Cuban profiles in courage, sacrifice, and hope (Havana, alternating between 1958-1959 and 2017): Next Year in Havana is a novel consumed with politics, romance, and familial devotion. Love of country and family is pitted against impassioned love in a country with a long history of loss of freedoms. It arrives at a time when Americans love for country – standing up for democracy – is sorely being tested. The novel humanizes brave men risking their lives for their homeland and the strong women who fell in love with them at great peril and sacrifice. “To be a woman in Cuba is to suffer.”

“No one warned me love would hurt so much,” says nineteen-year-old Elisa Perez, voice of Cuba’s complicated political past. Yet the “only thing worth trusting” is love, concludes her granddaughter Marisol, the other female narrator, hers the voice of Cuba’s complicated political present. Past and present, “the story of Cuba is struggles and strife.”

A sentiment echoed by President Obama when he announced the re-opening of American relations with Cuba after fifty years: “I’m under no illusion about the continued barriers to freedom that remain for ordinary Cubans.”

Those fifty-some years span American-Cuban author Chanel Cleeton’s stirring, partly biographical novel opening the year Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship was collapsing and Fidel Castro’s taking over.

Against the backdrop of Americans now traveling to Cuba, concerns about Trump rolling back historic progress, and the hot-button issue of immigration looming before us, could there be a more importune time for Next Year in Havana? The reason it caught my attention.

The author’s father and grandparents escaped communist Cuba in 1967. They, like Elisa’s fictional family, hoped to return to the country they loved, believing Castro would be toppled. Hope, ojalá, is also Cuba’s story. Of course that didn’t happen, so they forged a good life in Southern Florida like so many exiles did, keeping their culture, ancestry, and stories alive – the inspiration for this passionate novel pulsating with urgency and tension.

Elisa’s and Marisol’s heart-grabbing stories are mostly set in Havana, ”a beautiful city shrouded in sadness.” Likewise, the novel calls out to us in beautiful, evocative, soul-searching prose.

“We are silk and lace, and beneath them we are steel,” says Elisa, one of four sisters dubbed the “sugar queens,” referring to her family’s sugar empire – the industry Cuba’s economy was built on. When Fidel assumed power the family was in great jeopardy as their wealth was the antithesis of Communist doctrine. “For better, worse, or the truly horrific, sugar has molded Cuba’s fortunes.”

“Cuban society is not a quiet society,” and this is not a quiet novel. It’s a novel of heart and heartache. Cleeton tells us “this book holds a piece of my heart.” Which is why it revolves around Elisa’s and Marisol’s stories. Cleeton was very attached to her Cuban grandmother; Cleeton, I think, imagines some of herself in Marisol.

When we meet Elisa, she’s a demure high-society young women, respectful of her family’s position in Cuban society yet restless in her cloistered world. Her father Emilio is well-connected in politics having been instrumental in drafting Batista’s 1940 Constitution, which was supposed to bring democracy to the island. The fact that he’s well-known and well-watched by the new dictator poses even more danger when Elisa unexpectedly falls deeply in love with an intense older man, Pablo, who turns out to be a revolutionary, an associate of Che Guevara.

Danger is the tone of the novel, opening with the Perez family fleeing the country. Then we learn Elisa was essentially the mother who raised Marisol. The rest is told in backstories opening with Marisol’s chapter telling us Elisa has died and bequeathed Marisol to scatter her ashes in Cuba, much like the author’s grandmother asked her family to do. They’ve yet to do so, revealed in a Dear Reader letter. In Marisol’s opening chapter we learn why: burying an exile in Cuba is not an easy proposition. Thus, we meet thirty-ish Marisol also taking risks starting with the smuggling of her grandmother’s ashes into Cuba, a “mythical entity” up until now – the plot that drives the novel.

Traveling on a journalist’s visa (Marisol writes for a travel magazine), she’s met by captivating Luis Rodriquez, son of Elisa’s best friend, Ana. From the moment he picked her up in one of Cuba’s splendidly maintained vintage cars, a source of enormous pride, sexual tension permeates and does not wane.

Next Year in Havana is Cleeton’s marvelous coming-out in the historical fiction genre, having penned a series of contemporary romances, ten novels in all. (A delicious, seductive line: “I have a feeling there will never be enough moments with you,” Luis tells Marisol.) The novel also draws on the author’s degrees in global politics, international relations, and law, which, without giving away spoilers, surely help to tell tales of intolerable injustices with authenticity.

