Standing in line at Miami International at dawn, in a crowd whose sense of order was loose at best, Tom, my uncle, confessed to a stranger next to us that this was his first trip back to Cuba since he left the island at the age of nine in 1962. Same for my father, who was fifteen when they landed here that summer. He lagged behind us now, watching an attendant crank his last suitcase into a suffocating shawl of blue plastic, like a beetle prepped by a spider. We were surrounded by mounds of this stuff: shrink-wrapped luggage stacked chest-high, only a fraction of which contained what each passenger needed for the trip. The rest was stockpile.

I was surprised to be in line at all. Hurricane Gustav had been barreling toward Cuba as if to beat us there. We’d been up since three that morning, staring at the Weather Channel, obsessing over forecasts, calculating and recalculating the likelihood of a takeoff according to the storm’s path. Judging by the smeared radius of bad weather on the hotel television, our odds didn’t look good. But we had our tickets, and the line kept inching forward.

So far as my father and uncle knew in the summer of 1962, the trip to Miami was a vacation. They wore hand-tailored suits, because flying was a privilege then, and you dressed for the occasion. They were greeted by a family friend, a pal of my grandmother who’d fled the year before, who met them at the airport with a young priest in tow—a French Jesuit who escorted the boys to a camp tucked into the pines of North Miami called Matacumbe. It was one of several camps that composed the Catholic Welfare Bureau’s Peter Pan mission, through which Cuban children were extracted from what had become Castro’s solidly Communist regime. By then, our family farm in Quivicán had been confiscated, as had the family business—a cracker company, of all things. The family wealth had been looted. The Bay of Pigs invasion had failed, and my father’s uncle had begun a nine-year sentence at the Isle of Pines prison for his role in that debacle. Clearly, it was time to get out of Cuba if you could. Arrangements were made. The boys were sent first. René, the middle son, was already dead, struck by a car while retrieving the visas they would need to travel. He was buried in the suit he would have worn on the flight.

At his young age, Tom could fathom some of this, but he wasn’t freighted with the gravitas of fatherland. My father, on the other hand, was man enough to comprehend leaving Cuba in all its political and existential depths, an awareness that sowed a distinctly Cuban brand of poisoned nostalgia. Nothing from his childhood can be revisited without a piling on: his uncle’s imprisonment, his grandfather’s humiliation in seeing a life’s work confiscated, the death of his brother, the separation from his parents, and the gentle nightmare of waking up, day after day, year after year, in exile. For my father, all of these memories are rooted in the Revolution, so that it took years of prodding—and the recent realization that the Revolution might outlast us both—to get him to acquiesce and fly home. As for Tom, he was ready years ago.

The flight was packed. Among the thirty-somethings dressed in witch-pointed boots and glittering shirts, wide-eyed guajíros stumbled in wearing three hats stacked, so as not to damage them in the luggage. Some of the elders seemed clueless as to what the overhead compartment was for, or even how to read the numbers along the aisle that would guide them to their seats. The stewardess looked impatient; the aisle was approaching chaos.

Outside, the Miami sky was cleaving between a pink clarity and the purple shelf of the storm, Gustav’s edge, the threat growing with every minute that we were grounded. The stewardess began to bully people into their seats. You could smell nail polish. A couple of women began spreading their lipstick, getting ready. This was the event.

Soon, barely settled, we pushed back from the gate and were off—Tom on the aisle, my father in the middle, the window mine. The plane hurtled down the tarmac, straining for lift, then hiccupped off the earth to applause. We bumped through some bad air, then broke above the clouds. I asked Tom about the plane they took to America.

“It was a DC-3,” he said. “A tail-dragger.”

“No,” my father said. “It was a Constellation. The one with the three tails in the back . . . kind of high . . . KLM.”

“No way,” Tom said. “DC-3.”

My father looked at me. “Well, Tom knows.”

I offered the window seat to my father. We switched, but I kept an eye on him while Tom and I chatted. He was too quiet. In a few minutes he gave up the window to Tom and sat in the middle, with nowhere to stare but forward, at the headrest in front of him.

“You don’t want the window?”

He glanced at me, but he wasn’t listening. He had the glazed look of a pile of worries, a calm paralysis. He shook his head but didn’t answer, and rubbed his nose, and rubbed it. And he kept shaking his head, gently, but with persistence that meant he didn’t realize he was doing it, preoccupied with some memory that was massive and vivid. He shook his head, but he wasn’t answering anything; it was simply a motion, like a Parkinson’s twitch. Something had been triggered—the view had shaken something loose—and he could only sit there quietly, answering himself. I’d seen him furious, violent, pensive, immaturely buoyant, but I’d never seen him vulnerable. And in the glassy distance of his stare, in his hesitancy to speak, I saw a vulnerability that made me second-guess the wisdom of this trip.

He leaned toward me and whispered, “When we left Cuba, Tom was nervous. So I gave him the window seat, to keep his mind occupied.”

As he said this, his eyes were wet, and for a moment both he and Tom were looking at me, before Tom turned back to the window. In a while, they were both staring out at nothing, a white void of clouds.

