Margarita, my sister’s mother, hands me a mariposa flower.

“Smell that, it is the smell of Cuba.”

I inhale slowly, twirling the papery flower by its reed-like stem. I nod my head and smile politely, saying I’ll press the mariposa in my travel journal, to remember this first trip to Cuba always.

I have come to meet my sister Alicia and to see a view of dawn in the tropics, just like the title of a Guillermo Cabrera Infante novel that has been in my parents’ house as long as I can remember. Growing up in Philadelphia, I never saw the sun rise in the tropics. But I imagined another me doing so every day, that true me whose life kept going undisturbed on this island, while the accidental me, the one whose skin I live in, led a parallel life in a northern city speaking an uninherited language.

Alicia is the one with a lifetime of dawns in the tropics, the daughter born when my father was a completely different person than the one who conceived me twelve years later. My father believed in the revolution. He was 20 years old in January of 1959 and studying at the University. He believed in Fidel on behalf of every poor kid like himself who had learned to fight for his own on the streets of Havana. But in those early years he saw how hard revolutionary promises are to keep and it shook his faith, enough to walk away from his first wife and two children, and he rarely discusses it now. When I brought up the 1973 coup in Chile in conversation once, my father scolded me. It was around the time I started to question everything my own government had done in Latin America over the last thirty years and I didn’t hide my disdain.

“Don’t let yourself be seduced by ideals like that, you’ll turn out like I did. Trust me, it only leads to disappointment in the end.” He said it in a tone that warned me I was in college to “make something of myself,” not save the world.

I am the daughter of a pragmatic man who gave me everything he could. Alicia is the daughter born just as my father’s revolutionary fervor was waning, the daughter who couldn’t hold his failing marriage to Margarita together. Her father is not just a man she has not seen in decades, he is a ghost.

As I walk back with my mariposa to the room Alicia shares with her daughter, I linger in front of the books lining the hallway. These books, not the flower in my hand, are what Cuba smells like—something damp and well worn. They are arranged with care, but the cracked spines release the scent of their yellowing pages. I smell them every morning when I step into the hallway, before I smell the salty ocean air outside or the car exhaust rising from street level. I stop and stare at the titles, the authors—Carpentier, Stendhal, García Márquez, Tagore—a library to make my head spin. These books were read by my brother Jaime and then by Alicia, and represent the years lived in this home before I arrived, years the books know more about than I do.

I want to match my siblings book for book, but more than that, I want to do it by reading their own dog-eared, underlined volumes. I want to know the thoughts in their heads the first time they read Langston Hughes or Nicolós Guillén. The Depression-era modern Cuban classics Ecué Yamba-O and Sóngoro Cosongo that I bought, newly reissued, in an antiseptic European department store this past spring seem inferior to the same titles on these shelves. My copies were mass produced in Barcelona and lack the smell of Cuba between their covers, a cheap proxy for the country now under my feet.

Alicia takes me by the hand. I squeeze her hand, knowing that this is real, that what I think or want from the land under my feet doesn’t matter now. My sister is here to take care of me. Last night, we dragged our sunburned bodies home from Varadero, wanting only food and a bed. We ate greedily, with that appetite that only comes from being by the sea all day. When we were done, the anticipation of sleep became even more delicious. But Alicia wouldn’t let me climb into bed with the salt still wound up in my knotted curls.

She pulled a stool up to the bathroom sink and said, “Pónte allí,” you sit there, while she went to take a pot of water off the stove.

Alicia and my niece Larisa then washed my hair in the sink, tickling my ears. I closed my eyes, so that I didn’t know who was pouring the hot water over my head and neck and who was spreading the avocado cream through my hair to comb the tangles out. A shiver went down my spine with every cascade of water falling over my head. I felt time regressing slowly, taking me back to rituals like this in my childhood, me floating in the bathtub while my mother coaxed the shampoo out of my hair with her long hands. Me blissfully happy in the womb-like watery warmth, not wanting to hear the glug-glug of the draining tub, ever.

Like a child, I had to sit patiently as Alicia and Larisa dried my hair after washing it, first with a thin, scratchy towel and then with a yellowing plastic blow dryer that whirred so slowly I was surprised it had any effect at all.

“You can’t go to sleep with your hair all wet like this. You’ll get sick.” Alicia said. I didn’t protest, all too familiar with arguments in this vein made by my own Cuban mother. You shouldn’t wash your hair while you have your period, you shouldn’t take a shower right after eating, a list of nonsensical bathing rules that goes on and on. I’ve broken every one of them with no harmful result, but still, I do not argue. Last night, I gladly surrendered to the sleepy, happy haze that blended Alicia’s caresses with my mother’s and the lingering taste of the evening’s malanga dinner with the mashed malanga spoon-fed to me as a toddler.

Alicia and I talked as we have every night before going to sleep, curled up in the large bed with its nubby pink blanket over our shoulders. Head to head, we talk about my life there and her life here and about the places we’ll see together now. When we’re getting too tired to think too much, we talk about the books we love and the passages we both know by heart. Some we recite together, like José Martí’s poem Los zapaticos de rosa. “Hay sol bueno, y mar de espuma...” we whisper and drift off to sleep with our voices like mirrors of one another.

