Next Year in Havana

 By Chanel Cleeton

Berkeley     2018

356 pages     Literary

If you like serious history lessons mixed in with your romance fiction, you are going to love Next Year in Havana. It is the story of a grandmother and granddaughter in two distinct generations and their love affair in Cuba. Grandma Elisa Perez, was the daughter of a Cuban sugar baron—one of four sisters—forced to leave Cuba and everything they loved because their father was a proponent of the old way of life, pre-Castro. Elisa is a young adult in love with Pablo, a revolutionary, and is totally bereft when it appears that he has been killed in the revolution. Years later, her granddaughter, Marisol, has promised to bury her ashes in Havana, and because of her journalism credentials, she is able to travel in 2017 to visit the city, meet the people close to her grandmother, and fall in love with Luis, the grandson of her grandmother’s best friend.

It's all very heavy, with long passages of history interspersed with the sights and sounds of Havana and bits and pieces of romance and family life. The Kirkus review says “Somber and humor-free, the novel feels uncomfortably strung between its twin missions to entertain and to teach detailed, repetitive factual lessons.” That’s exactly how I felt. It was very heavy, and if I hadn’t been reading it for my book club, I would not have finished it.

However, at book club this week, we had a guest speaker—a Kalamazoo woman who had been part of the diaspora from Cuba. As a 12-year-old, she had been sent to an orphanage in Miami to wait for her parents to be able to leave Cuba. We were thrilled to hear her story, because the history lesson was so much more vibrant than that of Chanel Cleeton’s. She told about how her family were reunited and ended up in Kalamazoo, when religious family services got her father a job at a pharmaceutical company. She has returned to Cuba several times since 2010, and she was able to give us detailed information about how the country is faring now.  

To its credit, Next Year in Havana introduced me to some history that I knew little about. Of course I remembered Fidel Castro, the Bay of Pigs, other aspects of the revolution, and especially the antique cars, but there was much I didn't know. Cleeton has a sequel that has come out recently, When We Left Cuba, the story of Elisa’s sister, Beatriz. Finally, The Last Train to Key West, which arrived in June, tells the story of two more women and their involvement with Cuba. Some of her earlier books also deal with Cuba and romance.

Chanel Cleeton’s website.