The Other Side Of Change

What do you learn about change when the public story barely budges, but every private life is in motion? In The Other Side of Paradise, Julia Cooke argues that the truest picture of Cuba’s transformation in the late 2000s and early 2010s isn’t found in official speeches or embargo headlines—it’s in the everyday improvisations of young Habaneros. She contends that to understand Cuba’s future, you have to live its present at street level: in ration shops and illegal rentals, on Calle G and the malecón, at drag shows and Santería ceremonies, in kitchens where lunch is a small miracle and in apartments where a suitcase is always half-packed.

Cooke embeds with a constellation of twenty-somethings navigating the hinge-years between Fidel and Raúl Castro: Lucía, who hacks the system to rent a forbidden apartment and later leaves for Chile; Carlos, a witty, restless gay man whose mother, Elaine, cooks daily feasts against the grain of scarcity; Liván and Takeshi, friki punks who sculpt identity on G Street; Sandra, a jinetera who sells desire, then yogurt, and then a version of security; Isnael, a gentle apprentice to Santería who believes spirits stand nearer than politics; Adela, an idealistic student whose patriotic faith tilts into lucid disillusion; and Adrián, an electrifying young jazz pianist who learns to wear different masks in Havana and Europe. Their stories sketch a map of Cuba’s untelevised change: a loosening economy tethered to a rigid politics, an island graying as its youth file exit papers, and a culture that spins grace out of scarcity.

Why These Lives Matter

If you’ve ever felt stuck in a system bigger than you—an institution, a job market, a family story—this book hands you a mirror. Cooke shows how young Cubans translate macro-stalemate into micro-motion. They resolver (solve by wits) every day: finding a black-market haunch of jamón Serrano, hacking an Internet connection, or trading sanitary napkins via neighborhood circuits. They cultivate subcultures in public (Calle G as a living, breathing “internet”) and carve sanctuaries in private (kitchens, rooftop parties, makeshift studios). Change, Cooke suggests, isn’t always a headline—it’s a habit.

What You’ll Explore

You’ll enter the informal economy that keeps Havana humming, where dual currencies (moneda nacional and CUCs) bifurcate everyday life and the verb resolver becomes an operating system. You’ll walk Calle G, where frikis, mikis, profundos, emos, and repa(rteros) use clothes, beats, and hair as politics-by-other-means. You’ll sit inside a misa espiritista where a medium channels advice as matter-of-factly as an aunt; then you’ll head to Parque Lenin’s drag stage, where the politics of presence undo decades of silencing without a single speech. You’ll shadow a sex worker who maps the gray economies of intimacy and a student who tests whether critique can live “within the Revolution” without being crushed by it. You’ll also track what it takes to leave—by raft, by scholarship, by marriage—and what leaving does to those who stay.

The Core Argument

Cooke’s core claim is simple and subversive: the “other side of paradise” is not only deprivation—it’s ingenuity, solidarity, and quiet revolt. The Cuban state, steeped in a heroic narrative (“within the Revolution, everything”), choreographs pageantry—military exercises, slogans, and televised amends—while ordinary people perform the actual art of survival. Economic reforms under Raúl (cell phones, hotel access, legal cuentapropistas) unlock just enough oxygen for an entrepreneurial class to sprout, even as political speech stays hemmed in. In that gap—between economic loosening and political stasis—young Cubans build identities, careers, and escape routes.

Why It Matters Now

For you, the lessons travel well. When institutions move slowly, micro-agency, culture, and community move first. Cooke invites you to watch how people practice change in long transitions: a mother (Elaine) refuses culinary austerity as a daily act of dignity; a musician (Adrián) learns to code-switch across worlds; a believer (Isnael) anchors in ritual when facts waver; a student (Adela) calibrates voice and safety line by line; a hustler (Sandra) rides ambiguous waves of intimacy and risk; a punk (Liván) turns hair and noise into a declaration. The book insists you look both ways: at structure and at streetcraft, at policy and at potluck. And it nudges you to locate your own Calle G, your own kitchen table, your own misa—that place where big narratives thin and a door opens to work that counts today.

Untelevised Change

The most significant transitions in Havana between 2008 and 2013 rarely appeared on TV: they happened in the black-market aisle, on drag runways, under kitchen fans, and in the quiet click of an emailed carta de invitación.

