“You can’t trust Black men,” my grandmother says, and I nearly choke on my cafecito.

This I still haven’t gotten used to, the blatant racism, how it commingles with revolutionary fervor at times in the older generation in a way that seems unlikely. But perhaps I am naïve and racism among even revolutionaries is as obvious as me sticking a lacy thong in my pocket at sixteen. As obvious as the fact that I am no good.

I say nothing.

I want to love my grandmother, but my mother has poisoned me. She said once my grandmother loved her country more than her blood. She said my grandmother was a murderous devotee of a regime. She said I could never speak to my grandmother.

My mother slapped me when I said I loved Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries, when I said Fidel Castro was handsome in his youth. My mother told me I should never go to Cuba until That Man is dead, she wouldn’t see me to the airport. I know that she likes me here only because there is no heroin here. I know that she likes me here because Suboxone has failed me once already.

And me? What am I doing here? I thought Cuba could be some kind of connective tissue, maybe even show me my mother. Make a piece of her make sense. I remember pressing her about why she left as the girl, Ana, watched cartoons last year, as my mother let me fail yet another person. Or perhaps I just needed somewhere to run to in this moment and only Cuba felt faintly familiar. There is no Meaning here. Only questions.

I want to love my grandmother, but she is blank faced, spreading rice on her splintered kitchen table, picking out the black kernels and the grit. Crooked arthritic fingers, tight-lipped and unsmiling face. I want to love her but it is too quiet in this house.

But it isn’t as though Black Cubans fare better in Miami, where racism is just slightly more polite, a little quieter. This is fact: In Miami, Cuban is synonymous with white. In Miami, Cubans will scoff when you call them Latino. “I’m not Latino, I’m Cuban,” they will say. By which they mean, I am white, another kind of white you don’t know about, outsider.