In the character of Luis Rodriguez, Cleeton has created a clever vehicle for the natural rolling out of the details of Cuba’s political history. He’s a history professor at the University of Havana (which Castro later closed for fear of spreading student activism). Also close to his grandmother, Ana, Luis graciously agrees to be Marisol’s tour guide, setting in motion a relationship that in many ways parallels her grandmother’s.

Ana and her family stayed behind in Cuba, raising thoughtful, deeply emotional questions about how Cubans feel towards those who left and those who stayed.

The two friends lived next door to each other in an exclusive neighborhood by the sea, Miramar, isolated from the oppression ordinary Cubans endured every day. (You can almost feel their hunger through an austere food rationing program. “Cubans do lines better than anyone.”) The Perez sisters maintained the lifestyles of socialites. “My mother has no time for revolutions; they wreak havoc with her balls and teas,” says Elisa, until the revolution comes to her doorstep.

What tourists see, hear, and taste – glamorous and romanticized – is dramatically different than the rest of Havana. The music video below featuring one of the “musical icons” Elisa and Marisol were raised on – the Buena Vista Social Club – gives you a sense of that colorful flavor and scenery.

The novel is filled with Cuban politics. “No one can afford the luxury of not being political in Cuba.” “How can you dismiss something [politics] that is so fundamental to the integrity of who we are as a people, as a country?” Luis asks Marisol. He’s a serious, intense man, like Pablo.

The romantic tensions in Elisa’s and Marisol’s alternating stories build and converge – one under the Batista/Fidel regime, the other under today’s Communist dictator, Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother.

“I know a thing about Cuban pride,” Marisol declares ambivalently because the Cuba she finds is not as beautiful as the stories Elisa nourished her on. “I didn’t realize how much people still suffered.” In spite of it all, Cubans are pictured as people who adapt and “make their own fun.”

It’s that Cuban spirit, “passion, honor, and conviction,” that drew Elisa to Pablo, Marisol to Luis. They (and others) carry messages of courage, sacrifice, and hope.

Lorraine

Ethical Science, Ethical Child-Rearing — Behaviorism (Vassar College, Johns Hopkins Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic, Long Island, Whip-Poor-Will Farm, CT; 1916-1935): Many moons ago, I was an undergrad psych major. After taking all the clinical/Freudian offerings, the engrossing emotional stuff, all that was left were classical conditioning experiments with rats and mice (think Pavlov’s dogs). Stimulus-response, observable-measureable behavior — the antithesis of feelings. I hadn’t thought of those emotionless theories until Behave. Ironically, prepare for a roller-coaster ride of emotions!

Told through the complicit eyes of a science-savvy wife, Rosalie Rayner Watson, novelist and non-fiction writer Andromeda Romano-Lax delivers an absorbing, morally affecting fictional memoir taking stock of her life with the controversial founder of conditioning psychology known as Behaviorism or Behavioral Psychology: John B. Watson, a psychological giant of the 20th century. With very little known about the woman behind the larger-than-life trailblazer, the author had rich material to mine, done thoughtfully. (An ambitious novel; 401 pages.) You know you’re in for a ride when Rosalie sets the stage telling us it’s “tricky for any woman to sort out her feelings, but most of all when her husband is an expert on feelings.” Still, Rosalie comes across as a reliable narrator as all is not crystal-clear and things do not wrap up neatly.

John B. Watson
via Wikimedia Commons

Rosalie’s narrative is stunning given the popularity of John Watson’s extreme behaviorist doctrines that flourished in the 1920s to ‘50s. (B. F. Skinner came along and added complexity with his positive-negative reinforcement concepts.) Watson, on the other hand, espoused only three human emotions — fear, rage, and love; and claimed all could be stimulated, predicted, controlled. His radical views went mainstream into parental homes through magazines like Cosmopolitan and Parents and the bestselling Psychological Care of Infant and Child.

Behave opens in 1935 with an ill Rosalie, presumably what sparked this confessional. She examines: her privileged upbringing in a loving and lovely Jewish home in Baltimore; her passion for psychology at Vassar; a conflicted marriage to an influential man with “Valentino looks” and baggage from an unhappy Southern childhood and a troubled marriage to Mary Ickes, whose name rings a bell because her brother served in FDR’s administration (Rosalie and John married right after their divorce); Watson’s pioneering contributions to psychology and advertising; serious mistakes they both made in science and as parents. From the get-go, the prose grabs as you sense this is not going to be a pretty picture.