By the end, you’ll see why “paradise” is an optical illusion—Havana is neither fantasy ruin nor museum—it’s a moving city full of people doing the math of a future that may or may not include it. And you’ll carry a practical ethic: respect the unofficial, trust the micro, keep your passport close, and don’t underestimate what a shared meal, a rooftop set, or a Friday-night crowd can build against the grain of history.

Cooke explains that if you understand resolver, you understand how most Cubans actually live. Resolver is not just “to solve”; it’s a verb that braids hustling, reciprocity, craftiness, and quiet lawbreaking into a daily survival system. In Havana’s twin-currency maze—moneda nacional for salaries and CUCs pegged to the dollar for imports—you don’t get through a week without tapping the black market, a cousin’s cousin, or a neighbor’s stash. You do it, and everyone knows you do it, even if no one says it aloud when the TV is on.

How Resolver Works

Start with Lucía. She’s a recent University of Havana grad who “pays” for her degree with two years of social service and a $12 monthly salary. She hacks Havana twice. First, she secures an illegal Havana address and rents a forbidden apartment, posing as a “cousin” when inspectors knock. Second, she turns landlord: a spare room quietly rents to backpackers for $10 a night, the proceeds cushioning the state’s thin pay. When her office cuts Internet access, she borrows a foreigner’s in-home connection code and times her email sprints between outages. Every workaround sits within a web of favors—me resolvió; le resolví. You see it again when a vendor lugs a haunch of jamón Serrano into her living room, forcing her to recruit a grocery clerk to slice it on an industrial machine.

Now step into Elaine’s kitchen, the moral center of the book. Elaine—Carlos’s mother—transforms ration-shop rice, black-market horse meat (beef is too scarce to kill legally), and a neighbor’s eggs into ropa vieja, tostones, and cumin-scented beans. She buys grated Parmesan from a hotel employee, olive oil from a friend-of-a-friend, and a liter of Tetra Pak milk from the diplomats’ grocer when the Rio Zaza scandal stalls local production. Lunch isn’t just lunch—it’s a quiet rebuke to utilitarianism, a daily civics lesson in dignity.

What It Teaches You

Resolver socializes you into a “moral economy” (James C. Scott would nod here) where strict legality takes a back seat to reciprocity and care. In Cooke’s Havana, the egg man with a miraculous bucket, the clothing trader with lumpy suitcases from Panama, and the gas-selling Party official all participate in a tacit social contract: we’ll keep each other afloat and keep it quiet. You learn to see scarcity as an engineering problem and neighbors as co-founders. It cultivates the very skills you use in any constrained context—pattern recognition, network sense, and the ability to cross the line, return, and not get burned.

Costs and Coping

But resolver has a price. It normalizes illegality, frays trust (beware the chivateo, the neighbor who can snitch), and drains time. Cooke shows you the weariness after the hundredth queue, the shame of “Communist sweetbread” that sticks to your fingers, the swallowed anger when a state clerk tells a mother “even when the teacher is not right, in this country, the teacher is right.” It also burdens women: Elaine cleans cabinets to outpace a cockroach; Sandra wheels yogurt in a stroller while nine months pregnant because tourists are thin on the malecón. You come to see resolver as both enabling liberty and masking structural failure.

Why It Matters Beyond Cuba

If you’ve ever built a side-hustle within a rigid employer, assembled childcare from neighbors and calendars, or learned a system’s “unwritten rules,” you’ve practiced a form of resolver. Hernando de Soto’s work on the informal economy (Peru) shows how states ride on the backs of citizen ingenuity; Cooke’s reporting makes it intimate. Her point is not to romanticize gray markets but to recognize them as early signals of change. When Raúl’s reforms legalize 178 “non-professional” jobs—button-upholsterer to clown—the state is essentially admitting what kitchens and stoops already knew: people had opened for business long ago.

Field Rule

In a slow system, ethics ride shotgun with tactics: borrow, barter, bend—then feed your people. That’s not just how Cubans survive; it’s how they retain themselves.

Practical takeaway: map your own resolver network. Who are your Elaine (quality), your egg man (supply), your Lucía (hack), your diplomat grocer (edge access)? In any transition—personal or political—you’ll move faster if you already know how to move off-menu.

