“When I was younger, I begged my grandmother to tell me about Cuba. It was a mythical island, contained in my heart, entirely drawn from the version of Cuba she created in exile in Miami and the stories she shared with me. I was caught between two lands—two iterations of myself—the one I inhabited in my body and the one I lived in my dreams.” 

Elisa’s version of Cuba is rooted in nostalgia that fails to acknowledge that Cuba has moved on since the Perez family left in 1950. Marisol is unaware of the impact of this nostalgia. Her sense of herself as caught between Cuba and the United States is a clear expression of what it feels like to be from a family of immigrants and exiles.

“To be in exile is to have the things you love most in the world—the air you breathe, the earth you walk upon—taken from you. They exist on the other side of a wall—there and not—unaltered by time and circumstance, preserved in a perfect memory in a land of dreams. My Cuba is gone, the Cuba I gave to you over the years swept away by the winds of revolution. It’s time for you to discover your own Cuba.” 

Elisa’s task is putatively for Marisol to scatter her ashes in the land to which she couldn’t return. Her obsession—even after death—with returning shows that Elisa defines herself as an exile from Cuba. Elisa is aware that her notion of Cuba is not enough for her granddaughter, however. Her charge to Marisol is the inciting incident that forces Marisol to begin her pilgrimage.

“My grandparents are Cuban, my father Cuban, therefore I am Cuban. But will it matter here that my skin is lighter than many of the country’s citizens, that my blood is not fully Cuban? Am I an outsider here or is the ancestry I claim enough?” 

As Marisol goes through customs, she experiences a crisis of identity because she is not sure she has the right to make a claim to Cuban identity based on being a Perez. Her uncertainty in this moment is one of many when she questions the meaning of the Cuban part of her heritage.