47 pages • 1 hour read
Chanel CleetonWhen We Left Cuba
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: The Cuban Revolution, Bay of Pigs Invasion, and Cuban Missile Crisis
The first Cuban Revolution of 1933 stemmed largely from economic troubles due to the impact of the global Great Depression on the production of sugar, the island’s chief industry and major export. The success of Cuba’s sugar industry had supported a wealthy upper class, but the economic pressures that resulted from the withdrawal of US investments in 1929 led to increasing instability within Cuba’s authoritarian government.
After a military coup in 1933, Fulgencio Batista, leader of Cuba’s armed forces, played an outsized role in Cuban politics, including serving a term as president from 1940 to 1944 and establishing himself as a de facto dictator in 1952, controlling the elections that led to his presidency beginning in 1955. Batista’s governance drew many complaints as he suspended civil liberties and democratic reforms, increased censorship, and supported the wealthy sugar producers and the US-based Mafia’s control of gambling and sex work in Havana. Under the guise of repressing communist activities, Batista’s secret police arrested, tortured, and executed those expressing dissent or socialist ideals.
In 1953, a young lawyer named Fidel Castro led a raid on army barracks at Santiago in an attempt to spur an uprising. Defeated, he fled the country, but in December 1956, Castro returned to Cuba with a small band of armed men including his brother, Raúl, and the revolutionary Che Guevara. The group began a guerilla war on Batista’s government, taking the name of the 26th of July Movement.
Castro’s landing spurred other uprisings, including an attack on the Presidential Palace in Havana in March 1957, which drew the support of a group of University of Havana students who had organized to protest Batista’s government. In the novel, Beatriz’s brother Alejandro is involved in this uprising and is subsequently disowned by the family.
The unrest further impacted the Cuban economy, already suffering from stagnating sugar exports, high unemployment, and a shrinking tourist trade. An arms embargo imposed by the US stripped Batista’s military of ammunition, leaving them outgunned by the revolutionaries.
In response, Batista suspended further constitutional protections, including freedom of speech. After his interference in the delayed 1958 elections led to public outcry, Batista fled to the Dominican Republic on January 1, 1959. Castro entered Havana a few days later and took control of the government, essentially making himself prime minister.
Arrests, torture, and executions of Batista’s supporters led to hundreds more deaths in the months following Castro’s takeover. In July 1959, Castro passed an agrarian reform that nationalized control of the country’s production of sugar. As Cuba’s largest trade partner, the United States was affected by this change. The worsening economy and executions led to widespread defections as prominent Cubans and high-ranking military officers left the country.
Castro shored up the sugar industry in a developing friendship with the Soviet Union. A trade pact established in 1960 and his public alliance with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, along with a four-and-a-half-hour speech for the United Nations in September 1960 denouncing the United States for imperialism, led to the severance of diplomatic ties with the US at the end of 1960. The United States continued to maintain a naval base in Guantanamo Bay, on the southeastern end of Cuba, on land that had been leased indefinitely to the US government since 1903.
In 1960, the CIA began planning an invasion of Cuba to remove Castro. In April 1961, the attack began with air strikes against Cuban bases and a water landing in several places, with the main force of around 1,500 landing in the Bay of Pigs, known as Playa Girón to the Cubans. Castro anticipated the attack and his military easily repelled the invasion, killing over a hundred of the invaders and imprisoning a thousand more.
In the summer of 1962, the US government learned that the Soviets were shipping ballistic missiles to Cuba and setting up launch sites. Presumably, the US was the target. In October 1962, US President John F. Kennedy deployed a naval blockade around Cuba to prevent the delivery of further missiles. A tense standoff resulted, and for several days, Americans feared the outbreak of a global nuclear war between the two superpowers. On October 28, 1962, Soviet Premier Khrushchev agreed to abandon the installation of more missiles if the US would promise never to invade Cuba, and the Cuban Missile Crisis ended.
Despite over 600 alleged attempts to assassinate him, Castro ruled Cuba until he stepped down in 2008. An ongoing trade embargo by the United States depressed the economy and standards of living in Cuba for decades. Castro died of natural causes on November 25, 2016.
Ideological Context: Communism and the Cold War in the US
Beginning in 1917, the Russian Revolution led to the overthrow of the monarchial government, and a group called the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, established a communist government in the form of Soviet Union. Part of the ideological rhetoric of communism was that economic systems like capitalism were exploitative and dangerous and needed to be dismantled or overthrown. This made capitalist countries, like the US and Great Britain, wary that communist governments posed a threat to their governance.
