Elisa Albo   Fort Lauderdale  (Julie Marie Wade)
Volver a Cuba  February 2017

They say you can’t go home again, but if you try, 
you’ll need a taxi driver like Rafael Martín Martín 
lounging beside Casa de las Americas in Havana’s 
El Vedado and smoking a slow cigarette when he 
caught me pacing the sidewalk—determined not 
to use a legal but rude taxi driver from the stand at 
the Hotel Presidente next to my casa particulár--


and offered to drive me to my first home in Miramár. 
They say you can’t go home, but if you try, you’ll 
need Rafael willing to drive in circles for an hour, 
up and down the other Calle Ocho, entre Septima y 
Quinta Avenidas, and finally to park in front of
the garish green three-story building, walk you to 
the front door, verify the address, cross the busy 


street for a better picture, cross back, stare up from 
the sidewalk and help you imagine the wide balconies 
not caged in by ugly black metal railings rising to  
the ceiling. Is that where your nanny stood with your 
year-old self in her arms, wailing to your eighteen- 
year-old mami below that the authorities had sealed 
the house shut, barred her from entering her own 


home after my father had fled the country to avoid 
imprisonment? Was this where she stood, on this 
sidewalk, looking up at one child, another sleeping 
inside, her husband at that moment in the sky, their 
plans for us to follow uncertain? They say you can’t 
go. You won’t even knock on the door. No one will 
come to the window. Mami will glare at pictures 


you took with Rafael. She’ll study them fifty-five 
years after she locked for the last time the door to 
her first married apartment and say, No, that’s not it. 
I don’t recognize it. You can’t go home. You can 
return to the land of your birth when your mother 
who carried you out is not keen—to say the least--
on you returning, stepping onto the island you have 
never known, the place that scattered her family 
​
forever and buried them on three continents. And 
you’ll return to the look on her face, the do-what-
ever you-want-I-don’t-like-it-and-won’t-say-another-
word-about-it face. That one. And, not for the first 
time, or the last, she will have been right: Cuba
es bella, llena, basilla, pero no se puede volver. 

*Translation: Cuba is beautiful. full, empty, but one can’t 
go back, ** Thomas Wolfe took the title You Can’t Go Home Again
with permission from a conversation with writer Ella Winter 
who asked him, “Don’t you know you can’t go home again?”