11 A Red Too Much: Intimate Politics in Wendy Guerra’s Todos se van

“No sé en qué momento permití que me quitaran todo y me dejaran sola, desnuda, con el Diario en una mano y un carmín en la otra, tratando de colorearme la boca de un rojo que parece demasiado subido para esta edad indefinida.”

[I don’t know when I let them take everything and leave me alone, naked, with the Diary in one hand and lipstick in the other, trying to paint my mouth a red that might be too much for this indefinite age.]

With a title like Todos se van [Everyone Leaves] Cuban writer Wendy Guerra’s 2006 debut novel is always ultimately going to be about her homeland. We can read it in other ways, for other kinds of messages, and turn our attention to a variety of other themes. Its format—a series of personal diary entries divided into two parts, those of a child and then of an adolescent girl—invites us to look for the development of more intimate, private issues. The situations and struggles of our growing protagonist—raised in a series of dysfunctional households and working her way through a handful of problematic relationships while developing as an artist—encourage us to read the work as alternately a coming of age story (a bildungsroman), a story of artistic development (a kunstlerroman), and a feminist tale of the struggle to find one’s voice in a male-dominated society. For all that, Guerra’s novel, set in Cuba, and announcing in its title a defining action of the island nation—the endless exodus of the disgruntled, disgraced, and disaffected—will always lead us back to Cuba and specifically to the controversial politics that have defined it for six decades.

Lest we harbor any reservations to so reductive a reading experience, Guerra’s first-person narrator-protagonist concludes the two-page prologue of her diary-novel with a paragraph that begins: “Nacer en Cuba ha sido mimeitzarme en esa ausencia del mundo al que nos sometemos.” [To be born in Cuba is to learn to be absent from the world in which we live] (10). She goes on to list several rather mundane activities—not knowing how to use a credit card, for example—that underscore how literal this novel’s response to Cuba will be. At the completion of the list she shifts abruptly to more abstract considerations: “Afuera me siento en peligro, adentro me siento confortablemente presa.” [When I’m outside, I feel in peril; indoors, I feel comfortably imprisoned] (10). Her final thought in this brief prologue is the epigraph that introduces this reading: “No sé en qué momento permití que me quitaran todo y me dejaran sola, desnuda, con el Diario en una mano y un carmín en la otra, tratando de colorearme la boca de un rojo que parece demasiado subido para esta edad indefinida” [I don’t know when I let them take everything and leave me alone, naked, with the Diary in one hand and lipstick in the other, trying to paint my mouth a red that might be too much for this indefinite age] (10). Standing alone, that final sentence could refer to any number of people or causes or themes we’ll encounter in the coming pages. But given the novel’s title plus the preceding paragraph, the “them” of that final sentence will ultimately be Cuba, specifically Castro’s officially still-ongoing Cuban Revolution, with its capital R.

The first half of Guerra’s Todos se van satisfies all Cuba-centric expectations. Entitled, “Diario de Infancia” [Childhood Diary], the entries, dating from November, 1978 to June, 1980, register the experiences and observations of protagonist Nieve Guerra, age eight when the diary begins. In her first entry, Nieve describes living with her mother and a stepfather in a privileged oceanside neighborhood in Cienfuegos, Cuba. Nieve’s is a charmed existence: “Tenemos una casa en la laguna llena de inventos raros… en un barrio elegante donde las casas dan al mar…nado por las tardes el tramo que va desde la laguna al mar. Tiro la maleta en el patio, me quito el uniforme, lo cuelgo en la hamaca y cuchuplum, para el agua” [We live in a house on the lagoon, full of odd inventions.… in an elegant neighborhood where the houses look out over the sea.… Every afternoon I swim the distance from the lagoon to the sea. I throw my backpack down on the patio, take my school uniform off, and hang it on the hammock, then—splash!—into the water] (13–14). The ensuing description of Nieve floating like a fish, drifting aimlessly about the bay, carried to and fro by the saltwater currents, is matched only by her description of her stepfather Fausto, “Es muy bello, rubio y alto” [very beautiful: blond and tall] (13). Most notable, however, is that Fausto is almost perpetually naked. A Swede working at the local nuclear center, Fausto cares little for convention. He swims naked, Nieve reports, walks around the house naked, reads the newspaper naked, and plays naked on the beach with his stepdaughter. Nothing changes in his comportment when his Eden comes under threat, such as when Nieve’s mother is sent to Angola for six months for questionable revolutionary behavior. He just keeps living his relaxed, carefree, clothes-free life.