During World War II, the US and Soviet Union set aside their differences to ally with Great Britain against the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan. After the war, Germany was partitioned into four parts, with a quadrant of the country allotted to each of the Allied powers: the US, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. The capital city, Berlin, set within the Soviet-occupied quadrant, was also partitioned. While the Allied powers aided recovery attempts through democratic means, the Soviet Union imposed more communist principles on their territory. Tensions mounted as the US objected to Soviet policies within its own borders, which under the leadership of Joseph Stalin led to famine and the deaths of millions. Great Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill, suggested erecting an “Iron Curtain” between the Soviet Union so communism did not spread to the West. This eventually took shape in the form of the Berlin Wall, erected in 1961 to divide Berlin between the democratic republic of West Germany and the communist East Germany.
While the Soviet Union imposed communism on several Eastern European countries it drew into the Soviet bloc, communist governments also arose independently in China and Africa, and Central America. The US was both economically and ideologically opposed to communism. US officials believed that if one country fell to communist government, neighboring countries would soon follow. For this reason they instigated wars across the globe against communist countries, including the Korean War, starting in 1950, and the Vietnam War, which didn’t end until 1975.
There were also fears about communist beliefs spreading inside the US, which intensified as the Cold War developed between the US and Soviet Union, so called because hostilities did not involve actual military deployment but rather a competitive stockpiling of nuclear missiles on the part of both countries. Bunkers in secret locations around the US held long-range missiles that could be deployed at the notice of a Soviet attack. In the late 1940s and into the 1950s, the Red Scare led to organized efforts in the US to investigate people in the government, film, and other industries who were suspects of harboring communist sympathies. These efforts often disproportionately targeted marginalized people, like the LGBTQ+ community. Fidel Castro’s communist governance of Cuba and his friendliness with the Soviet Union made US agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation fearful that the Soviets could use Cuba as a base from which to launch an attack on the US.
In 1989, the governments of East and West Germany agreed to reunite, and the Berlin Wall was dismantled. Following the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 and many of its former member countries dispensed with communism as an ideological model. Other once-communist countries in Africa and Central and South America followed suit. By 2016, the year the novel closes, only five countries in the world retained communist forms of government: Cuba, China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Laos.
Literary Context: The Perez Family Books by Chanel Cleeton
Chanel Cleeton’s family left Cuba in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, and she grew up in Florida before studying in England and eventually getting her law degree from the University of South Carolina. After beginning her writing career with contemporary romances, Cleeton hit the bestseller lists with Next Year in Havana (2016), which draws on her own family history in describing the fortunes of the Perez family.
Next Year in Havana follows stories across two timelines: One, set in 1958, describes how Elisa Perez meets and falls in love with Pablo, a rebel fighting alongside Fidel Castro to expel President Batista from the country. When Castro takes over, the Perezes are in danger. Emilio Perez, the head of a large sugar empire, is vulnerable for his family’s wealth and privilege, gained through exploitative practices of cultivation. Emilio is released from prison, but his son, Alejandro, is killed. Elisa, who made love with Pablo before he left to join the rebels, keeps her pregnancy a secret as the Perez family flees Cuba for Florida.
In 2017, Elisa’s granddaughter, Marisol, returns to Cuba to scatter Elisa’s ashes. She struggles to reconcile her grandmother’s romantic tales of the Cuba she knew with the reality of the country. Marisol finds a romantic interest and ally in Luis Rodriguez, the son of Elisa’s best friend Ana, and is surprised to find that Pablo is still alive and working for the government. Next Year in Havana establishes that Elisa had a son named Miguel and a husband named Juan, to whom she was happily married for nearly 40 years. The novel also alludes to an attempt by Beatriz to assassinate Fidel Castro.
When We Left Cuba (2018), set primarily between 1960 and 1963, explores Beatriz’s life, including her work for the CIA, and ends shortly after Marisol’s return to the US. Several hints are given about a cousin in Spain who is married to a diplomat.
Cleeton’s next novel, The Last Train to Key West (2020), is set in 1935 and describes how the lives of three women intersect in the Florida Keys in the days leading up to a disastrous hurricane. One of the heroines, Elizabeth Preston, is related to the Preston family that appears in When We Left Cuba, and Mirta Perez, a second protagonist, is the sister of Emilio Perez. The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba (2021) is set in 1896, during the Cuban fight for independence with Spain and the war with America. It too features the intertwining fates of three women: a New York City secretary, an imprisoned Cuban girl, and Marina Perez, who is working for Cuban revolutionaries.
Our Last Days in Barcelona (2022) is another dual-timeline work of historical fiction. In the 1964 timeline, Isabel Perez travels to Spain to investigate why her sister, Beatriz, has disappeared, and while there learns about the surprising life her mother led in 1936.
Two of Cleeton’s other works to date are set in or around Cuban history, including the short story “A Night at the Tropicana” (2023) and The Cuban Heiress (2023), while The House on Biscayne Bay (2024) is a thriller set in a Gothic mansion in South Florida.
