One thing I notice: fewer women in Cuba wear makeup. Some women preen in jewelry and heels, sequins and bangles, and a bare face. Not all, but many. It is too hot, probably. But I am not here to draw conclusions or take answers home. I know everyone will say in Miami, Tell me about Cuba. Most of them expecting an answer like, It is hell on earth. Or maybe a few, subversively, will ask me expecting an answer like, It is socialist paradise. I’d rather answer with a question, Tell me about the United States?

“It’s complicated,” I say.

“So sad,” Abuela says.

So my mother hates her mother. There are times I thought I hated my mother, so I understand, though I wonder if only politics divided them. I grew up in Miami, yes, and watched family dinners devolve into all-out brawls over mere mention of Cuba-anything, but I am as uninterested in the familiar arguments as my cousin Maydelis, also my age. We grew up on opposite shores but equally drenched in the political, in living everything through the context of a country miles away. I understand her fatigue. I, too, am tired.

Maydelis and I stay up talking after my grandmother has gone to bed. We sit on plastic chairs in the hallway, which is lined with sepia photos and a termite-ridden bookcase that holds ancient-looking hardcover books. They’d be at home in any grand library, the kind where rolling ladders reach the highest volumes and portraits of old dead white men line the walls.

I ask Maydelis about the books and she shrugs, says, “They’re just books.” But I pick one up and then another, amazed at their fragility. The two oldest-looking ones are enclosed in plastic. I take one out of its wrapping and marvel at the crinkling, disintegrating pages. CECILIA VALDÉS, O LA LOMA DEL ÁNGEL, reads the cover in embossed, faded gold. CIRILO VILLAVERDE. I flip the yellowed pages carefully until I find the date of printing: 1839. I gasp. Maydelis barely looks over.

The next is Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, a Spanish translation. It is harder to find a date in that one but from the delicate, humidity-beaten pages, the type so faded it is barely legible, it’s obvious that the book could be a contemporary to Cecilia Valdés. I flip its pages and notice something scrawled in the margin, in black ink turned wispy gray, ornate script. I bring my face closer but can make out only the last word, fuerza. Force.