Such behavior, predictably, gets him into trouble. Nieve’s biological father pays a visit, takes issue with what he views as Fausto’s scandalous behavior—“degradación moral ante los niños” [moral degradation in front of children] (36)—as well as his ex-wife’s obviously neglectful parenting—leaving her daughter with such a dangerous man—and successfully sues for custody. The verdict rips Nieve from her seaside paradise, taking her instead to the primitive, impoverished conditions of Cuba’s inland Escambray district. There her father writes and directs the activities of the Teatro Escambray, a troupe of artists and intellectuals using theater to teach literacy to Cuba’s rural poor. If such makes her father an exemplary revolutionary in public, in private he is an abusive alcoholic. He regularly beats, starves, and neglects Nieve, keeps her home from school and prohibits her from writing in her journal. Nieve, the adult narrator who has organized the novel for us readers, devotes a fifth of its pages to documenting the cruelty of the father of the child Nieve as the latter cowers in silence in the back of a rural Cuban hut.

The message is not lost on the reader: Nieve has been betrayed by the Cuban revolution. Even readers unfamiliar with the details of Castro’s Cuba can understand that Nieve’s father’s leadership of the Teatro Escambray places him on the front lines of some of the most proud and progressive work of Castro’s revolutionary movement, carrying its mission of social justice to the island’s most neglected citizens. Nieve’s father represents, in the words of critic Ana Belén Martín Sevillano, “the new man the Revolution promised” (192). And yet, as a human being, in the relationships we typically consider of greatest import, he is a monster.

But it is not just the father who has failed Nieve. Her mother’s record, though not showing outright abuse, is still rather suspect. While Nieve’s childhood diary doesn’t recognize her mother’s failures explicitly, readers see in Nieve’s diary a mother not up to the task of either raising or protecting her daughter. Moreover, while disillusioned by the revolution as practiced, Nieve’s mother still believes in its ideals. Her ex may continue to practice the revolution, but she appears to actually believe in it. She, therefore, is just another side of the same coin, the tail to the head that is her ex. While she now sees through its hypocrisy and utterly rejects its present practice, her belief unfortunately renders her incapable of coping with the resulting reality. And so she sits paralyzed while her family suffers. Whether actively or passively, both parents have deeply failed their daughter. Both for what it is and for what it isn’t, so too has the Revolution.

But in this first half of the novel, Cuba is more than just Nieve’s parents. Other members of Nieve’s father’s Escambray group, by all appearances as educated and enlightened in Revolutionary ideals as her father, see the abuse she suffers but still fail to protect her. Yes, they slip her meals, offer clandestine friendship, and help her find brief moments of escape from her father’s violence. Even so, despite witnessing some of the father’s worst behaviors and uncovering unconscionable neglect, the friends, one after another, fail to denounce him. In one instance, the confidante—so solicitous toward the suffering Nieve—turns out to be the father’s lover. The message is, again, impossible to miss. As Ana Belén Martín Sevillano has argued in her reading of Guerra’s novel, domestic, intimate violence is inseparable here from the systemic violence legitimated and facilitated by contemporary political and economic conditions (178). Recognition isn’t enough. Self-critique without change not only proves cold comfort but may be even more damaging. It would be one thing to abandon Nieve to her father’s abuse if it couldn’t be recognized or if nothing could be done. But neither turns out to be the case here. The Revolution doesn’t oblige inaction. Instead it has ennervated people who are otherwise intelligent, observant, and caring. They see the abuse before their face but repeatedly bow to the higher authority of officially championed ideals.