Finally, the plane tilted forward, just a little. As it descended, a verdant Cuba surfaced, a serene gray light making the palm trees a little sharper, the foam of the coast a little more brightly white. “It feels like the same plane,” my father said, meaning, in his mind, the Constellation.

We had about ten minutes of powerful nostalgia there on the tarmac, my father’s arm draped around Tom as they walked, the dark clouds casting a moody backdrop to the prodigal sweetness of the moment. We could feel cool air slip through the opened doors of Terminal 2, dedicated to flights to and from Miami.

Inside, the mood was a pressure drop. Agents in blue, agents in khaki, employees in uniform of one kind or another—they all stared at us. Two lines formed leading to two slots, blocked by two red doors. An agent examined your passport and customs forms, asked a few questions, stared at you, and took your picture. Our line was long and slow, and I couldn’t understand what distinguished it from the next one. We waited, watched for a clue. Above the slot was written, with marker on a slab of cardboard, VIP. A lady agent in khaki saw me considering and invited us to proceed—and why not? We were Cuban-Americans on a homecoming. I figured there would be cocktails waiting.

So we entered as VIPs. Just then, the hospitable woman in khaki reappeared and steered us toward a makeshift room where a few elderly women had gathered, looking very patient. Apparently, this was the VIP room. We were encouraged to sit on patent leather couches and have bottled water if we liked. Tom started digging through the tiny fridge tucked in the closet, and, with his confidence back, immediately started hamming it up, teasing the khakied agent. “¿Dondé está la cerveza?” he barked, pretending to be impatient. “¡Soy un VIP!” She stiffened a little. Hospitable or not, she worked for the airport, and the airport was nothing more than a subsidiary of the state, which could give a shit if we were wasting half an hour in the VIP room. The luggage, meanwhile, snaked through the baggage claim, in and out of sight.

A hired boy finally brought it over, but we spent another hour paying more taxes, visiting other windows, other agents. The closer we got to the exit, the more convoluted the interruption. Finally, a pair of girls—twenty-somethings—who asked for our passports and paperwork stopped us. We all leaned in at a tall table—now painfully close to the door—as they asked us, with a detachment that suggested a drowsy interrogation, where, exactly, we were headed once we left the airport. I gave them the name of a hotel I knew. Did I have a reservation? No. Why were we here? To see family. But you’re American? My father was born here. When did you leave? 1962. Why are you coming back now? To see family.

They split us up and asked for a family member’s name and address. I happened to have one written down, but my father and I hadn’t rehearsed this part. I knew he was providing a different name than I was. Tom, meanwhile, kept quiet. The girls led us back to the table, and then took our paperwork with them into the crowd. We looked at each other, at the drug-sniffing cocker spaniel, at the soldiers in blue. The thrill of the landing had evaporated.

The girls returned. With jaded smiles they handed back our paperwork and welcomed us home. It was raining by now and a huge crowd had gathered at the exit, but the rain didn’t seem to faze them a bit—anxious, searching, and soaked.

By the time we reached Centro Habana, dark was falling, and Gustav was upon us. We had rented two bedrooms in an apartment near the university—with air conditioning, my father’s only prerequisite. But soon the lights flickered, the power went out, and the AC rattled to a halt. We unfolded the jalousie shutters and found the entire city pitched in darkness, save for the top floor of the hotel Habana Libre across the street, its sign furred by a brightened rain. We spent the evening talking by candlelight and mopping up the water that blew through the shutters. Then the eye passed, the sky cleared, and by the light of dozens of candles, people began to step out onto the street. The block had a narrow, theater-set intimacy; the balconies were close enough that neighbors could talk across the street without raising their voices. Mothers in curlers traded updates with the neighbors’ daughters. Half-naked husbands leaned out windows to watch the passersby. A woman shook maracas and prayed. Dogs howled; a rooster joined in.

And all night that rooster wouldn’t quit. It was still going by mid-morning when my father and I stood on the balcony, overlooking the street. The storm seemed to have wiped the industrial grime, the congestion of diesel and grease, all away. My father, too, seemed clearer, more together now, and he was telling me about why he’d been so quiet on the flight.

“I felt like I was on a . . . on a return flight . . . on a two-way trip. I’ve taken maybe over a thousand trips between 1962 and yesterday, and it was like all those trips were erased.”

He paused, watching the action on the rooftops—a girl hanging laundry, a dog sniffing the air.

“Listen,” he said, “my experience when I left here—it was kind of tragic. The guards showing up at my house. Seeing my mother cry. Seeing my grandfather lose everything he built. Seeing my father move from job to job. From ’59 to ’62, it was terrible, and I was flying back into that.”

“Soldiers showed up at the house?”

“They needed a car. They knocked on the door—a woman and three or four men, dressed in greens and with rifles and machine guns. They sat in the living room, and they asked who owned the car. My uncle had a brand new Plymouth Belvedere, black and white, and they took it. He just handed them the keys—for the Revolution. And days later, my uncle and my father drove around Havana and found it, abandoned.”

We stared out at a diesel truck coughing up the hill.

“What happened at the airport,” he said. “That interview. That was exactly what I was afraid I was going to go through—exactly. I didn’t know it was going to be like that, but I thought, you know—I thought they were going to pick on me again. And as soon as I landed, sonofabitches, that’s what they did.”