We are sitting in rocking chairs by the front door, open to a field of guava bushes, when a man arrives. My grandmother introduces him as her neighbor; he says he heard she had a visitor from the United States. He is my age and Black. My grandmother squints her eyes when he speaks, but I can’t read her response. Maydelis seems uninterested in the man. She stubs her filterless cigarette, the ones offered at the bodega, and leaves for the kitchen without saying a word to him. The man wears red skinny jeans, a red-and-white polo shirt. He has a kind of mohawk buzz cut. I follow Maydelis to the kitchen to fetch the visitor a beer because that seems like the thing to do.

“Repartero,” she says. Maydelis settles at the little kitchen table beside the ancient stove and pulls out another cigarette. She sucks hungrily and blows delicate wisps and I wonder where the rest of the smoke goes, does it just sit inside her?

“Don’t you see how he dresses, his fake-diamond earrings?” she says.

“Repartero?” I repeat and she sighs.

I’ve been in Cuba only a week, but I sense she is tiring of me. She spent days guiding me all over La Habana, answering my questions like a mother explaining the basic ways of the world to a child. She has brought me to this tiny town in Camagüey, to the campo, to meet my grandmother, but I sense she’d rather be anywhere else. All she wants to talk about is the United States, what it’s like over there. I do not tell her I have come to visit Cuba because I have nothing left over there. That I am over there’s worst representative.

“A repartero is a kind of person,” Maydelis says. “They dress like reggaeton stars. They have no class, if you know what I mean. They talk bad.”

I do not know what she means, but she lists kinds of people that exist in Cuba—freakies, emos, Mickeys, repas. She lists what they wear and what music they listen to and where they hang out and I realize every country is different but the same. Every country has its own lunch tables. I open the massive ice box, shuffle past slabs of mamey and fruta bomba, cheese wrapped in wet cloth, until my hand reaches a cold Cristal. I can sense Maydelis wants to say more, but I leave her in the kitchen because I am curious about the visitor. I am more curious about the visitor than “kinds of people.”

When I hand the beer to him, my grandmother wiggles in her chair and settles back. The man smiles at me, and my grandmother is not unfriendly but she does not smile.

“I have horses,” the man says to me. His name is Yosmany, he says. “I have two.”