Despite all this, Nieve does finally escape. Her escape is facilitated by the observations of traditional educators working in a traditional school system. If the father, the mother, and their intellectual friends are symbolically the Revolution—meant to bring education to the people through less conventional means—it is conventional education that finally blows the whistle on the father’s abuse. Nieve is at last free. Tradition, not Revolution, has proven her liberator.

Nieve’s mother’s own unconventional life means, however, that Nieve doesn’t return home. Instead she winds up in an orphanage where she suffers the loneliness, confusion, and alienation readers would expect in such a place. But she also enjoys predictable moments of community and solidarity with fellow orphans. Nieve gives special attention to two incidents during her stay, a near adoption (despite both her parents’ still being alive) and her rejection of the lesbian advances of a roommate.

Her childhood diary concludes when Nieve is finally reunited with her mother, who is now not only living with another man but appears to have taken to treating one of Nieve’s old friends as her own daughter, even after Nieve returns. The final entries in the childhood diary involve Nieve’s participation in a series of demonstrations against fellow Cubans planning to abandon their homeland. Nieve’s involvement is cut short when her mother forcibly removes her from the crowd, screaming at her still young and innocent daughter that “Que esto no es la revolución” [this is not the real Revolution] (126). In the final diary entry included in the first half of the novel, Nieve notes sardonically that her father—the Escambray revolutionary—is one of those people leaving. The Revolution, we understand, is dead—or at least soon to be living in Miami alongside those who rejected it in the first place. What remains? Why stay when the very reason for staying has itself gone?

The childhood diary, while beautifully written, makes for an easy anti-Revolutionary read. Its only apparent enigma comes from the disconnect presented by the contradictory behaviors of Nieve’s mother and father. While the revolutionary leader takes the first boat available off the island, the revolutionary dissident not only stays behind but suggests—more passionately than she’s indicated anything previously—that there is a revolution still to fight for. This is someone who thanks to the revolution had lost her daughter, been exiled to Angola, had her second marriage destroyed, and her job threatened. What gives? What is the revolution? What is this Cuba that Nieve and her mother refuse to leave?

If we think the second half of the novel, “Diario de Adolescente” [The Adolescent Diary], will provide easy answers, we are mistaken. As Martín Sevillano has noted, the Adolescent Diary is by standard measures a literary inferior to the Childhood version (191). It provides a much more straightforward, less literary description of typical adolescence, even if the milieu is particularly artistic. The Adolescent Diary from beginning to end feels like the product of the average grumpy teenager. Its focus is friends, boys, and the angst of an adolescent figuring out her place in the world. With her father gone and her mother faded to the background, her focus turns to the activities of a bunch of teenagers. The Adolescent Diary becomes inevitably more benign in its representation of Cuba and the Revolution.

Not that the latter doesn’t come in for some moments of serious abuse. Her diary can’t help but comment on the typical idiocies brought to light when ideologies get imposed on questioning adolescents who, immune to any deep sense of mortality, aren’t afraid to challenge answers they perceive to be absurd or insufficient. Nieve and her friends are the progeny of the now jaded children of the Revolution, “los nietos de la Revolution” [the grandchildren of the Revolution], who, viewing the world with a certain degree of childlike innocence, can’t understand and don’t care to understand their parents’ former ideological ardor and current frustrations. Thus their complaints never achieve the level of serious political protest. To the contrary, their rebellion is driven by an utter inability to see the point of all the revolutionary fuss. They would dress as they will and read what they wish. Why should that matter to anyone, they ask. If we wonder how a Revolution might punish such simple rebellion, the answer is that, for the most part, it doesn’t. But the lack of coherent response reads, again, not as the failure of the Revolution but more as the typical inability of adults to effectively bridle adolescent energy.

