Next Year in Cuba: A Cubano’s Coming-Of-Age in America

Gustavo Pérez Firmat arrived in America with his family at the age of eleven. Victims of Castro’s revolution, the Pérez family put their life on hold, waiting for Castro’s fall. Each Christmas, along with other Cuban families in the neighborhood, they celebrated with the cry, “Next year in Cuba.” Growing up in the Dade County school system, and graduating from college in Florida, Pérez Firmat was insulated from America by the nurturing sights and sound of Little Havana. It wasn’t until he left home to attend graduate school at the University of Michigan that he realized, as the Cuba of his birth receded farther into the past, he had become no longer wholly Cubano, but increasingly a man of two heritages and two countries.