When We Left Cuba

On November 26, 2016, a woman in Palm Beach receives a delivery of a bottle of champagne. She pours a glass and thinks, “It is the taste of victory and defeat, of love and loss, of nights of revelry and decadence in Havana and days of exile in Palm Beach” (2).

Beatriz tries to remember the name of the man kneeling before her, offering her fifth proposal of marriage. She declines the proposal, though the marriage would elevate her family. It’s been a year since her family left Cuba, where her father ran a prosperous sugar business. She feels they are regarded with veiled contempt by their American neighbors.

Beatriz steps out onto the terrace to listen to the ocean and pretends she is in Cuba. She spots a handsome man, “the sort of man who has never had to wonder if he’ll have a roof over his head, or fear his father dying in a cage with eight other men, or flee the only life he has ever known” (7). She thinks of him as Golden Boy. He says he heard she ruled as a queen of the social scene in