Instead of looking for a critique of the Cuban Revolution, readers will find a more obvious organizing principle in this second half of the novel in Nieve’s relationships with three men who fill the lion’s share of her diary entries. The first, Alan, is a classmate and her first kiss. From this intellectually gifted and morally courageous peer, Nieve learns to speak truth to power, even if her typical truth is, as noted, more often than not a simple adolescent response to caretakers who just don’t understand. Still, Alan shoots straight in an ideologically distorted world. She learns from him, gets her kiss, and then discovers that he has left.

The next man in Nieve’s life is the young, hotshot artist, Osvaldo. Osvaldo allows Nieve to move beyond the adolescent world of the schoolhouse and the simplistic politics of its classrooms. An up-and-coming painter enjoying a growing international reputation, Osvaldo takes Nieve, Pygmalion-like, under his wing. He houses her, dresses her, and educates her. From the back of his motorbike and at many a soiree of Cuba’s young and sophisticated artistic class, Nieve enters the world of Cuba’s jet set. But when Osvaldo and his friends fly off to Paris, Nieve—still technically an adolescent—remains behind. While she continues to enjoy the privilege of remaining in his rather posh home, as the months pass, it becomes clear that Osvaldo isn’t returning. He too has left.

Another artist occupies the final pages of her diary. Antonio is a photographer and filmmaker who manages to seduce Nieve with what we would identify as the same machista weapons Osvaldo had previously employed. On their first meeting, while she seems to almost cower in fear at his mysterious presence, Antonio makes demands to which she submissively complies: show me Osvaldo’s paintings, show me your diaries, sleep with me, etc.

But this time, to our surprise, Antonio turns out to be more than the stereotype. Like the men who preceded him, Antonio demands access to her diaries. But in contrast to his antecessors, rather than shutting down her writing, he ends up asking for more. It turns out the machismo of their first encounter is a façade under which hides a strange kind of nurturing fellow artist. In his machismo, he nourishes.

His relationship with Nieve, compared to that of the rest of the men who have passed through her life to this point, appears the least politically charged. Their affair occurs almost entirely in private. They have no encounters with authorities. They say nothing of the regime under which they create. Antonio, at least, doesn’t look to be anything more than a fellow artist equally abandoned by all those who have left. And there seems to be no indication that he will leave. Until he does. Rather than having left, this time the latest male figure in her life has been either imprisoned or possibly even killed by the regime. Apparently not everyone leaves. Some just disappear.

And with that, Cuba works its way back into the picture.

Indeed, over the course of the novel Cuba rises to the surface within the most intimate of relationships: those between a daughter and her father and between that same daughter and the man in whom she had at last found a possible soul mate. Perhaps it is this intimacy that may show us a way to think through Guerra’s novel and that may show us how to square the commentary on Cuba with the apparently disconnected exploration of human relations.

To understand those human relations, we must first understand their protagonist, the author of the diary herself, Nieve Guerra. Who is Nieve? Daniel Mesa Gancedo has argued that Nieve Guerra is none other than the alter ego of Wendy Guerra herself. Mesa Gancedo reads Todos se van as not just a novel-diary but an autofictional novel-diary (146). Having already read the autofictions of Pron, Zambra, Cercas and others, we might take some issue with the claim. After all, Nieve is not Wendy where, as in true autofiction, the author and narrator have the exact same names. Moreover, there is little if any attempt to play on the blurred lines between fiction and reality in Guerra’s novel as we find in typical autofiction. What there is however—and here we agree with Mesa Gancedo—is an implied collapse of Nieve and Wendy, if not within the novel itself then via the context within which many of the novel’s readers have been invited to approach the novel. As Mesa Gancedo points out, for Wendy Guerra’s readers, it would be clear that the protagonist and her author share the same last name and the exact same age. They also share an obsession with maintaining personal diaries, and at least equally important, they have both remained in Cuba. These latter points have been made clear by Wendy Guerra herself when discussing her novel (Mesa Gancedo 147). Her novel arises, she implies, from her own experience with a protagonist who shares her age and, in part, her name.

