On Writing My Memoir A Little Piece Of Cuba: A Journey to Become Cubana-Americana

My memoir A Little Piece of Cuba: A Journey to Become Cubana-Americana centers around a five-day trip to Havana that I took with my husband in 2017 and how that trip led me to connect with my Cuban heritage. It was my first full-length book project and first work of creative nonfiction, so I sought a guide in the form of developmental editor and writing coach Janna Maron. Early on, I saw how Janna and I were kindred spirits. She provided a structure for process that was elegantly simple – figure out how much time you can devote to writing and figure out how many words you can write in that time and make a schedule and like the Nike slogan, just do it – and also wonderfully freeing – play with your work, be gentle with yourself, and let the story show up for you. Unlike previous screenwriting classes and creative writing workshops that hammered technique, Janna’s framework sent me on a quest to discover the story through freewriting and revising. Every few months for a year, I sent a maximum of 30,000 words to Janna for her to review, make notes, and provide feedback on the larger themes and narrative structure. 

Bursting to get this story on the road, I nailed my first 30,000-word deadline like an NBA player throwing a Hail Mary shot at the buzzer. But as I chugged towards my second deadline, though I was set up for success with Janna’s solid feedback and a sense of the book’s emerging narrative arc, life got in the way. The ups-and-downs of the COVID era, professional disruption, health issues in the family, and personal drama erupted all at once before my second deadline. My steady progress derailed and I put the manuscript down for several weeks. This was just the opening that doubt needed. Leaning on a regular writing schedule gave me a sense of forward motion that until this point had kept the judgmental critic at bay, but in my worn-down state, the critic wreaked havoc by knocking me off my writers’ game when it had barely started, making me second-guess myself about writing the book at all, and showing up in disguise to talk me out of writing altogether. 

Take a break. Take it easy. Be kind to yourself, the critic crooned insincerely, but taking a break didn’t feel like what I needed. Trying to write with everything going on and my reliable schedule blown to smithereens was hard, but I managed to slog through a few dawn hours to splatter words on the page. Still, the day before the deadline, I had fallen short of the wordcount target and felt that the quality of what I had written was nowhere near as good as I wanted it to be. I started to write this email, 

Dear Janna, hope you’re doing well. I have to apologize that I will not be able to turn in the next 30,000 words for my book project for tomorrow’s deadline. A LOT went down these last few weeks and I didn’t get as much done as I thought and I also haven’t addressed some of the feedback we discussed and –

That was as far as I got. A question floated up from the trainwreck in my brain: 

What would Janna do?

Followed immediately by the answer: 

Janna would send in whatever she had. No excuses, no qualifiers, no explanations, certainly no judgment. 

Immediately, I deleted that email, started a new one, attached the manuscript exactly as I had saved it that morning, and hit SEND. That simple act suddenly made me feel like a warrior claiming victory after a long-fought battle. I could turn back to all the other drama with a clear focus knowing that at least my creative life had been taken care of.

A few weeks later, Janna and I met on Zoom to discuss her notes, address my questions, and share a brainstorm about where I would take the book next. I told her about my “What would Janna do?” moment and she laughed heartily. 

“I had no idea!” she declared. “And I would have granted you an extension, but I’m glad you decided you didn’t need it.” 

Yes, there was a lot going on, and Janna’s grace may have been warranted at another time and place, but I don’t think I would have ever forgiven myself for setting aside my writing then. My desire to keep going as best as I could and in the face of challenges was much more than meeting a deadline or writing well or doing something perfectly. I was in the phase of discovering my book’s story and that momentum was a powerful undercurrent that sustained and buoyed me through a few tough weeks. I slowed down, I set aside my overachiever expectations, I wrote less, but I did not stop and I did not coddle myself into quitting. 

Narrating the audiobook recently, the beginning of one chapter took me back to a cold dark November morning at 5am. I only had fifteen minutes to write that day, and what I wrote in that fifteen minutes are the opening lines of chapter ten titled El Café Es Muy Importante. When life throws out challenges that send my best laid plans into disarray, I learned to write on and to choose what my writer self most needs. Sometimes it’s a soft place to land, and sometimes it’s a hard wall to smash through. 

—

A Little Piece of Cuba: A Journey to Become Cubana-Americana

For fans of Chanel Cleeton’s Next Year in Havana, a real-life story of how a young woman’s five-day trip to Cuba, her mother’s birthplace, completely changed her view of herself as a second-generation American.

When Barbara Caver was growing up in South Carolina, her Cuban roots were as mysterious as the embargoed island her mother had been born on but left in 1959. For Barbara, Cuba represented a heritage that she’d never understood and couldn’t fully embrace. When she moved from South Carolina to New York, the vibrant diversity of the city and new friendships with other Cuban Americans made her curious about her mother’s home country. Finally, in 2017, she traveled to Cuba.

Immediately upon arriving in Havana, Barbara was struck by a sense of the familiar: tiles on a backsplash looked like tiles in her grandparents’ home, the airport smelled like a childhood memory, local dishes tasted like her grandmother’s cooking, and a morning stroll through Vedado delivered her to the front gate of her great-grandmother’s home—despite the fact that she didn’t have the address. She wasn’t just visiting a foreign country; she was being welcomed home.

Part travel adventure, part ghost story, and part memoir, A Little Piece of Cuba: A Journey To Become Cubana-Americana (December 2, 2025 / She Writes Press / $17.99) is an imaginative and humorous personal journey through Barbara’s memories and experiences as she discovers that she is and has always been more Cuban than she thought.

BARBARA CAVER is a lifelong student of the arts and is an accomplished film and television production executive. She loves traveling, exercising, hiking, dancing, cooking, and eating, as well as writing about all of these things with great enthusiasm, affection, and humor. A Little Piece of Cuba is her first full-length memoir. Raised in South Carolina, Barbara currently resides in Jackson Heights, New York City.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing