water, running them over my lips, down my collarbone, and over my heart.

With the day’s errands out of the way, Nesto says it’s time to go home. He drives along Quinta Avenida, past former residential palaces turned-embassies and ministries, where police monitor street corners. One has to drive fast, Nesto explains, since the early eighties when a bus crashed into the gates of the Peruvian embassy, killing a guard and opening the doors to thousands of asylum seekers, setting off the events that led to the boatlift. If caught slowing down suspiciously in this area, one can be fined. We pass through Miramar and Nesto points out the aquarium where he worked, and the cafeteria down the road where he says young girls hang around, selling themselves for a few dollars to anyone who comes in for a coffee so they can buy minutes for their cell phones.

“Every time I see them I think of my daughter,” he says. “And I think I have to do whatever it takes to get her out of here before she starts getting offers for her body.”

Soon he turns onto another road and up a long hill where the neighborhood has clearly changed, turning from slick and smooth paved avenues to broken, potholed streets. A barrio of colorless buildings wasted by time and neglect to their original plaster and concrete tones. Houses like blocks haphazardly arranged by a child, built one on top of the other. People walk in the middle of the street. Children carry smaller children. Skeletal dogs sleep belly up in small patches of shade under tin awnings. Garbage accumulates on street corners. There are few trees around here and the salty ocean air doesn’t reach this far up the city slope.

“This is it,” Nesto says. “This is Buenavista.”

We’re not far from the famous Tropicana, where Yutong buses drop hundreds of tourists each evening for a show, or even from the neighborhood where El Comandante is said to live beyond gates in a no-fly zone. But Buenavista is one of the forgotten pockets of the city, Nesto tells me; some sections didn’t even have electricity until a year or two ago.

People wave to him as he rolls the car slowly down the broken road, until he pulls over, parks, and points to a house with metal bars over the front door and windows that reminds me of the house I grew up in.

“This is my home.”

Nesto opens the front door for me and we stand in the entryway as he calls to his mother until she comes down a dark hall toward us. She looks much older than my own mother, more like the sweet abuelitas of kids I knew from our neighborhood in Miami, grandmothers who lit up when their grandchildren came around, so different from my grandmother, who, in spite of her affection for me, often snarled that it was too bad I had the misfortune of being born my mother’s daughter.

Nesto greets his mother with a kiss, then pulls back to introduce me to her.

“This is Reina, Mamá.”

“Reina,” she pulls me to her chest with an embrace, then holds me by my shoulders to get a better look at me as if I’m a long-lost relative and not a total stranger. It’s a warmth I’m not used to. “Welcome, welcome. Estás en tu casa.”

I see Nesto’s smoky eyes in his mother’s. She’s dark as melao de caña like he is, though her face is dotted with freckles. She ushers me into a sitting area with a door open to the patio while Nesto goes out to the car to bring in the food we bought for dinner. I look out to the patio and see the prized trees Nesto has told me about, which fed his family through their toughest times. Beneath the mango tree, the long-haired white cat sleeps: Blancanieves, who Nesto told me he rescued from a dumpster years ago, before someone else could trap her to use or sell for brujería.

This is the house Nesto was brought to as a newborn, the long-awaited son; the space in which he’d grown up as a fatherless boy, through hungry years when he had to find a way to help feed his family, the home of the young man who left when recruited for the military; the house he returned to after marrying and divorcing the mother of his children, the house he’d remained in until he gathered the courage to leave that final time, crossing the ocean to the other shore where he eventually met me.

I see pieces of his former life everywhere, relics of stories he’s told me back in our new life together in Florida. Opposite the sofa where I sit is the fish tank Nesto built into the wall as a teenager from glass panels of abandoned windowpanes and concrete he mixed himself, full of tropical fish swimming over pieces of coral and painted rocks; the shelves Nesto told me he built from a disassembled table to hold his mother’s ceramic figurines and a few pieces of bone china, the only things she had of value, inherited from her mother; other things Nesto made for her when there was no money to buy gifts: a box made of seashells gathered in Isla de la Juventud, a rose carved out of the wood of a fallen chaca tree with his mother’s name, Rosa María, inscribed at the base.

On the wall above the chair where his mother sits facing me, three pictures hang: a royal portrait of the king and queen of Spain beside one of a young Fidel in a military cap; on his other side, a depiction of the island’s patron saint, la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, the other face of the orisha Ochún.

I notice on the table next to her armchair a framed photograph of Nesto with his children standing by a small roller coaster, the same photo he has taped to a wall in his room at the motel on Crescent Key, which now feels so far away along with the cottage and the life we share on those small distant islands.

Nesto arrives at my side, sits beside me on the sofa, tells his mother all the places we went to get the food for tonight’s dinner.

“Can you believe it?” his mother says to me. “The things we have to do in order to put a decent meal together in this country?”

I nod, though I’m uncertain of what to say because Nesto has always told me that despite her disappointments, having given her life and her faith to a revolution that gave so little in return, she still feels a conflicted loyalty to it.

Nesto tells his mother we are going to go to Yanai’s house to collect the children and bring them back here while she prepares dinner. By the time we return, he says, the others — his stepfather, sisters, nieces, and aunts — should be back too.

We walk along the broken road. Every now and then we’re interrupted by people calling to Nesto, saying they’re glad to see him back in Buenavista, and he pauses to wave back, telling them yes, it’s good to be home.

“Nesto,” I begin when we’re a few blocks along. “What have you told your children about me?”

“That you’re important to me.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s all that matters, isn’t it?”

“When my brother and I were kids, we hated when our mother brought somebody new to the house. She’d send us to the kitchen to get the guy a beer and we’d spit in it before we brought it back to him. Then we’d watch him drink it and try not to laugh.”

“Why would you do that?”

“I guess we were afraid of someone taking her away from us.”

“Didn’t you want a father?”

“No.”

“Didn’t you want her to find happiness with someone?”

“I didn’t understand why she couldn’t be happy with just my brother and me.”

“What do you want me to tell my kids about you then?”

“Tell them I’m nobody special.”

“I’m not going to lie to them, Reina.” He points to a house a few feet away with a wide stone terrace behind a high metal fence. “That’s the house.”

A body rushes Nesto from behind and he reaches around him, laughing, knowing his son’s weight and touch on him, pulling Sandro into his arms. He’s as tall as his father and already growing out of his chamaco body with new muscles. He’s in his blue school uniform, carrying a nylon book bag I remember Nesto buying for him around Christmas. They hug and wrestle for a moment until Nesto breaks up the laughter and motions to me.

“Sandro, this is Reina. My friend from La Yunay. She’s eating with us tonight.”

Sandro says hello and kisses me on the cheek. In his face, I see their bloodline, his grandmother’s eyes, his father’s grin, canela-skinned, a blend of his parents on the spectrum of mestizaje.

“Go get your sister,” Nesto tells him, and Sandro disappears through the gate, leaving us on the sidewalk outside the house.

“You used to live here,” I say, taking in the facade, trying to picture Nesto living within its walls with his wife and family.

“Yes, for many years. You see that terrace? I built it myself. It was a narrow wooden thing before. I brought each one of those stones and laid them with my own hands. I built the columns for the roof canopy, and I built that front door after a cyclone blew out the old one. And this fence?” He fingers the metal wiring. “I put it up too.”

“You’re good with fences.” I slide my hands over the rusty links, remembering how we freed the dolphin together, on a night that already feels so long ago. “Putting them up, taking them down.”

I look back up to the house and notice a slim figure in the front window watching us. She leans on the edge of the window frame, arms limp at her sides, dark hair pulled tight off her pale face.

Nesto notices her too and gives a small wave.

“That’s Yanai. She knows about you too.”

She raises her palm slightly, gives a faint wave, then leaves the window and our sight.

Their daughter is smaller than I expected, even from older pictures. She runs to Nesto when she steps out of the house and sees him waiting for her outside the gate, swings her legs when he pulls her off the ground into the air. She’s changed out of her school uniform into a dress that Nesto sent her from Florida and shows it off proudly, twirling at his feet. Her hair is braided, similar to the way my mother used to braid mine every morning before school, gently dividing my hair with the comb, in a way that I loved, even if later other girls would pull on those braids. I can’t help thinking of my mother now and what she would say if she knew where I was, with Nesto at the foot of his ex-wife’s door. She would remind me there is no stupider woman than one who takes up with a man between lives.

“Look, Cami,” Nesto says to his daughter. “This is my friend Reina.”

She stands behind him, covering her face with a flap of her father’s shirt.

“Hi, Camila,” I tell her. “You’re even prettier than your papi told me.”

“Say thank you.” Nesto nudges her, and she mumbles, clutching her father’s waist.

We walk back to Nesto’s mother’s house. Camila drops her father’s hand to walk ahead with her brother, his arm protectively draped over her shoulders. She leans into him and he tilts his head toward hers as if they’re sharing secrets.

I remember how Carlito and I used to walk together the same way, how I felt when I was by his side that nobody in the world could hurt me.

I would give anything to feel that way again.

Nesto says there’s no way the rest of his family will miss dinner tonight, not because a guest is coming but because they’ve all heard he was bringing home steak from the broker. As we wait for his mother to prepare the food we brought home into a meal for twelve, the others begin to arrive: his stepfather, Juan Mario, who was out having his bifocals repaired, a small husk of a man with a hollowed face, trails of pigmentless patches up his arms and across his neck including one on his shin he swears is the exact shape of Cuba; then Nesto’s two older sisters, Bruna and Galina, women with thick bodies and tired faces who bear little resemblance to him, probably because they have different fathers; Bruna’s daughter, Clarilu, nineteen, with her boyfriend, Yordan, and her baby daughter, Lili, in her arms; and Galina’s daughter, Cassandra, twenty-two and wearing an engagement ring Nesto tells me was given to her by a British guy she hasn’t heard from in a year.

We’re crammed into the living room, spilling onto the patio, Nesto’s sisters and Yordan leaning on the walls because there are not enough chairs to go around. Nesto tells them I used to paint nails and Cassandra rushes off and returns with a bottle of polish — a gift from Nesto — and asks if I’ll paint hers for her.

“Of course,” I say, and when I’m through, Clarilu and then Nesto’s sisters each ask for a turn. Nesto pushes his daughter forward.

“What about you, Cami? Do you want Reina to paint your nails?”

She clenches her fists and hides her hands behind her back, shaking her head. Nesto smiles at her and then at me. He looks happy, though it’s a kind of happiness different from the one he shares with me: joy with confianza, among the people who know him best. The room is small and hot, the metal fan in the corner barely moving the air, but I envy this family’s closeness and think of how vacant my childhood home felt in comparison.

Nesto’s mother has taken the steaks we brought, sliced them down, and added them into a stew with rice, potatoes, and fried eggs. She arranges the food on a table near the kitchen and we eat with plates on our laps, Nesto and me on a corner of the sofa with his children on his other side. Nesto’s sisters ask me about life in Miami, if it’s as beautiful as they see on the telenovelas they catch from their neighbor’s illegal satellite dish. Nesto’s stepfather, after hearing I arrived from Colombia, asks if it’s true that all of Venezuela’s shortages are to be blamed on their neighbor because that’s what the Cuban news reports.

“I can’t say for sure,” I tell him, “but I really don’t think so.”

Through it all, I watch Nesto’s children. They eat quietly, his daughter’s head resting on her father’s thick arm. I remember being her age and trying to claim ownership of my mother every time she brought a new man home to meet us. I would cling to her, wedge myself onto her lap until she pushed me away or told Carlito to take me out to play. I remember the men I saw as intruders, invaders of our territory. Carlito was never as threatened or bothered, with an innate awareness that each man was just passing through.

There is dessert of flan and by the time each of Nesto’s family members has been served, there is none left. They give me the biggest piece and I see Nesto’s daughter eye me with envy. I offer to share with her but she shakes her head, hiding again behind her father, tugging his shoulder down to her level.

I hear her whisper into his ear, “Papi, will we ever see her again?”

“Yes, mi amor. She’s a very good friend of ours.”

“Will she come back with you when you come back?”

He tries to distract her, offering her what’s left of his own slice of flan, but she’s undeterred and now asks her father when his next visit will be, and makes him promise to return before her next birthday because her mother has promised to throw her a big party.

After dinner, Nesto walks his children home and I stay behind, offering to help his mother and sisters clean the plates, put away what little food is left, but they don’t let me and leave me to wait for Nesto in the living room as his stepfather watches a news program describing Venezuela as the role model for the future of the Americas.

When Nesto returns, he tells me to follow him down a narrow hall past the kitchen and a row of small bedrooms, to a cave-like room at the back of the house, the bulk of the floor taken up by a mattress and a small stereo system on a metal stand; the only window covered by a thin sheet to block out light.

On the wall, a solitary print of Fidel hangs upside down.

“This is your room?”

“What’s left of it. I sold almost everything I had before I went to Mexico.”

We stand quietly as I look around. In the distance, the sound of somebody striking together a pair of palitos, like the opening pulses of a guaguancó. I hesitate to touch Nesto in his house, afraid he doesn’t belong to me here, and maybe not at all anymore.

I wonder how it would have felt if I’d ever had the chance to stand with him within the walls of what had been my room in the old house in Miami, or in the first room I ever lived in, the one I just left behind in Cartagena. I think I would never have felt more naked.

I touch his hand, as if that is all that’s permitted. He takes hold of my fingers and leads me down to the mattress and we rest facing each other as I try to picture the years and nights he spent on this very bed, more than thirty summers, winters, and springs, waiting, waiting, waiting, and how I slept on a similar bed on the floor across the ocean, and though I didn’t always know for what, I was waiting too.

In my dream, I lie on a crest of beach where sand meets water, my body pressing deep, carving its form into the earth; when I stand and look down, I see my silhouette has hardened despite the current rushing over it, filling the space where my body rested until the water recedes and my form in the sand fills with blood; water washes over it again, and with each wave, an exchange of blood and tide.

I tell Nesto about my dreams when he calls me at the hotel in the morning, how they’ve changed since I arrived in Cuba.

“I’m going to take you somewhere so you can make sense of them,” he tells me.

“No brujas, please.”

“She’s no bruja. She’s the best reader of dreams in Havana.”

The morning sun is hot, the air heavy with moisture. Nesto picks me up in a 1952 Chevrolet, borrowed from a cousin. He drives through Centro Habana, down cracked roads, stray dogs scampering to avoid being kicked or chased off; men hunched over popped-open car hoods trying to diagnose the day’s malfunction; buckets and baskets full of fruit or food being pulled from the street up to balconies full of laundry lines; old men sitting around improvised tables and overturned crates playing dominó; ladies young and old, some with babies in their arms, lingering in windows and doorways mirando y dejando, watching the world go by.

We come to the enclave of Cayo Hueso, webbed with wires and antennas, where Nesto parks on the corner of a tight street, asking a group of shirtless boys kicking a ball around to watch the car so it’s not stripped of any parts while we’re gone.

He calls up to a building, “Zoraida! Zoraida!” his voice filling the small avenue.

A woman pokes her head out of a third-floor window, turns her face upward to yell the same name too. Finally, on the sixth floor, another head emerges from some curtains. A man calls down to Nesto to catch, and tosses a key down to the street for him. Nesto opens the building door to a foyer wall painted over with a portrait of a dreamy-faced young Che, and we start the long walk up several flights of broken stairs, sweat gathering in the crevices of my collarbone and dripping down my spine. I stop and lean on the banister to catch my breath while Nesto flies past me, teasing that I have no stamina, until we both arrive at the top floor, which opens into a small cinder block single-room apartment on the building’s roof.

Zoraida sits in a wooden chair at the center beside an altar to Santa Barbara — Changó—with her long sword watching over a glass of white wine and a red apple. Zoraida is a small woman, her head wrapped in a ruby scarf, wearing a long white dress that reaches the floor. The door behind her opens to a concrete garden. Nesto greets her, bowing to her slightly, and introduces me; and Zoraida, who Nesto says is at least one hundred years old though nobody knows for sure but she looks about seventy, waves me over to her, takes my hand in hers, rubs it gently with her thumbs, and says, “So you are the one having trouble with your dreams.”

She turns to Nesto. “You leave us alone. Go outside. Wait in the shade until I call you.”

Nesto obeys and I see him settle onto a metal chair out on the azotea while Zoraida tells me to sit on the stool close to her.

“I’ve known Nesto, since he was a young boy. His grandmother used to bring him to me because of his nightmares. Now you, mi niña, it’s your turn.”

I begin by telling her the dreams of the past, of Cartagena until I returned, of my father, my brother, babies going over the bridge, though I don’t tell her the reason for these dreams, how they come from real memories. Then I tell her of my dreams here in Cuba, unlike any I’ve had before. The burning forest that looked so similar to the one I visited yesterday. And the most recent dream: my body in the sand, my figure form filled with blood and water.

She watches me as I speak though I have the impression she’s not really listening, but reading into me a different way.

Once I’m done talking she says sternly, without a trace of speculation, “You have been haunted by shame. You have been shackled. You have known violence and you have committed violence unto yourself. You must try to understand why you have placed yourself in a prison. To dream of fire is an indicator of change. You will have to let go of all that came before. You will feel an end to great pain, but only after trials of despair. To dream of sand, water, and blood shows that you feel impermanence, but it’s the opposite; something in you is taking root. Listen to the voice of your instincts. The spirits are guiding you.”

She pulls back and eyes me with sudden suspicion.

“You don’t believe in our santos or even the ones you were raised with.”

I shake my head.

“But you are a daughter of Yemayá. You must know this. She claimed you long before you were born. You must feel it. You watch the moon. You follow its glow. She is the universal mother. You are in her special favor. Anything you ask of her, she will give you.”

She calls to Nesto who comes in from the patio and stands at her side.

“Nesto, take her to see Yemayá. She will bring peace to her dreams.”

She takes Nesto’s hand, enormous next to hers, and he lowers himself onto one knee at her feet.

“And you, have patience, my dear boy. The Great One hears you. In time, you will have all that you want.”

“Gracias, Zoraida.” Nesto leans over and kisses the top of her hand.

He tries to give her some money but she refuses it, pushing his hand away. He walks to the altar of Santa Barbara and places the bills under the apple.

“For your santa, then,” he says, and she doesn’t protest.

Nesto says he wants to show me the view before we leave Zoraida’s place and leads me out to the azotea, all of Havana spread out before us in concrete cubes, homes upon homes, water tanks, electrical chords, antennas, barking dogs, and pigeon coops on nearly every rooftop.

I feel heat pressing against my chest and become breathless again. I’ve felt nauseated all morning but haven’t said so because I don’t want Nesto to think it’s caused by his mother’s cooking. I could hardly eat my breakfast at the hotel. I feel my stomach cramping, my body both burning and suddenly chilled.

“It’s so hot,” I tell Nesto, shielding my eyes from the sun as he points to where the Malecón begins and to the fortress of La Cabaña across the harbor.

Everything becomes dark but I feel his hands on me, hear him say my name. Then he’s above me and I’m not standing on the azotea looking over the city, but lying on the dusty concrete rooftop with Nesto fanning my face with his shirt, which he’s taken off, Zoraida slowly coming toward us through her doorway, one hand on a cane, the other carrying a glass of juice. He helps me prop myself on my elbows, resting my head against his knees, taking the juice from Zoraida, holding the glass to my lips until I taste mango.

“She’s more overheated than a hot dog!” Zoraida says, and returns a moment later with a wet cloth, handing it to Nesto, who slips it onto my forehead. “What have you done to this poor child? Can’t you see she’s not used to our heat?”

I sit up but my head feels heavy and I have to lie back down for another moment until Nesto helps me up and toward the door. I thank Zoraida, though I’m almost too dazed to speak.

“Take her straight to the ocean,” she tells Nesto. “Make sure she covers her whole head with water.”

When he sees me hesitate to go down the first flight of stairs, cautious with my footing so I won’t lose my balance, Nesto takes my arm, ducks his head into my chest and throws me over his shoulder, carrying me all the way down to the street where the boys wait beside the car for Nesto to pay them their chavitos.

We head east, outside the city perimeter toward the beaches. I close my eyes as Nesto drives, feel air rush past my face through the open window, the smell of gasoline and exhaust giving way to the aroma of the sea and greenery of the city outskirts.

I think of the last time I fainted, as a teenager when Universo took me to San Basilio de Palenque because he was obsessed with Benkos Biohó, the cimarron king who founded the refuge for runaway slaves like him high in the hills, surrounded by jungle, the only community in the Americas to resist colonization. We had to hitchhike out of Cartagena and caught a ride with a truck driver on his way to Mompox. He left us at the bottom of the muddy trail and we hiked through thick humidity until we came to the dusty clearing of the village plaza. Universo told me the Palenqueros were known for being reclusive, untrusting of outsiders, and reluctant to come down from their hill.

An old man came out to meet us by the road, asking what we were doing there.

“We came to see that,” Universo said, pointing to the statue of Benkos in the center of the plaza, an iron man with arms extended, broken chains hanging from his wrists.

We walked over to the statue, sweat slick down my back and my legs, sun reflecting on the white dust at our feet.

I remember telling Universo, “This must be the hottest place on earth,” and then I was on the ground.

When I came to, Universo and the old man had dragged me into a patch of shade by the church, laying me on some grass. I felt my skull crushing, heard the man shouting in Palenquero until a young boy appeared with a gallon of water that they poured over me.

“This girl doesn’t belong up here in the hills,” the old man told Universo. “She belongs at sea level. Take her back to the water.”

Nesto pulls off the highway down a winding road to Bacuranao until we are at an arc of beach, sand fine as flour, water turquoise and transparent.

“When I see this beauty, I think, How could I have ever left my homeland?” Nesto says. “Then I go back to the city, see the conditions in which the people live, and I think, How could I have stayed as long as I did?”

The beach is desolate except for a lone horse tied by a long rope in the shade of a coconut palm.

We walk to the water and Nesto reaches for me to turn my body, reminding me to always approach Yemayá with humility, from the side, never head-on.

I go into the water as far as my thighs, gathering my dress so it won’t get wet. Nesto doesn’t care, though, and goes in with his jeans on, dunking under the surf, and holds me so that I can dip my head under the water too, feel the cool foam run down my neck and chest.

We find a coconut palm for ourselves and lie on the sand, salt and water hardening onto our skin, my head cushioned on Nesto’s chest and his in the pillow of his arms.

I’m tired, I tell him, so tired, and let myself close my eyes for a little while to sleep.

When we leave the beach, Nesto drives from Bacuranao on the Vía Blanca through the clapboard houses, cuarterías, concrete cube apartments, and colonial buildings of Guanabacoa to neighboring Regla until we come to the tip of the peninsula facing Havana across the bay, at the gates of a white church on the bluff. There is no service happening but the church is busy with people coming in and out, scattered in pews facing the altar where a black Virgin holds in her arms a tiny white baby Jesus.

Nesto leads me to an altar on the side of the church where believers have placed dozens of blue, white, and violet flowers, girasoles, candles, and candies, kneeling before the statue of the Virgen de Regla in prayer. One woman carries a baby dressed in blue and white, presenting her child to the statue, whispering the name of Yemayá, then leaning forward to kiss the baby’s cheek.

Nesto takes a turn kneeling before the altar and I kneel beside him. I don’t know what he’s praying for but I hope his prayers are heard. I hope everything he and Zoraida say is true, that our desires echo through the heavens and that faith will bring them to completion. I close my eyes, feeling the petitions of all those around me.

“Yemayá, estoy aquí,” a voice says from behind me.

And beside me, Nesto, “Yemayá awoyó, awoyó Yemayá.”

Outside the church, a few Santeras sit on the wall lining the harbor road beside improvised altars of dolls surrounded by flowers, seashells, paintings on wood of a tongue with a dagger piercing it, arranged on handkerchiefs and blankets at their sides, calling to passersby, offering clairvoyance and blessings.

“Oye, muchacho,” one calls to Nesto. “Come let me tell you about your future.”

Nesto ignores her and I follow him to the water’s edge where passengers of a ferry from across the harbor disembark, and we sit together on a flattened piece of stone.

“You don’t want to have your fortune told?” I ask him.

“Not here. Not like this.”

“When is the last time someone read the shells for you?”

“Before I left for Mexico.”

“What did they tell you?”

He shakes his head. “It wasn’t good.”

“Tell me.”

“A few days before I was supposed to leave, somebody left a dead chicken at my mother’s door. Its chest was pinned with a paper with my name written on it. It made me nervous because nobody knew I was planning to defect outside of my family.”

“What did you do with it?”

“I called a friend, a Santero, to take it away. He buried it somewhere so nobody would be tempted to cook it. They say the worst maleficio is the one you eat. But that friend told me to go to see an iyalocha to find out what was going on.”

“Did you go?”

“Yes. And the iyalocha told me someone from my past, maybe a jealous or bitter ex-lover, did a trabajo on me. She said this person was in communion with Paleros because the hechizo was so strong it couldn’t be broken no matter how many limpiezas or polvos she mixed for me. She said the purpose of the spell was so that I would never find peace in my life. Not with my family and not even within my heart. She warned me not to leave the country under those conditions. She said I would never find the better life I was seeking. She said the only way to undo this trabajo was to become full Santo, but not just anywhere. She said I had to go to Santa Clara because it’s in a sacred place at the center of the country, the crossroads of aché and benevolent energies. But it would have cost me thousands. Money I didn’t have then, money I don’t have now. And if I did, it would be money better spent on my family and my children.”

“Do you believe her about the trabajo?”

“Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don’t.”

I tell him how the blue-haired bruja in Miami told me that the only way to break the curses I’ve inherited was through some cleansing ritual that involved bathing in honey, milk, oils, and rose petals, surrounded by seven seven-day candles every night for a week. At the end of the week she said I would sleep as if I’d returned to the womb and would be free of all the dark powers plaguing me.

“She wanted to charge me three thousand dollars. She even said I could pay in installments.”

“Did you consider it?”

“No. I was taking care of Carlito in those days. Any extra money I had went only to him.”

“The iyalocha told me I would always be alone.”

“The bruja told me that too.”

“Do you think it’s true we’re both doomed to solitude?”

“If I believed that, I wouldn’t be here with you.”

I often think, if only Carlito had lived another three months, he and Nesto could have met each other.

But then, if Carlito had lived, and everything in our lives hadn’t gone so wrong, neither Nesto nor I would have ever found our way down to those lonely islands, into each other’s lives.

I feel tethered to Nesto in a way I’ve never felt with anybody else.

Like family but not family because we weren’t tossed to the tides of life together but instead found each other, adrift.

“I need something to change,” Nesto says, eyes on the Havana skyline across the water, pale and blurry in the afternoon haze. “When I was young and I got so frustrated I punched walls, cursed everything about this country, locked myself in my room for days without speaking to a soul, my grandmother would tell me, ‘Cálmate, mi’jo. Not even sadness is a permanent condition.’ She thought she would be alive to see the end of the regime, but of course, she was wrong. Those men are immortal.”

“Nobody can live forever.”

“The thing is, they can all die and it still won’t matter.”

“Why not?”

“Because where there is a dead king, there is already a crowned prince.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re not looking at the relics of a revolution anymore, we’re looking at the beginning of a dynasty.”

It’s a half-moon night, a breeze from the trade winds ruffles against our skins. On my last night in Havana Nesto and I sit together on the same stretch of the Malecón that he took me to on my first night. He’s quiet beside me, until we part so that he can go back to Buenavista, see his children for dinner again, and for one last time before returning to Florida, try to reason with Yanai, convince her to change her mind so they can carry out their plan to marry again and get her and their children out of here.

