Front of Book

She looks like me, pale with blue eyes and light brown hair and freckles. Yet she has largely been raised day to day by intense, dark-eyed Cuban-American women, and their blood is in her, and the history of their family, with all of its drama and all of its issues, has exerted an incalculable influence on who and what she is. At some point in her life, she’ll have to figure out what all of that means to her; the whole story and the way she looks will be part of its strangeness. For me it was all behind glass. I felt the sudden separation between us, between the relative depths of what this trip would mean to us, many years on. One of those moments of generational wooziness that come with having kids, like realizing there’s a part of their lives you won’t see.

Where Is Cuba Going?