Before the thunder rolled across the Sierra,
Cuba breathed in colors the saints still remember
emerald cane fields whispering to the sea,
Havana’s nights a carnival of rum and starlight,
where the malecón held lovers like a mother’s arms
and the air itself tasted of mango and freedom.
Ernest walked those streets with a fisherman’s grace,
Pilar cutting the Gulf like a silver prayer,
daiquiris sweating in the Floridita’s cool shade,
words rising from the deep like marlin on the line.
He loved her then, the island’s wild, unbroken heart,
wrote of old men and the sea while the finca slept
under jacaranda blossoms and quiet Cuban moons.
Spirit moved in every wave he cast into,
a rough communion of salt, sweat, and sky.
Then the revolution came, a sudden winter.
Theresa’s family—Spaniard-Scottish blood
and Cuban soil,
felt the ground shift beneath their feet.
Castro’s shadow lengthened; the old life thinned.
They packed what little the heart could carry,
left the house of their fathers, the church of their mothers,
the graves that still whispered their names.
It was not easy, to tear roots from the only earth
they had ever known, to board a plane with trembling hands,
to watch the island shrink into a memory
while tears salted the Atlantic between them.
Even though Theresa herself was born later,
safe on American soil, the ache traveled with the blood:
the stories told in kitchens late at night,
the photos yellowing of a Havana that no longer answered,
the quiet grief of a people who chose exile
over the slow death of everything familiar.
Now the streets still hold their beauty, cracked and stubborn,
pastel walls peeling like old saints’ robes,
vintage cars coughing through decades of silence,
the same sea that Hemingway loved,
still blue, still endless, still singing.
Yet the laughter is thinner, the shops emptier,
hope rationed like sugar, dreams held in careful hands.
Oshun’s rivers still flow beneath the concrete,
Yoruba drums still beat in the night’s soft corners,
and the spirit of the island endures,
melancholy as a mother’s farewell,
sad as the empty chairs at family tables,
happy in the stubborn green of the palm,
beautiful in the way only the wounded can be.
Theresa writes the ache into poetry,
Hemingway’s ghost still fishing the same waters,
and somewhere between then and now
the pearl still shines,
not unbroken,
but unbroken in its longing,
a spiritual wound that remembers light.
