It’s that sticky, suffocating kind of summer that makes a shower futile. Already I can taste the sweat, the brine in the air. El Alemán circles the driveway of the Hotel Nacional, Jeanette’s hotel—where I stayed last night—and turns where I direct. Then the Malecón zips by: ocean, limestone wall, no waves to temper the heat though that’s not deterring children in their underpants from dangling legs in optimistic anticipation. And two fishermen atop the wall, handmade poles in hand. We are nothing if not a hopeful people.

“Even after being here for a week, it still gets me. Everything crumbling. Everything in ruins.” Jeanette points to a disintegrating apartment, a woman in a head wrap staring blankly in the doorway.

“But a certain romance, no?” El Alemán casts a look at me. “The crumbling. Everything pastel. The ocean, ah, the ocean.”

Any other circumstance and I’d roll my eyes at both of them. But I’ve learned a special kind of patience, a kind of mask, because tourists are easily hurt. I’ve learned it from selling knickknacks to foreigners along the Malecón. Work my husband belittles. Hustle my husband doesn’t see as work. But I make more money than he does, and he is a doctor. That’s why he ridicules me.

What you do is you notice the little details. Like you can tell just from the clothes, you know?

I watch the people on the Malecón as we zoom past. A woman with a small gold cross and three gold rings. Cuban-American, no doubt about it. Back from La Yuma full of gold and jewels trying to impress some folks. They like to hear how hard it is. How it’s gotten worse. Yeah, more apagones, the lights just went out yesterday, you missed it. Have you seen what they’re giving out in the ration bodegas? Real political. Everything political. If they’re real Americanized, I sell them nostalgia, postcards of an old La Habana that existed only in their dreams. I sell them misery in the hopes they give me an extra dollar or two. I gave Jeanette a print of the old Tropicana club in all its glory. “For your mom,” I said.