On Thursday through Sunday nights, you can watch youth culture write itself along a mile of grass and concrete. Calle G (G Street) is where subcultures—frikis (rock/metal), mikis (mainstream trendsetters), profundos (bohemian-intellectuals), emos, and repa(rteros) (from working-class repartos)—gather to be seen, to gossip, and to borrow one another’s signals. With slow hotel Wi-Fi at $8/hour and state TV looping Mesa Redonda, Calle G becomes Havana’s open-source platform—part Facebook, part YouTube, part Reddit—coded in hair, sneakers, and bass lines.

The Avenue as Platform

Cooke meets Liván and Takeshi here: two teens who just left a failed metal show at Maxim Rock. Liván’s head spikes into a fragile medieval mace; Takeshi’s cuff studs clap against his jeans. They drape punk across bodies assembled from peso-shops and ingenuity: spikes pried from bracelets, boots repurposed from an electrician, hand-spray-painted tees (“Punk Not Dead”) on Carthage College Greek Week leftovers. Hebdige’s classic on subculture (Birmingham School) reads like a field manual for this block: style communicates resistance when direct speech is risky. Here, just moving through space says, “I’m not theirs.”

Style as Politics

G Street’s semiotics are wonderfully fussy. Fake vs. real Nikes isn’t only about brand aspiration; it’s about accessing a global lexicon with local materials. Mikis in polos and pearls sidle up to profundos in Silvio Rodríguez T-shirts, and both side-eye repa swagger. Trends spread by osmosis: a skater sees a trucker hat in a U.S. video, finds a fisherman on the malecón, pays 5 CUC, re-tags it with a graphic friend’s design, and appears on Calle G. Seeing it, your brain updates what “Cuban” looks like. You leave with a downloaded aesthetic—minus a single megabyte of data.

Policing and Precarity

Of course, the state notices. Floodlights appear; rocks are set into low walls to keep you from sitting; uniformed trios hover, citing “pre-criminal dangerousness” when it suits them. After the shutdown of El Patio de María (2003), frikis colonized G Street as a fallback when venues vanished. The state co-opts where it can (a chipper emcee once cheered, “On the anti-imperialist stage, long live rock-and-roll!”), then reins it in at the curb. But the point remains: for most kids, this is risk-mapped rebellion—different enough to feel like action, safe enough to rinse off before Monday.

What G Teaches You

If you’ve ever lacked a platform, Calle G hands you a blueprint. Take your signals to public space, iterate in sight of your peers, and let volume do what permission won’t. Even in constrained worlds, scene-building changes who counts as “normal.” When Cooke watches two “vegetarian vampires” try to seduce a girl using “energy arguments” under a streetlight, the detail is comic—but it also signals a cultural ecosystem resilient enough to tolerate the quirky. In the small muscles of tolerance, future changes learn to walk.

Field Rule

In places where speech is policed, style becomes syntax. Hair, sneakers, playlists—these are sentences. Read them carefully; write your own.

Practical takeaway: build your version of Calle G—a recurring, low-cost gathering that doesn’t beg for permission. Whether it’s a weekly meetup in a park, a living-room salon, or a pop-up mic night, you’ll create a feedback loop that shifts identity faster than policy ever will.

When systems wobble, people look for steadier gravity. In Havana, Cooke shows you how Santería—rooted in Yoruba spirituality braided through Catholicism—offers community, meaning, and a vocabulary for change that avoids head-on collision with power. Through Isnael, a gentle, lanky twenty-one-year-old “son of Yemayá,” you enter living rooms where spirits are soothed with cigars and sweet wine, and where counsel flows in a language older and truer than the evening news.

Roots and Reach

Santería arrives in Cuba with enslaved West Africans; its orishas (Yemayá, Changó, Obatalá) hide behind Catholic saints across centuries of surveillance. After 1959, the Revolution outlawed religion but couldn’t cauterize faith. As the island’s racial and class hierarchies flattened in some ways (then bent back under remittances), Santería traveled across lines: white and Black, poor and professional, foreign and local. By the 2000s, bracelets peek from sleeves on everyone from sex workers to artists to ministry officials; a doll in a multisided skirt sits on a fridge beside a flat-screen.