Later, I dream of my brother in prison.

I confuse stories he told me when he was still alive about how the guards would often abuse inmates, especially the mentally ill ones. He’d learn about these accounts when he crossed ways with them in the infirmary or hospital, bruises on their faces, gashes on their heads. He’d hear about it from other inmates on the prison “radio,” echoes down the death row corridor between security checks, how guards withheld toilet paper and meals while writing in their reports that those prisoners refused them, taunting the most vulnerable ones until they banged their heads against the walls, tied them to their beds or cuffed them to their toilets for days, then punished them for soiling themselves by sending them to the hole.

These were guys, Carlito said, who you couldn’t imagine being fit for trial, men who could barely speak full sentences, who cried in anguish at the faces of demons they saw within the shadowed corners of their cells, burrowed in the crevices of the walls; men who ended up in prison when they should have been in a psychiatric hospital somewhere. The prisoners could do nothing but endure the mistreatment because the guards would only deny their actions, lying and covering for each other with their own kind of brotherhood loyalties.

I told all this to Dr. Joe once, everything Carlito had described, and was surprised when Dr. Joe didn’t even argue or try to convince me it was an exaggeration.

“And you just let this go on?” I’d said.

“I’m only one man, Reina. Prison is too big a system.”

“Then you’re complicit. And you’re as bad as the rest of them.”

In my dream, it’s Carlito who is being tormented, starved so that his body looks as dry and shriveled as the bark of a tree.

He cries, screaming for our mother, for me, to come save him, while a faceless guard laughs, mocking him. He covers Carlito’s head with the sheet of his bed so that my brother can barely breathe and, in my sleep, I feel myself suffocating, slapping at my own face to tear the cloth off my mouth. I see the guard grab Carlito by the neck, thrust his face in the toilet, leave it there until water fills his nostrils and Carlito is certain he is drowning.

He can’t cry anymore. No sound comes from his throat, but I feel him scream from within, calling for Mami, calling for me.

In the morning, Nesto meets me at the hotel, his eyes ringed with fatigue, and I know he hasn’t slept. He will take me to the airport though he won’t leave on his flight to Miami until tonight.

“She said she’ll think about it,” he tells me, once we are in the car, yet another borrowed Lada, on our way to the airport. “I asked her how much more time she needs. It’s been years already. By the time she’s done thinking, the kids will be grown and have their own children to struggle to feed or Sandro will have already thrown himself to the sharks to bring himself over. I know she has a new boyfriend. My sister told me he works in the kitchen of a paladar. But Yanai says she’s not staying for him. She says this is her country and it breaks her heart to think of leaving it. She blames me. She says I should never have left. She says, ‘If you love your children as much as you say, why don’t you come back?’”

“Do you ever think about doing that? Of moving back instead of trying to bring them over?”

“Every day. Even my mother tells me maybe Yanai is right, and the children are better off here. They won’t know the pain of leaving their country. They know only the pain of being left behind. She says to let it be, to let time take care of everything. But just look around this island. Anyone can see time is our enemy. We are already four generations deep into this mierdero of a revolution. I was born into it. I didn’t have a choice. But am I supposed to surrender my children and all my descendants too?”

We slow at an intersection and Nesto turns to face me.

“This island causes blindness. I know because I was blind for a long time too. But I can’t let things just be. I have to keep trying.”

At the airport, we say good-bye though it’s only for a matter of hours because we will meet tonight back at the Miami airport, after my detour through Colombia and his short flight from Havana, and take the bus together back to the cottage in the Keys.

When I came to Cuba a few days ago, the airport arrivals area was a scene of ecstatic embraces, loved ones reunited after years, maybe decades. Here at the entrance to the departures terminal, the long hugs are accompanied with tears, a feeling of families breaking apart for who knows how long.

I tell Nesto what I’ve never told him before.

“I’ll wait with you through it all. As long as you want me by your side. I believe you when you say you had to leave in order to help your family. But I want you to know, I will also believe you if one day you tell me you have to stay.”