My mother chastised me with a speech about Cuba. “Do you know,” she said, “that people buy steak from a food vendor on the side of the road? They think it is steak, because it is glossy. It looks juicy.

“Do you know,” she said, “that they bite into the steak and they think, oh, this is a tough steak, and they don’t think, this is a mango peel—they don’t think, this is a mopping rag charred, marinated, blood-orange-soaked, a mopping rag resembling meat. Of course they don’t think this is a mopping rag masquerading as meat.

“Do you know,” she said, “that there are no cats in Cuba? Think about that, Jeanette, no cats. Where do you think all the cats have gone, do you think they just disappeared overnight?

“Jeanette,” she said, “I came here to freedom so you’d never have to steal.”

That is what I am thinking as I pet my grandmother’s cat: I am thinking about a thong. I am thinking about stores and stories and stealing. It is 2015. Things are different in Cuba in 2015. I don’t know if my grandmother ate mopping-rag steak during the Special Period. If that ever even existed. I don’t know if she had another cat when the Soviets fell—what was it, 1989? But it is 2015 now, and my grandmother is round and portentous, nothing like my mother. She is eighty-something in a sleeveless housedress. Each time she emphasizes a word with a swipe of her arm, it jiggles like custard. Her voice, too, sprawls, coats everything like dust. Her eyes punctuate: large in delight, slanted when her statements sharpen.

“Jeanette,” she says as if she reads my thoughts, “don’t believe the mercenary media—we struggle, but we are happy here.” Squint, slant.

Maydelis has left the kitchen and joined us again by the doorway, waiting for a breeze. She rolls her eyes but my grandmother can’t see her. I’ve heard Maydelis rant about how she is frustrated here. I know how she feels.

Abuela makes coffee even though outside it is dark as the chicory-laced grounds. She tells Maydelis that Yosmany invited me to ride his horse, and Maydelis snorts.

“Don’t be silly, Jeanette,” she says, scrunching her hair into a fat pouf atop her head. “He just wants to woo you so you can whisk him off to La Yuma. Or he will spend all evening riding horses with you and then ask for a pair of sneakers and an iPhone, ha ha ha.”

Maydelis had asked me for a pair of sneakers, but I don’t mention that. I brought her a pair of Nikes tucked in one of those fifty-pound canvas bags the Cubans call gusanos. Gusanos are worms. Back in the Cold War days, they called Cubans who left the country for Miami gusanos. I, daughter of a worm.