Today, Alicia is taking me to Ernest Hemingway’s house in San Francisco de Paula, a small town just outside Havana. Hemingway’s ghost is strong here. We’ve passed the bay where he fished in Cojímar and the bars he frequented in the old part of the city, but I want to see where he carried out his business of writing.

We take a ten-peso taxi that leaves us at the edge of an overgrown estate. This is Finca Vigía, or Lookout Farm, where there was and is enough land to keep Hemingway’s moored boat Pilar on the grounds. We walk under the dense palms to find the house, an imposing high-pillared structure with a fresh coat of white paint. This is the first house I’ve seen since arriving in Cuba where the paint is not chipped or faded. The overhanging palms leave fine-edged shadows of varying sizes, as if they had been stenciled on the walls. White iron chairs line the veranda, inviting visions of the author sipping mojitos as his next novel stirred in his head.

Every French door and window is open to reveal the contents of the house’s rooms. Ropes hang across the doorways, barring our entrance. We cannot inspect the mounted animals, leopard skins and heavy furniture up close. This odd museum is kept in order by mandating views from afar.

“They don’t let anyone in, ever?” I ask.

“No, never.” Alicia answers casually as we wander the perimeter of the house, peering in.

Around the corner, I hear a guide telling a group in English about the Picasso plate in the dining room. I want to see what he is describing, but can’t steal a look at it myself. There was a Picasso cat in Hemingway’s Key West house that I was immediately drawn to when I visited at age 15. It was just sitting unguarded on top of a dresser, bright and flat-faced and perfect, so remarkable among the purring six-toed cats famously descended from Hemingway’s own cats. It had a life of its own behind the painted eyes and I wanted to take it with me, as a kind of talisman for my own writing.

Instead, I wrote a poem about it a few years later, attributing the lines “I could be yours...be yours” to Picasso’s cat. Nothing in this roped-off house outside Havana tells me it could be mine, echoing the reluctance of the country around it to belong to me.

The air hangs thick and humid and I walk, dizzy with memories and desires. In my parents’ home, a small brick house crowded upon by neighbors of various ethnicities in search of the American dream, we spoke Spanish and created our own tiny world where one person’s aspirations became the other’s and more importantly, memories of everyone’s homeland mixed together, released from the constraints of their original domain. Maybe it was the incessant storytelling, or maybe it’s just that the memory of your land is something you carry in your genes, in your blood, no matter where you are born. I inherited all the memories and dreams my parents carried out of Cuba, and I thought that when I arrived here the soil would receive me like a prodigal child. It hasn’t. Only Alicia and her eyes like my father’s have. At every corner, I am reminded that my parents were born here, but I was not.

We climb the steps to the tower by the pool where Hemingway wrote on his typewriter. This room, too, is roped off once we reach the top of the steps. There’s a large picture on the wall of Hemingway and Castro at a swordfish tournament in the early 60’s. Both are bearded, smiling as they shake hands. Their bodies face each other, Hemingway’s small belly just inches away from Castro’s lean figure in fatigues. They look comfortable together, this old man and the young revolutionary.

I consider the image slowly, deliberately. Would I have believed in the promise of the revolution if I’d been here at the beginning? Or would I, too, have become disillusioned like my father, leaving my family, my country, and everything that assured who I was and who my children would be?

We climb back down the tower steps. I take in the elegant house, the leafy banana trees, and the sliding colors off the backs of lizards on the ground. It is so perfect that it seems like it shouldn’t exist. One could hide in here for years and not know what is happening on the road outside the gates.

We get back to the apartment late in the evening, exhausted again after more touring around el Morro, la Cabaña and other sights in and near Havana. The day’s heat has sapped me of my energies.

“¿Y qué te pareció la casa de Hemingway?,” Margarita asks. What did you think of Hemingway’s house?

“It’s beautiful, so beautiful,” I say, because it is. We are sitting at the dining room table, where I am making a list of the places we’ve seen.

“I hear they do a very good job of maintaining it just as he left it.”

“Did he... leave that house to the government when he died?” I ask.

“You know, I don’t really remember what happened. Ali...” She calls out down the hallway. “Your sister wants to know something about Hemingway and the time he spent here.”

Alicia steps out of the back room and walks towards us, plucking a thick green volume off the hallway shelf on her way. She hands it to me and says, “You should read this. It’s very good.” I look at the spine. Fading silver letters spell out the title Hemingway en Cuba. “The prologue is by Gabriel García Márquez. I think you’ll like it.”

“But I’ll never finish reading it before I leave. I’m only here for another week, and you have me running around all the time!”

Alicia laughs.

“No, you don’t have to. Llévatelo.” Keep it, take it with you.

“Are you sure?” I ask, hoping she won’t suddenly change her mind.

“Of course! You’re my sister! Anything I have is yours,” she says and leans over to hug me around the shoulders.

“Gracias.” I rub the crown of my head into her chin.

I open the front flap and inhale the smell of Cuba.