Make Your Home Among Strangers: Chapter 36 Summary & Analysis

Lizet, writing as an adult, explains that the island of Cuba is surrounded by some of the most pristine coral reefs in existence. Industrialization never came to Cuba the way it did to the rest of the world, and so the thing Lizet has spent her entire adult life “studying and working to understand” has been preserved.

Lizet knows that the lab she works for will soon require her to take a trip to Cuba; if the reefs were anywhere else in the world other than the island from which her parents fled, the island that is at the root of her family’s biggest heartaches, she would have traveled there much earlier.

Leidy and David live in Hialeah now, and Lourdes shares their duplex; Dante and their younger daughter Angelica are both thriving in school, and Omar and his wife are their neighbors. Lizet was not the maid of honor at Leidy’s wedding—Lourdes was. Ricky did not attend the event, and Lizet is not even sure if Leidy invited him, though he sent, through Lizet, an expensive set of copper pots as a wedding present. The event took place the summer before Lizet’s third year at Berkeley, where she “inadvertently” followed Ethan to grad school; he was gone, though, by the time she began her studies. She emailed him when she got in to tell him the news, but the message bounced back, and she later learned he’d left before finishing his program.

Lizet attended graduate school for a time but ultimately dropped to take a position at a laboratory. Her parents are proud of her, but she worries that will change if her work takes her to Cuba. She knows how unfair it would look to them for her to travel to a country they cannot enter. More than that, part of Lizet doesn’t want the burden of having them tell her to visit certain sentimental spots or look up family members; she wants to be able to focus on her work without her parents shaming her into familial obligations.

Lizet doesn’t know if she would tell her parents if she got the opportunity to go to Cuba; most likely, she writes, she’d just tell them she was traveling, though to keep Cuba from them would make her sad. She would want them to know that she was bringing some part of them back to where they started, and returning some part of them home—even if they wouldn’t see things that way.

After the summer internship in Santa Barbara, Lizet moved her things into a single dorm and used the days before classes began to write letters to her mother and Leidy—something she’d never done before. She had written an apology to Ethan over the summer, and though his response was short and vague, she felt inspired to try even harder in her apologies to Lourdes and Leidy. A week after Lizet mailed the letters, Leidy called her on the phone to tell her how “weird” it was to send a letter. They talked and caught up as if nothing had happened, discussing the Ariel Hernandez case and their respective summers.

Leidy told Lizet about that a rumor was going around that Al Gore had been the one to order the raid on Ariel’s house; Lizet doubted that it was true. Leidy told Lizet that Lourdes had forgiven her—but Lizet reveals that Lourdes, after all these years, has still never told her so.

The November after the Ariel debacle was the first election in which Lizet was old enough to vote. She followed the directions on her absentee ballot, nearly throwing the whole thing out when she grew frustrated. She wished she were in Miami, where she could have simply driven to her polling place and voted in person—to do so would have been so much less of a burden.

Lizet writes that she is sure, now, that her ballot, so painstakingly filled out, was never even counted. She wishes now that she could have known this as she filled it out, punching holes in the designated places. She wished she’d known, as she made her choice that day, how little it would ultimately matter which side she ended up betraying, and how much it would hurt either way.