A Night with the Ancestors

Cooke attends a misa at Marielena’s house. The room is dusty-yellow; a flipped seat cushion becomes a drum; a son in crisp green fatigues keeps time. They chant Hail Marys bent into Yoruban cadences, then switch to call-and-response. Marielena grows still; a spirit named Francisca “rides” her body. Ordinary grievances—strange noises, unquiet dead, a son’s sexual trouble—are named and given offerings. Then something raw happens: Isnael falls forward, fists pounding the floor, asks for aguardiente, then blessed water, then returns from the edge. You feel two truths at once: the cynic in you doubts a line about a young man entering a foreign house; the witness in you sees trance, dignity, and care.

Belief vs. Skepticism

Cooke is transparent about her oscillation between curiosity and doubt. When Francisca prescribes a fountain pen anointed with smoke to bless Cooke’s writing, she smiles—and shelves it. Still, she can’t shake what Santería does socially: it gathers people; it authorizes women like Marielena; it converts private chaos into shared narrative; it offers what the state’s slogans can’t—immediate, embodied agency. Anthropologists like Lydia Cabrera and Ruth Behar have written this tenderness into the Cuban record; Cooke places you on the folding chair inside it.

Religion as Side Door to Change

Isnael wants to “make saint,” to be initiated fully and eventually charge clients—locals and Europeans—with consultations. In a country where professionals (architects, engineers) cannot freelance but “clowns” can, religion becomes a livelihood path as much as a lifeline. It’s not only spiritual consolation; it’s entrepreneurship with a sacred license. When reforms legalize small businesses, the same ritual networks morph easily into supply chains for candles, beads, and advice.

Field Rule

When truth is contested, rituals restore reality. They turn fear into tasks, loneliness into circles, and pain into a story that moves.

Practical takeaway: in your own transitions, name a ritual (weekly meal, shared playlist, candle, walk) that helps a group cohere. You don’t have to believe in orishas to grasp the power of a practice that says: you are not alone, here is what we do next.

Cooke threads one of her most complex portraits through Sandra, a twenty-one-year-old beautician-turned-sex worker whose office is the seawall where Paseo meets the malecón and, on better nights, the turquoise lobby of the Hotel Riviera. In Cuba’s lexicon, she’s a jinetera—but the word you hear more often is amigo. The boundary between romance, survival, and exploitation blurs under the neon. If you want a clean narrative, Sandra refuses you one.

From Salon to Seawall

Sandra learned the shape of the skull at beauty school; she learned the shape of demand on the malecón. Five hours as a stylist won’t touch what one night as a girlfriend-for-hire can do. She calibrates her look like a strategist: spandex shorts, black-blue hair, long red nails, a smoky voice that says New Jersey to Cooke’s ears. The Riviera’s Copa Room has long since lost its Ginger Rogers glamour; still, it sells a brand of foreign attention Sandra can convert into cash. When the tourists thin, she pivots—selling yogurt door-to-door from a stroller while nine months pregnant, then later hawking air fresheners.

The Moral Gray

Amalia Cabezas calls it an “economy of desire”: Western money flows through intimate channels (Dominican Republic, Cuba), dissolving neat lines between sex work and romance. Cooke’s field notes agree. Many amigos are long-term, blurred arrangements; some men get their girlfriends out, many don’t. The police sometimes jail the too-obvious but often prefer bribes. Sandra frames choices pragmatically: she’ll name the right father for her child to secure help (maybe Bong, a Filipino-Italian she says is besotted); she’ll stop breastfeeding to protect her body’s “asset value”; she’ll accept a Colombian husband’s money three years later while not wearing a ring because rings attract taxes and questions.

Motherhood, Risk, and Stories We Tell

The book refuses to make Sandra a victim or a hero. She asks Cooke to be her baby’s godmother (Cooke declines, ethically); she scolds her daughter, Mia, for hustling pesos at the neighborhood fair; she spins urban legends (a blind-eye transplant in “one of those countries”), which may not be true but narrate real fear. She’s jailed four days in “Villa Delicia” and emerges “this thin,” then returns to the malecón. Her cardinal virtue is velocity—when one revenue stream dies, she finds another. Her cardinal wound is exhaustion—when she doesn’t call Cooke back, you can feel the gravity of a life spent convincing and being convinced.

