Love Letters from Cuba

By Betty Viamontes

It’s the year 2021, in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, when twenty-four-year-old Lena Pérez discovers her grandfather’s love letters. She has just ended a three-year relationship with Paulo Oliviera—a Brazilian ex-soccer player—after realizing he will never be accepted by her Cuban-American mother. She feels lost. Through the letters kept by the wounded Vietnam veteran Rolando Pérez, Lena learns about events that occurred long before her birth and took her grandfather from Cuba to the United States and Vietnam. Through these letters, she is able to peel the layers of who she is, learning about where her family comes from, uncovering secrets, and finding who she will become.

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"In her newest novel, award-winning author Betty Viamontes uses the first-person narrative and brilliantly exploits the epistolary approach. As in her prior works, she continues to describe life in Cuba. The novel is set in present day and is full of surprises that will keep you guessing what will happen next.” –Susana Jiménez-Mueller, storyteller and podcaster, author of Now I Swim and The Green Plantain - The Cuban Stories Project podcast.

About the Author
Betty Viamontes was born in Havana, Cuba. When Betty was fifteen, she and her family crossed the Florida Straits in an overcrowded shrimp boat on a stormy night when many families perished. This trip would reunite the family with Betty’s father in the United States after twelve years of separation. Betty completed graduate studies at the University of South Florida. Upon her mother’s death, Betty began to dedicate her life to capturing stories of people without a voice.

Her stories have traveled the world from the award-winning Waiting on Zapote Street to the No. 1 newest releases, The Pedro Pan Girls, and The Girl from White Creek.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Betty Viamontes
• Release date: Nov 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005690465

Betty Viamontes

Betty Viamontes was born in Havana, Cuba. In 1980, at age fifteen, she and her family arrived in the United States on a shrimp boat to reunite with her father after twelve years of separation. "Waiting on Zapote Street," based on her family's story, her first novel won the Latino Books into Movies award and has been selected by many book clubs. She also published an anthology of short stories, all of which take place on Zapote Street and include some of the characters from her first novel. Betty's stories have traveled the world, from the award-winning Waiting on Zapote Street to the No. 1 New Amazon re-leases "The Girl from White Creek," "The Pedro Pan Girls: Seeking Closure," and "Brothers: A Pedro Pan Story." Other works include: Havana: A Son's Journey Home The Dance of the Rose Under the Palm Trees: Surviving Labor Camps in Cuba Candela's Secrets and Other Havana Stories The Pedro Pan Girls: Seeking Closure Love Letters from Cuba Flight of the Tocororo Betty Viamontes lives in Florida with her family and pursued graduate studies at the University of South Florida.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Paulo

While driving my metallic-blue 2020 CRV, I felt the acid revolt inside my stomach as I thought about my encounter with my cousin Marta the night before. Over wine and pasta at the quaint Italian restaurant Casa Santo Stefano, she had asked me whether—now that I had ended my relationship with Paulo—she could go after him. I had seen her trying to seduce him during family gatherings. I didn’t worry about it then. Now, I did.

It was July 2021, in the middle of a pandemic that had killed over 600,000 in the United States alone. We lived in a world of masks, social distancing, and divisions that threatened to end life as we knew it, yet on this day, Marta took front and center in my thoughts. Her attire paraded in front of my eyes: leopard-print tight stretchy jeans, a black low-cut top that revealed her ample bosom, and high heels. She had long red nails, and I could smell her strong flowery perfume while she spoke incessantly about her clients at the beauty salon. Why did I agree to go out with her? I kept asking myself throughout the evening.

At the end of the meal, when the waiter brought us the check, she looked at it and gently pushed it toward me, allowing a crinkle of a smile. I didn’t say anything and paid for the entire bill. Eighty dollars with the tip, which put a dent in my budget during this period of rising prices. But here I was, delivering food to my grandfather like I did most Sundays and allowing my insecurities to get the best of me.

My mother kept telling me that my grandfather didn’t need my help. As a wounded veteran who retired from Tampa General Hospital as a security officer, he had a pension, and his house was paid off. I told her he was on a fixed income, and if I wanted to spoil him, it was my choice. However, I didn’t tell her that for as long as I remembered, I had felt a special connection to my grandfather. He would take me out for ice cream and showed me how to defend myself. When I was twelve, he took me to the shooting range, but when my mother found out, the trips were over. For my seventh birthday, he bought me a mid-sized brown bear with a blue bow that I still kept. It wasn’t my best present that year, but the happiness in his eyes when he saw me unpack it told me that few people would ever love me the way he did.

I was now twenty-four, two years after graduating from the University of South Florida with a business degree, and lonelier than I had ever been. The daughter of Cuban parents who had raised me as if they were in Cuba, with chaperones and all, I had finally broken free following my graduation and rented my own apartment in the trendy Hyde Park area—small, but accessible to shops and restaurants.

