47 pages • 1 hour read
Chanel CleetonWhen We Left Cuba
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
Beatriz continues to attend Palm Beach parties, though she’s never invited to the ones with the most important people. Her father is focused on his business, “Cuba a fading memory in the face of the new fortunes he seeks to build” (68), while her mother focuses on the family’s social status and Beatriz’s unmarried state. Beatriz resents that she is “meant to marry, have children, live the lives our parents lived before us” (71). She walks on the beach with Eduardo and again they imagine what they will do when they go back to Cuba. Eduardo warns that Fidel’s increasing friendliness with the Soviets is stirring tensions between Cuba and the US. Eduardo, too, warns Beatriz not to get involved with the CIA, trying to keep her safe. Beatriz feels that she and Eduardo are alike in many ways.
Chapter 8 Summary
Beatriz’s sister Elisa, who is married to Juan with a young son, Miguel, announces that they are moving to Miami. Beatriz complains that she is only valued for being beautiful and charming, expected to do nothing but marry. Elisa hints that Eduardo desires Beatriz, but Beatriz insists they are only friends. Dwyer meets Beatriz in her driveway and says the CIA wants to send her to New York while Castro is visiting and see if she can catch his eye. Beatriz agrees to go but wonders if she can pretend to cozy up to the man who murdered her brother.
Chapter 9 Summary
Beatriz has a dress made for her New York trip and tells her family she is visiting the Hamptons. In New York City, Dwyer informs Beatriz that Castro moved to a hotel in Harlem. World leaders visit him as if he’s a celebrity. Dwyer says they will get her on the guest list to a party Castro is attending; her job is to flirt and make an impression. They arrange payment.
The next night, Beatriz dresses and takes a cab to Harlem, realizing she’s come to think of America as a haven, and now Castro has invaded again. She sees crowds in the street, some protesting, more welcoming, and wonders, “Would they still admire him if they heard the shots from the firing squads, the cries of the murdered, smelled the blood of their countrymen?” (94). She’s decided “to claim my womanhood, to use it to get what I want rather than what everyone else wants for me” (95). She is surprised, when she finally meets him, to realize Fidel Castro is simply a man: flawed, dangerous, but a man all the same.
Chapter 10 Summary
Beatriz recalls Castro is only 34 and thinks he looks “surprisingly young for a man who has wrought such havoc” (98). He takes note of her, but she realizes that while he is her nemesis, her family is little more than a name to him. They chat, and Beatriz agrees Cuba needs to break the hold that sugar and the Americans has over the country, though privately she disagrees on the ways to go about this. Fidel invites her to sit near him. Beatriz listens to the conversations. A woman near Castro tells Beatriz she is over her head and should go home. Beatriz leaves the party and has a drink at the bar at her hotel. She holds back tears, feeling lonely, and a man offers his handkerchief. It’s Nick.
Chapter 11 Summary
Nick heard Beatriz was in town and came to find her. He takes her to dinner and warns her to be careful about what she’s getting involved in. Nick admits he isn’t married yet and is still interested in Beatriz. To explain her commitment to her cause, she describes the morning that a car pulled up the curb outside their house in Havana and dumped her brother’s body on the ground. He’d been shot. She vowed revenge and tells Nick again that Cuba will always be her home. They discuss his political ambitions and his work in the Senate. When they return to her hotel, Beatriz gives him her room key.
Chapter 12 Summary
Nick lets Beatriz into her hotel room and they make love. Beatriz thinks that even though she is “the villain in this piece for going to bed with an engaged man” (121), she is happy to be with Nick for as long as it lasts. Nick admits he can’t reconcile the Beatriz “that is smart and logical with this person who seems willing to throw herself into an utterly reckless and risky situation” (123). She tells him she won’t be a mistress and she wants no lies, no promises.
Chapter 13 Summary
Beatriz dreams she is sneaking out of her house in Havana, going to meet her brother, and then the car drives up and dumps Alejandro’s body. Nick soothes her. Beatriz admits how grief has affected her, how hard it is to move on with her life. She asks about his family. He admits to ambitions for the presidency, being friends with Kennedy, and needing the right kind of wife for a political life.
Chapter 14 Summary
Beatriz kisses Nick goodbye, then meets Dwyer in the bar of her hotel. He has a new assignment for her: to infiltrate pro-Castro groups in South Florida. Dwyer thinks Beatriz will make a good spy because she speaks several languages, knows people, and can blend in. He also thinks he can predict her because her motive is revenge.
Back in Florida, Beatriz goes to the Hialeah address she is given, saying that Claudia sent her. The group includes three American students, who are communists, and two Cuban brothers, Javier and Sergio, who don’t say much. They discuss Fidel’s friendliness with Khrushchev and the US trade embargo on Cuba, which limits all but humanitarian essentials. Eduardo meets her after, and Beatriz confesses that meeting Fidel in New York City made everything about her brother’s death come rushing back. Eduardo asks about her relationship with Nick, and Beatriz says she doesn’t love him.
Chapters 7-14 Analysis
This section continues to present Cuba as a lost paradise and an ideal for which Beatriz is fighting, foregrounding the theme of Exile and the Longing for Home. Beatriz and Eduardo speak longingly of what they will do when they can return, including enjoying the landmarks and the festive atmosphere. Beatriz continues to insist that Cuba is her real home, though she is settling more into life in Palm Beach. She realizes that America has felt like a shelter to her when Castro figuratively invades it in his visit to New York.
This historical background adds to the plot as growing tensions in US-Cuba relations are described. The narrative adds enough explanation, though Nick and other characters, to show US concerns over Castro’s communism and his close relations with the Soviet Union, the United States’ greatest rival. Cleeton inserts Beatriz into a well-known historical incident, Castro’s visit to the United Nations, where his open friendship with the leader of the Soviet Union and a lengthy denouncement of the US—once Cuba’s chief trading partner and ally—made his position clear. This is Beatriz’s first meeting with Castro, a setup for the meeting that follows later. Cleeton adds vulnerability to Beatriz’s character by portraying this scene realistically; Beatriz is not an experienced spy, nor a player on the world scene, and she realizes how out of her depth she is.
This section continues to develop the theme of Conflicting Loyalties through Beatriz’s relationships, particularly her relationship with Nick, which conflicts with her desire to bring down Castro. Nick represents softness and nurturing, whereas her involvement in espionage requires more strategy and calculation. Nick also represents another lifestyle Beatriz knows she doesn’t fit into; she doesn’t wish to be a politician’s wife, and is aware of the scandal that will follow if she gets involved with him. Though she’s attracted to him, and they connect on their individual experience of war and violence, Beatriz chafes at Nick’s attempts to nurture and protect her; his wish to keep her close conflicts with the independence and agency she wishes to exercise.
Beatriz also resists having her future charted for her by her mother, seeking Freedom From Gendered Expectations. Beatriz sees that Elisa is happy as a stay-at-home wife and mother, but she doesn’t want that scripted future, and she does not feel compelled to submit to her mother’s demands that she marry. Eduardo and Dwyer give her an opportunity to do something she feels is more useful, or at least more exciting. Beatriz feels a sense of purpose in working to avenge her brother, which motivates her to monitor pro-Castro groups in South Florida. Her status as an exile is for once an asset, giving her the freedom to move between both worlds. Though she feels her attendance at the pro-communist group yields very little useful information, Beatriz is learning and gaining confidence. Javier and Sergio express a wish to move Cuba forward on its new path, Castro’s path, while Beatriz still holds the ideals for a more democratic Cuba that her brother presumably fought for in resisting Batista. Eduardo’s goals remain unclear, but he is Beatriz’s only real confidante.