What Outsiders Miss

Two misreadings haunt Havana. First: “they’re poor but happy,” a tourist’s comfort that floats above rice queues and heavy air. Second: “they’re victims without agency,” a foreign activist’s comfort that erases cunning and care. Cooke refuses both. Sandra’s world is predatory, yes, but she also exerts control: picking clients, budgeting windfalls, setting boundaries (sometimes). The government’s legalization of “clown” but not “architect” says everything about whose self-employment counts. If you place moralism above observation, you won’t see how much skill it takes to keep a roof over Aboo and two kids without a ring, a contract, or a bank account.

Field Rule

When livelihoods are gray, judgments should be granular. Ask: What choices did she have this week? What costs did she carry? What futures does this buy—or foreclose?

Practical takeaway: in your own assessments of precarious labor (gig work, care work, platform hustles), widen your lens. Agency and exploitation often co-exist; your job is to see both and design help that respects the first while reducing the second.

Cooke’s nights out with Carlos place you at the edge of a stage where bodies reassemble a civic we. In Parque Lenin, beneath tinseled stars and a metal roof, Cuba’s LGBTQ community lip-syncs Cher and Gloria Trevi, whips hair, and welcomes Madonna de Cuba on a foil cross to a roar. It’s joyous, campy, and charged. The show is entertainment, yes, but it’s also constitutional law rewritten in sequins: we exist, together, out loud.

From UMAP to Mariela

The arc matters. In the 1960s, gay men were rounded up to UMAP labor camps (“aid to production”), alongside Jehovah’s Witnesses and “counterrevolutionaries.” Teachers and doctors couldn’t be gay; soldiers still can’t. Yet repression never extinguished desire (Reinaldo Arenas’s Before Night Falls remains the frankest record). By 2008, under Raúl, Mariela Castro (his daughter) had pushed the state to fund sex-reassignment surgeries and to broaden public discourse. There is still no marriage equality and public affection is scarce, but there are parties: Divino pop-ups on rooftops and basements, a drag bar on the outskirts, Saturdays at Parque Lenin. The state watches; the crowd grows anyway.

The Nightlife Network

Carlos dials a voicemail every Saturday: “Hola, divino…” A smoky voice drops an address. Men in boxer-briefs pull a red curtain; a queen in purple pounds her chest; a nun strips to a garter. The show supplies what the straight city withholds: an address book (who’s hiring, who can help), a release valve (dance until dawn), and a horizon (glamour that suggests elsewhere is possible). Afterward, Carlos eats mayonnaise bread under the blue glow of a bootleg hotel TV feed, then tries again next weekend. Elaine, his mother, worries—not about his sexuality, but about his center of gravity drifting toward parties and away from the intellect and verve she knows he has.

Politics of Presence

“No homosexual represents the Revolution,” a 1965 paper once declared. Decades later, the Revolution quietly expands its definition of “people,” partially because people showed up. Cooke’s point lines up with James Baldwin’s insight (different island, same truth): presence is argument. When clubs close early due to “mourning” for an aging comandante but the crowd reroutes to rooftops, the re-routing is a civic act. When queens outnumber patrons and still perform with verve, they model a resilience every Cuban recognizes. In that mirror, future rights find their legs.

Field Rule

When law lags life, throw a show. Staging joy is not escapism—it’s rehearsal for recognition.

Practical takeaway: if your workplace, campus, or city resists inclusion, don’t wait for policy. Build recurring spaces (shows, salons, teach-ins) where the excluded can be present to one another; let consistency do the slow work policy won’t yet do.

Adela might be the person you become when love of country collides with evidence. At nineteen, she’s the most patriotic non-party militant you’ll meet: quoting Martí, loving Haydée Santamaría’s radical legacy, arguing that doctors-as-exports beat soldiers-as-exports, and rolling her eyes at “impostor” youth militants who don’t actually read the press. Then the state sends her to Tarará to teach Spanish to Chinese teens. What happens there is a civics lab in slow motion.

Two Years of Social Service

Adela wanted city work; she got a beach compound where permits are required to visit. She learns chopsticks, dumplings, and what it means to be the minority in a room. She also learns how institutional pettiness eats principle: a boss in Havana slides his hand onto her leg; a state computer freezes whenever she opens European scholarship sites; an email she writes criticizing a philosophy conference (for stifling debate) is forwarded without consent. “It’s as if they told you to go inspect houses for mosquitoes,” she tells Cooke, laughing so she won’t cry.