Only months after I moved in, life around me halted when the pandemic hit. Overnight, businesses shut their doors, people retreated into their houses, and telecommuting became the norm for many offices, mine included.

My roommate moved out after the one-year lease ended. At the time, Paulo asked me if, instead of renewing my lease, I wanted to move in with him in his condo in Hyde Park. That would have helped me save money, especially now that rents were so high and mine had increased over 10%, a lot more considering that now I was not sharing my apartment with anyone. However, knowing that the two of us living together would have escalated his volatile relationship with my parents, I had declined.

Paulo had asked me to marry him the day after Thanksgiving of 2020. I told him I needed more time to get my parents ready.

In the past year, life around me had returned somewhat to normal. Then, the breakup came at the end of June 2021.

Since the start of the pandemic, tensions had flared up at home, and my mother stopped concealing her disapproval of Paulo. She rolled her eyes when he spoke about his life in Brazil, and during our last two visits, she started showing him pictures of Mark and me dancing together during my quince (sweet fifteen) celebration. I could see Paulo glancing at me as my mother kept turning the pages of the album full of photographs. His eyes begged me to say something. I didn’t.

I came to realize that nothing I could do would change anything. He simply didn’t meet my parents’ standards. He wasn’t Cuban, he wasn’t a professional, and he didn’t want a family.

Three strikes and you’re out.

Those were the reasons I used to justify the breakup. Yet nothing is ever that simple.

We had been together for three years. He didn’t have a college education, but he, an immigrant from Brazil, was passionate, hardworking, and—like my grandfather—accustomed to hardship. It impressed me that in only a few years after his arrival to the United States, he had built his own kitchen-cabinet company from the ground up.

So why did I walk away from him now? Was it because of my parents’ nagging? I knew who he was from the beginning. Did I suddenly believe he was not good enough for me? How could I think that someone with the work ethic, determination, and kindness of my grandfather was not worth fighting for? Perhaps if I had lived a fraction of my grandfather’s difficult life, I would feel different. Like he often said, Hardship strengthens the human spirit.

I didn’t want to behave like the typical Cuban princess whose parents had given her so much that she had lost touch with reality. Not that I was Cuban. Like my mother, I had been born in Tampa. My father came from Cuba during the Mariel boatlift in 1980, after being part of the thousands of people who flooded the Peruvian Embassy in Havana to request political asylum. I was thankful to my parents for wanting me to experience the best life they could afford.

My quince birthday party, held at the Columbia Restaurant in Ybor City, made me feel like I was on top of the world: Spanish dancers, paella, and ten girls who looked like bridesmaids wearing long, peach fluffy dresses and dancing with boys in tuxedos, and me at the center in a white dress that would have resembled a wedding gown if it had not been for my red gloves. That night, I danced with Mark, a Cuban boy, one whom my parents approved. As all the couples danced to old Cuban songs and a waltz and pleased our guests with well-executed choreographies, we resembled the aristocrats of Cuba’s past.

Ybor City also had a special meaning for me. The historic neighborhood northeast of downtown Tampa, Florida had contained a little portion of Cuba since 1956 when a tiny park, known as José Martí Park—located on 8th Avenue—was donated by Tampa to the island. A marker in the park describes how, in 1893, Paulina Pedrosa, a then resident of the area, had offered refuge to assassination target José Martí, Cuba's poet, patriot, and Apostle of Freedom.

Having my coming-of-age party held in this historic city with close ties to Cuba made me feel connected to the land of my father and my grandfather.

My parents also gave me a Catholic, private school education, a closet full of pretty dresses and shoes, and large family gatherings that became much less frequent after I reached my teenage years, as children grew up and moved away to other cities in search of the perfect job. Little by little, our large Cuban family had blended itself almost out of existence. Even my cousins had married Anglo-Saxon men and had American children with little or no connection to our Cuban roots. Maybe that was why my parents wanted me to marry a Cuban man.

No matter who I married, I didn’t want those roots to disappear from my life. Perhaps I had not made this clear enough to my parents during the years I had dated Paulo.

Two weeks had passed since our breakup, and I could not get used to the idea of being alone. I kept asking myself: why did I really do it? That question kept haunting me. Maybe I was tired of hearing my parents asking Paulo when he was planning to go to college and drill him about his past and his brother’s involvement with gangs, maybe it was my inability to tell my parents, This is my life, or perhaps, the pandemic had made me realize the temporary nature of my existence and that I should not settle. Maybe it was all of these reasons.

It didn’t matter to me that Paulo wasn’t Cuban or that he didn’t go to college, but I could not imagine myself without a family. That was a dealbreaker. I knew he