Havana Nights | Noches de Habana
"A journalist falls for her translator during a complicated assignment in Cuba"
Havana Nights
Noches de Habana
I came to Havana to write about revolution. I wrote about revolution of another kind.
"I'm your translator," she said. "Mariana. I'll make sure you understand everything."
"I speak Spanish."
"Not Cuban Spanish." She smiled. "Trust me."
Mariana was everything I wasn't—careful where I was bold, skeptical where I was idealistic, grounded where I floated through theories.
"You want to write about Cuba," she said, "but you don't understand Cuba. You see what you want to see."
"Then show me what's real."
"That could get us both in trouble."
"I'm not afraid of trouble."
"You should be."
She showed me anyway. Late nights in her apartment, listening to stories she couldn't tell in daylight. Early mornings in markets where the real economy operated beyond official channels.
"This is dangerous for you," I said.
"Everything is dangerous here." She poured rum into mismatched glasses. "We learn to live with it."
"Do you ever want to leave?"
"Every day." She looked out at the crumbling buildings, beautiful despite the decay. "And never. This is home."
I kissed her after too much rum and too much truth, her lips tasting of Cuba itself—bittersweet, complex, impossible to define.
"This is a bad idea," she whispered.
"The best kind."
"If anyone finds out—"
"Who would tell?"
"You don't understand how things work here."
"Then help me understand."
We were careful. Secret. I wrote my article during the day; at night, I wrote poems about her that I'd never publish.
"You're falling in love," she observed.
"Is that bad?"
"It's complicated. You leave in two weeks. I stay forever."
"What if you didn't?"
"Didn't what?"
"Stay forever."
Leaving Cuba was the hardest thing I'd ever done. Standing at that airport, watching her through security, knowing the impossibility of everything.
"I'll come back," I promised.
"You can't promise that."
"I'm promising anyway."
"Americana." She cupped my face. "So stubborn. So beautiful. So impossible."
I came back. Three more times over two years, each visit longer, each goodbye harder.
"This can't continue," she said. "It's torture."
"Then come with me."
"You make it sound simple."
"It's not. But neither is this. At least in the States, we'd be together."
The paperwork took eighteen months. The waiting was worse than any deadline I'd ever faced. But the day she walked off that plane in Miami...
"I'm here," she said, falling into my arms. "Actually here."
"I know." I was crying. "I know."
"You were right."
"About what?"
"Some things are worth the trouble."
She's a professor now—Cuban literature at the university. I still write, though less about revolutions and more about love.
"You changed my life," I tell her sometimes.
"You changed mine first."
"Cuba gave me the best story I never published."
"What story is that?"
"Ours."
Havana nights—where love survives everything, even geography.