Speaking “Within the Revolution”

In 2009, an ISA cafeteria protest over foul food escalates into a televised “clarification.” A year earlier, a student’s eloquent critique of travel restrictions at UCI meets a surreal reply: if everyone flew, planes would collide (Ricardo Alarcón). The script is old—“Within the Revolution, everything; against it, nothing”—but Adela can’t unsee what’s in front of her: friends leaving, ministers purged (Felipe Pérez Roque), a grandfather dead after an ECG missed the mark, and the humiliating truth she repeats: “even when the teacher is not right… the teacher is right.”

From Faith to Lucidity

By the time Adela returns to Havana, she has a lawyer boyfriend soon leaving for New Jersey and friends already gone. “The youth of today are gone,” she says flatly. She’s not defecting; she’s applying for fellowships and planning to come back “when things flow differently.” That stance—love large enough to leave and precise enough to return—is Cuba’s modern patriotism. It’s also a hard place to stand. Reading Orwell’s 1984 (she does), you recognize her line about “four vs. five fingers.” What matters in Cooke’s telling is that Adela keeps reading, keeps teaching, and refuses to confuse her country with its current managers.

Field Rule

Patriotism that can’t absorb critique curdles into theater. Real love survives doubt because it prefers truth over myth.

Practical takeaway: in your own institutions, practice Adela’s discipline—read the canon, test the claims, and decide whether your next act is voice, exit, or both (Hirschman’s framework fits). Then align your calendar with your answer.

Hurricane Ike (2008) is the book’s first great stage. As Habaneros tape windows and stock TuKola, the state’s choreography snaps into place: electricity cutoffs, televised storm tracks, CDRs (neighborhood Committees) assigning “unsafe” abuelas to safer flats. After, Washington offers $100,000 with strings; Havana says lift the embargo instead. The politics are familiar; the realities are not: eggs smashed by the hundred-thousand, harvests ruined, four deaths in provinces, and hurricane parties that tilt into G Street as soon as buses rumble again.

Managing Narratives

Cooke shows you the state’s talent for optics. Military drills splash across state TV in 2009—“reminders” for Cubans rather than messages to Americans, Elaine snorts as she stirs beans. Protest videos appear but not their causes; students are framed as “corrected,” not silenced. Dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez is briefly detained, then dismissed as a U.S. pawn. A USAID contractor is jailed. The effect isn’t North Korea-style blackout—it’s a fog that slows causal chains: protests, hunger strikes (Orlando Zapata Tamayo dies after 85 days), agricultural congresses, pork shortages. Without a free press, you fall back on rumor (Rio Zaza’s milk halts; Palco has German Tetra Pak; the black boogie-board caper is whispered as farce).

Economic Loosening, Political Tightening

Then reforms trickle. Early on, Raúl legalizes cell phones, hotel access, and taxes the under-the-table wages foreign firms had always paid. By 2010–2013, 178 “non-professional” self-employments are legal; home and car sales open; exit visas vanish; resident re-entry windows stretch to two (then four) years; and small-business permits explode from ~150,000 to 371,200. Simultaneously, arrests and surveillance continue; foreign businessmen face anti-corruption purges; key companies shift under military leadership. Cooke calls it a simultaneous contraction at the top and loosening at the bottom—oxygen for cafés and carpenters, not yet for architects of speech.

Restoration vs. Reality

Old Havana glows under Eusebio Leal’s restoration scheme: pastel colonnades, chocolate shops, a luxury watch boutique. But a block away, water lines tangle, kids bucket water to fifth floors, and barbacoa lofts press ceilings low over living rooms. The restored quarter runs on a fiscal logic that keeps profits in-district; the rest of the city runs on resolver. You can love the beauty and still wince at the optics—a paradise façade beside a crumbling reality, exactly what tourists see (and mis-see) on a two-hour stroll.

Field Rule

Beware revolutions that change the storefront first. Real transitions reach kitchens, commutes, and queues—or they haven’t yet arrived.

Practical takeaway: when you assess any reform (at work, in a city), follow Cooke’s method—ignore the ribbon-cutting; ask what changed in people’s daily loops: food, transport, connection, and voice.

The most delicate work Cooke does is tracking departures without turning them into a single verdict. People leave by raft, scholarship, marriage, family reunification, or hustle—and sometimes they return with pearls, iPhones, and a taste for rooftop bars. The book starts with a passport almost lost on a Miami-Havana flight and ends with a Miami concert where Carlos Varela strums under palm-lit paper lanterns. Between those bookends, you see an island teach its youth to love it and to survive away from it.