Their most crucial in-common characteristic, however, and that which convinces us that Nieve Guerra and Wendy Guerra are one and the same is that they remain. Readers know that Wendy Guerra has chosen to stay and that Nieve, the author of the prologue to her two-part diary, is also still there. Of course, this also foregrounds the ironic point that the title Todos se van is not exactly accurate. Certain key people have indeed left, and perhaps to Nieve—and to Wendy, as well—they constitute “todos.” But readers know that they do not constitute either Nieve or Wendy. Why? As for Nieve, it appears that at times she might have left but simply couldn’t. Or could she, we ask. If Nieve is Wendy, Wendy Guerra’s own adult life could be imaginatively read as Nieve’s future. If so, by now, Nieve/Wendy has certainly had her opportunities to leave. By the time this novel was written, the real-life Wendy Guerra had been a successful poet and then fiction writer for nearly a decade. With that success would have come the same opportunities that had presented themselves to her fictional character Osvaldo or to Nieve’s father before him. Wendy/Nieve Guerra could have left just as they did.

So this novel is a work by an author who has chosen to stay about a thinly disguised alter ego protagonist who, implicitly, has finally also chosen to stay. The frustration, then, cannot be explicitly with Cuba, or at least not directly and wholly so. The diary, to be sure, is no defense of the Revolution. But, despite its early attacks, it’s no angry anti-Revolutionary screed either. For whatever reasons, its author/narrator/protagonist has chosen to remain.

Critics have been unanimous in their recognition of a feminist thread in Guerra’s novel. María del Mar López-Cabrales situates its publication within the context of Cuba’s “Período Especial” [Special Period] of the 1990s when there was a sudden explosion of women’s writing after decades of almost exclusively male voices of the Revolution (381–82). Mesa Gancedo reads the novel as part of a feminine tradition of novel-diaries linking its play with genre to its exploration of gender. Martín Sevillano, like López-Cabrales, contextualizes Guerra’s work as part of a larger explosion in Cuban women’s writing and particularly as part of a series of novels that critiqued the Revolution’s failed emancipation of women from gender-based violence.

If it is a feminist novel, it certainly isn’t what we would expect. As Martín Sevillano points out, Nieve ends up more often silenced by men than liberated (192), and as Mesa Gancedo argues, at the same time, Nieve always ends up relying on those very men (150). Perhaps we’re better off reading it as a semifictitious diary that reads as a bildungsroman that is also a künstlerroman. It is the story of a young artist who also happens to be a young woman who appears to enjoy certain aspects of what it traditionally means to be a woman (she has her diary and her lipstick, and she dares to wear the latter boldly).

We might note, that in her comment about the lipstick, the now mature Nieve notes that it may be too bright for this “edad indefinida” [indefinite age]. Note that her comment is about this age, not this place. Just a moment earlier, Nieve was discussing Cuba. But the final thought in her prologue, her final concern, centers on the present “age,” not the present place. The focus on time, not space, is a moment, not a geography. Todos se van is a novel about Cuban reality, but perhaps more so it is a novel about the passage of time and the sense of loss one experiences over that passage. The novel’s focus is not so much on a political island as on a personal moment, a temporal paradise lost and Guerra’s attempt to regain it.

The idea returns us to the novel’s opening pages. The story is set in Cuba, but while Nieve’s parents play unsuccessfully at the Revolution, Fausto and Nieve are Adam and Eve in Paradise. This is clearly the preapple Eden. Despite accusations of indecency and immorality, there’s nothing erotic going on here. It’s just two kids, the Swede, Fausto, and the Cuban misfit, Nieve, a name better suited for the Scandinavian arctic than the sultry Caribbean. The two swim about naked and unashamed. An odd couple united by a saltwater womb and two names that make no sense—that stick out like sore thumbs—in 1978 Cuba.

Nieve loses paradise because she refuses to speak up, because she fails with language and ends up inhabiting a land cursed with thorns and thistles, so to speak, living with a man—her biological father—who is the master of language: a writer and teacher of words. Language is the law, and the law has condemned her. This law—forged in language—attempts to sustain its power by keeping its most powerful weapon out of the hands of others. Nieve is not allowed to write. Her father flies into a rage at the sight of her diary. He, a teacher of language, understands the power of the word. He prohibits his daughter from gaining that power. But she insists and so persists. Language—as her father shows in the courtroom facing off against the mute Nieve and her befuddled mother—is power. It is not something abstract that helps her simply make sense of things. Nieve—Guerra—wants something solid (like her bold lipstick). When she eventually escapes the Escambray, she regains access to the written word, but that is only one tool. It alone cannot restore paradise. After all, her father had the word and thus power, but his lot—laboring in the hinterlands with a whisky bottle and loveless sex—hardly constituted paradise. Armed with only the word, he failed and fled.

Nieve’s first significant experience in the orphanage, the rejection of the lesbian advances of a fellow orphan, are instructive. On the one hand, the rejection is simply part of her story. Nieve is heterosexual and therefore not interested. End of story. On the other, the attention she pays it invites our scrutiny. The relationship her friend proposes would involve Nieve in a bit of sexual obfuscation. Her friend proposes gender-bending role play. I’ll play the man, you play the woman, she tells her. Nieve refuses. As the story develops, that refusal underscores not so much Nieve’s sexuality as her lack of interest in play acting. She is seeking something more solid, more authentic, which for her will always hark back to her Eden alongside Fausto. The obsession that will develop in her adolescent diary for heterosexual companionship is not a championing of traditional forms of sexuality over alternatives per se. Rather it’s a manifestation of her desire to return to a sense of familiar solidity captured in the diary’s first entries. This solidity has less to do with specific sexualities as it does with a world in which people live their lives as they are and where they are, naked and unashamed so to speak.

After the setup of the childhood diary, the adolescent version reads as a series of attempts to form that solidity. Within her adolescent writings, as we have seen, Alan provides clarity; Osvaldo, possibility; and Anthony, at last, a sense of hope.

Clarity—Alan’s contribution—is just a kiss. It informs. Her solidity will take the explicit form of a heterosexual relationship. But more importantly, it will, like the boy who kisses her, be based in clear, unapologetic, unadulterated truth. Possibility and hope—the respective offerings of Osvaldo and Anthony—intertwine with eroticism, the desire to seal up newfound solidities through sexual consummation. While Osvaldo offers her glimpses of the possible by taking her outside her comfort zone, Anthony shows that hope exists within a safe, private, shared domestic space. Anthony first seduces Nieve in her home and, in contrast to Osvaldo’s jet-set behavior, continues to interact with her principally within that space. Most importantly, within that space Anthony reads her diaries and then celebrates and encourages more entries, and hence, represents a promotion of the intimate. With Anthony, Nieve returns, at last, to a relationship of equals.

To be sure, critics such as Mesa Gancedo have wondered at Anthony’s initial displays of machismo. The first seduction and then his demands to read the journal would hardly be indicative of any kind of relationship of equals. Moreover, even in Anthony’s encouragement there appears to be more than a touch of patriarchal control. As Mesa Gancedo points out, Nieve’s diary—and thus Guerra’s novel—essentially concludes with Anthony’s literally taking over the diary (155). Anthony’s own writing is among the last words we read. Moreover, his writing is a rather pointed critique of Nieve’s writing, and a classically male one at that. Her journal is too personal, he argues, too removed from the political realities against which it is set. It lacks historical facts, names, places, events. If this is the case, how is her relationship a sign of hope, to say nothing of stability and some kind of paradise regained?

We need to keep in mind, however, that Nieve isn’t seeking liberation—she’s not seeking to “leave” like everyone else. She is seeking to establish a lost solidity, which she has come to locate symbolically in sexual union and the formation of family. Anthony’s initial displays of machismo, while off-putting to readers looking for a classic feminist coming-of-age story, provide the protagonist clear signals of the classic familial formation once lost. She is, after all, no typical revolutionary nor anti-revolutionary. She is seeking something else.

As for Anthony’s critique of her writing, it clearly attempts to shove history into a sentimental diary (as noted classic male vs female tropes). Even so, the insistence doesn’t shut down the writing. To the contrary, the intrusion of Anthony’s list of missing historical data invites the reader—when the actual words of the diary, and thus the novel, are about to cease—to return once more to her now tens of thousands of words, to reread them while playing every tale, even every word off against this newly available context. Moreover, while the list is indeed Anthony’s—his intrusion as Mesa Gancedo notes—by the time Nieve posts it, Anthony has disappeared. The choice to post is hers. They may be his ideas, but ultimately, they are her words. This is her diary. She has chosen. It is she who wishes this relationship, and his inserted words penetrating her otherwise wholly feminine diary, to serve as the culmination of this story begun in the sun and sea of a far off paradise.

The only real tragedy of the novel-dairy, as far as its narrator/author is concerned, is that Anthony disappears—either imprisoned or killed. And with this critique, we do at last return to the problem of Cuba, a place where Nieve Guerra, in the guise of Wendy Guerra, remains. She is still here and still writing. Anthony was the surrogate out of which came her novel, a bold, bright-red celebration of the search for something solid that she fears may be too much for this indefinite age.

And it’s this reference to the age that, as noted earlier, problematizes our political reading—and satisfies our feminist reading. Guerra has survived (so far) the Revolution in all its corruptions and perversities. She has also survived the brand of machismo it encouraged and has in fact used it to recover what she had once lost. While everyone else fled in search of something else, what they fled was merely a place. Guerra’s novel suggests that more than the place, however, it was the times that had changed.

This indefinite age Guerra refers to in that conclusion to her pre-diary opening statement, which we noted at the beginning of our reading, may likely be the Cuban Special Period of the 1990s. This was the time when Guerra made her initial mark in the literary world, first the Cuban and then the international. Precipitated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disappearance almost overnight of the energy and food subsidies it had provided the Cuban population, the Special Period ushered in abrupt changes in the Cuban economy, and consequently, Cuban society. While the scarcity and even hunger of the special period led to a return to traditional forms of farming and transportation, it also produced political protest and eventually cultural change. The changes forced Cuba to begin opening its doors to tourism and other contacts with the outside world. Such contacts have only strengthened and lengthened since then, reintroducing much of Cuban society to the globalizing world from which it had long hidden away. In this sense, the Special Period represents the final nail in the coffin of the Revolution or, in other words, an end to any hope—either first-, second-, or third-generation—that Castro’s Marxist-inspired vision of an island utopia might ever be realized. If this is the case, then the Special Period represents, though in weaker form, the same notion of an “End to History” discussed in chapter three. If Cuba has still not fully entered today’s fast-paced, creatively destructive global economy, its refusal to do so in no way can be mistaken as indicative of any solid belief in some Castro-esque communist alternative. Even in Cuba, modernity has, in the words of Zygmunt Bauman, been permanently liquefied.

Cuba today is still different, but perhaps no longer unique. It is not just in Cuba, but even more so in the rest of the world, where we wander about like Adam and Eve, like Fausto and Nieve, cast out naked and naïve from our own quickly collapsing paradise. We each live our own Special Periods in which all that is solid melts into air to be replaced by only more air. Cuba, like Puerto Rico in Lalo’s novel, exists like Baudrillard’s Disneyland, to give the illusion that everywhere else the Revolution is real. Cuba’s failed revolution is a false balm. Everyone leaves, for sure. But if leaving is a solution, it’s not the final answer.

The final answer for both Nieve and Wendy Guerra appears to be not political but human. A strange political moment denied Nieve the most simple of psychic foundations, a family. No Revolution—Cuban, global, or otherwise—will bring that back. The answer is—perhaps naively (is the lipstick too bold?)—simply human. Leaving is not so much a political tragedy as a personal one. Her lipstick is her desire to make them stay. But her real weapon is her diary. And even if it can’t convince them, it can at least help her remember that even if hers is not the true revolution, neither is theirs. If someone, anyone, would just stay.