At the groundbreaking Johns Hopkins clinic run by prominent psychiatrist Adolf Meyer, the reader looks in on Professor Watson’s egregious, persistent breaching of ethical conduct involving human research subjects: fear-conditioning experiments on hundreds of “blank slates,” baby “Albert B” the most famous. Rosalie was his graduate assistant. She said nothing.

Rosalie Rayner
via Wikimedia Commons

Equally ethically disconcerting, she lets us in on what comes later, behind-closed-doors, as Rosalie navigates motherhood to two boys, Billy and Jimmy, under the dictates of her self-important husband. The reader can surmise how these two innocent children turned out; the Epilogue fills in their real history.

Professor Watson was thrown out of Hopkins for improper morals. Not for revelations about “Little Albert,” which came later, but for his scandalous love affair with Rosalie. He was twice the age of his student, married into a well-known family, a father of two, and rumors of earlier womanizing trailed him.

Watson and Rosalie appear to have embarked with good intentions. Partly in response to a topsy-turvy world after WWI, they aspired to “make the world a better place.” Did Watson really think he was helping to create happier children? Did Rosalie really take to heart his preposterous declarations that babies shouldn’t cry or be coddled or hugged? Granted Rosalie was a woefully inexperienced, overwhelmed, isolated mother. Did she go along with her guru husband’s “anti-attachment” approach because she didn’t know better, or didn’t have enough energy, or was she fearful of questioning the great man? By the time her mothering feelings were deep to admit the unnatural state of loving her two boys, it was too little, too late.

Much of their marriage took place during the break-the-mold Jazz Age, when Rosalie says it was “so easy to remake oneself these days.” Excuses? Maybe for her, but not for us. Except, I think, the author wants us to judge Rosalie against the context of history. Not to condone actions and inactions, but to provide perspective to our range of feelings towards Rosalie: disappointment, frustration, anger, outrage, sadness. She had so much, lost so much. As for the esteemed psychologist, you know you’re in good authorial hands because he engenders strong negative emotions!

Rosalie’s telling opens at Vassar College with her psych lab partner and best friend, Mary Cover. Enthused about science, Mary gave her a magnifying glass for her charm bracelet. We meet them in a course taught by the first woman to be awarded a doctorate in psychology, Margaret Floy Washburn. In short, Rosalie’s beginnings were charmed and seemed destined.

Mary Cover is key because in 1919 she and Rosalie, at Mary’s encouragement, traveled to Manhattan’s New School to hear Professor Watson’s lecture on behaviorism. By now, he’d achieved acclaim for his “1913 Behavioral Manifesto” presented at Columbia. In later years, Mary resurfaces, a haunting reminder of what Rosalie failed to do: juggle a career and motherhood. (In 1970, Mary was named “mother of behavioral psychology.”)

At first, working alongside the famed psychologist, Rosalie says she was her happiest:

“As a woman, I’d never imagined such heights of happiness: of being so wanted and so needed, my mind equally filled with our scientific tasks.”

Soon things begin to unravel. It starts with the dewy-eyed grad student hinting at discomfort with Watson’s experimentations with “Little Albert.” During those fear studies, Rosalie resists than falls for Watson’s magnetism. Then, there’s awkward, foreboding scenes of Watson’s wife oddly befriending Rosalie’s mother. Tension grows when Rosalie’s parents greatly disapprove of her marriage. (The love scandal made it into Baltimore and national newspapers.) When Watson moves Rosalie away from science, academia, and her family to the secluded wilds of Long Island, Rosalie is transformed into a lonely, housebound mother. Here, we empathize with her. She’s so out-of-sorts about her parenting skills and so fatigued she can’t even rouse herself to feel jealous about the comings-and-goings of John, now climbing-the-ranks in advertising.

John Watson was a man in a big hurry. In just three years post-Hopkins, he made a name for himself in the “psychology of appeal” at the prestigious J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. Contrarily, he was psyching out the desires of the public without asking the same questions about his wife. Did he not care or see how lost she was, slumbering around in threadbare cotton dresses in a sweltering, drab rental bungalow without a phone? Frugal with Rosalie yet he was cavorting, drinking, and dressing in Mad Men style, including finding the funds to join a sailing club.

What happened to that charmed Vassar girl? Why did she give up her identity? Her dreams? Her family? Her moral compass? If she couldn’t stand up for herself, couldn’t she have at least stood up for her children? She admits she was an enabler: “How could two smart people be so stupid?”

Rosalie’s spiral is depressing. Depression is the best diagnosis I can come up with to reconcile how she came to let herself and her children down so badly.

Rosalie tells us there’s “no such thing as a clean break.” This much seems certain.

Lorraine