Why They Go

Claudio, Lucía’s upstairs neighbor and Havana’s fastest talker, tries three times to leave on a speedboat from a provincial coast; each time, the house is raided or the timing trips. He stays for now, reading Faulkner by a fan and working as a janitor at the writers’ union. Lucía delays her flight to Chile after an earthquake, but goes; soon, half the world “congratulates her for leaving jail,” she jokes. Adrián takes gigs in Russia, France, Morocco, then a government grant in Holland; he’s not defecting, he insists, just learning how to wear new faces. Elaine and Nicolas sprint for an unplanned flight to Miami when a petty car-accident case threatens exit papers; they clean staircases, save for a car, and talk about keeping the Miramar apartment “just in case.”

What Leaving Does

When Elaine speaks about Miami (“everything is so big; the cars all look the same”), she sounds like someone who stepped from a story into a mall. She misses the intellectual life but loves consequence: a traffic fine scales rationally, not arbitrarily. Cooke notes how Cuban rings and diamonds glint more often by 2013; she also notes cholera warnings and the bling/blackout paradox. For those who stay, the departure of peers hollows G Street, classrooms, and kitchens. “The youth of today are gone,” Adela says, and you feel both grief and resolve in the sentence.

The New Rules of Return

By 2013, exit visas vanish; re-entry windows extend; you can keep homes you leave behind and deed them more cleanly. That legal scaffolding makes the loop possible: you can close a Havana door for two years and reopen it without penalty. It is, as Cooke says, a sign that the state recognizes what every kitchen has known: people’s lives cross borders now. Vedado Social Club pops up in Miami; Descemer Bueno sings; friends who were faces on Calle G are suddenly at the door of a Wynwood bar. You begin to see the diaspora not as a subtraction, but as an archipelago of Cubas in motion.

Field Rule

In long transitions, belonging stops being a place and becomes a loop. The question isn’t only “do you stay or go?” but “how will you keep the door movable?”

Practical takeaway: architect your own loop for seasons of change—maintain two networks, two addresses (literal or digital), and a rhythm of visits. Don’t force a binary if your life can bear a braid.

Cooke’s deepest gift is a way of seeing change when spectacle and cynicism both fail you. She offers a reader’s toolkit forged in Havana but portable anywhere your life feels gridlocked: look local, honor the informal, read style as speech, make ritual, measure reforms by lunch, and treat leaving as one way (not the only way) to love a place. She makes the private public—not to sensationalize, but to calibrate what counts.

See the Kitchen, Not the Slogan

If a government claims victory, ask Elaine what she served today and how. If a company trumpets “innovation,” ask which hallway became a makerspace. If your campus announces “dialogue,” ask whether students like Adela can critique in daylight without a performance of contrition the next week. The kitchen test travels; Cooke runs it relentlessly.

Practice Ethical Resolver

You will face gray zones. Borrow codes, share stashes, and bend rules—but do it with reciprocity and eyes open to power. Resolver isn’t a license to take; it’s a pact to keep a circle alive. If you’re the person with CUCs (or dollars), tip the balance toward those carrying more risk. If you control a stage, hand the mic to those building presence at a cost.

Honor Micro-Hope

Big hope—the televised kind—wanes in long transitions. Micro-hope—what you feel when Madonna de Cuba gets two standing ovations or when a drag bar plays to an audience of five with full heart—keeps communities from despair. If you lead, invest in those micro-hopes: after-hours rooms, weekly convenings, seed grants.

Prepare for Long Transitions

Change in Cuba didn’t flip; it thickened. Your institution may do the same. Plan for braids, not binaries: voice and exit, home and away, law and custom. Build loops (legal, logistical, emotional) that can hold a decade, not a week. And when you feel paralyzed by the gap between what is and what should be, find your Calle G and your misa, then get lunch on the table.

Field Rule

Untelevised change starts where you are: a fan blowing in a hot room, a playlist in a basement, a casserole on a chipped plate. Do those well—and watch what grows.

In the end, The Other Side of Paradise doesn’t ask you to pick a side; it asks you to practice a sightline. If you do, you’ll find more change than you expected—and more work you can do today.