I Walked the Havana Streets My Grandparents Left Long Ago. Somehow, it Still Felt Like Home.
Fidel Castro’s death is complicated for me, a first generation Cuban-American. I know what Fidel wanted for Cuba and what he actually accomplished. The strands of his legacy are a braid of totalitarianism and Utopian socialism.
Fidel is the fiery figure of my childhood. He is a memory shaped through the insistence of repetition. He is the man whom my mother swore again and again she sat next to once on a bench at the University of Havana. He invited her to join him for coffee, but she declined the offer when she saw a handgun peeking out from under his jacket.