Next Year In Havana

Next Year in Havana is a novel by Chanel Cleeton, a Cuban-American writer of contemporary romance and historical fiction. The book was the July 2018 selection for Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club and a New York Times bestseller. The novel alternates between 2017, when Cuban-American writer Marisol Ferrera goes to Cuba to scatter the ashes of her grandmother Elisa (Perez) Ferrera, and 1958-1959, when Elisa falls in love with a revolutionary. This guide is based on the 2018 Penguin Random House print edition.

Plot Summary

In 1959, Elisa, the 19-year-old daughter of sugar barons in Cuba, waits in a Havana airport for a flight to the United States. Elisa is there with her father, three sisters, and mother. Elisa has a secret—she is pregnant with the child of Pablo Garcia, a rebel who is on the side of Fidel Castro, whose forces have at last forced dictator Fulgencio Batista out of the country. Elisa’s path to exile in Miami began one night in 1958 after she went to a party and met Pablo. They began a whirlwind romance.

Six months after Elisa’s death in 2017, Marisol—Elisa’s granddaughter and a journalist who writes travel pieces—makes the pilgrimage to Cuba to bury her grandmother’s ashes.