HAVANA -- Ale sat pressed against the door in the back seat of a Russian Lada, leaving a strip of worn leather between herself and her new husband.
Ale, from a western suburb of Havana, is 28, a tall, dark-skinned woman with a perpetual look of skepticism. Her husband, a European, is 60. He is pale, graying, a tourist in long shorts and a fanny pack.
Ale married him not for love, but for an easier life outside of Cuba. It's a familiar story. Countless other women - and some men - have married foreigners and left the country since the economy crashed in the 1990s.
We met while I was in Havana working on a different story. Ale and her husband were on their way to an embassy in Miramar to drop off her emigration paperwork; my driver, who knew them, offered them a ride. I took the front seat and they sat, divided, in the rear.
Ale stared out the window at tree-lined boulevards as we drove. She and her husband didn't speak. They have no common language. They use a handheld digital translator to communicate, even when they argue.
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I found Ale later in my trip, and she told me about her life.
Once she dreamed of dancing in the National Ballet of Cuba, of traveling the world. She dropped out of school in 11th grade, married and had a son, now 6. She divorced the boy's father because she couldn't bear her mother-in-law's meddling.
Ale met her current husband, the European, a few years ago in the city. She asked me not to use her last name or say what country he comes from, for fear of retribution from the government.
She was walking alone; he was in Havana on vacation. Prowling for a wife, she thought. One of many she never shares with him.
For some women, marrying a foreigner is ir a la luna, a trip to the moon, an escape. At the time, Ale was earning $3 a day in a family-run restaurant. Better than most, but a struggle.
She says she was not thinking about marriage. She also had no intention of being one of those women who sell themselves as "girlfriends'' to foreigners - Germans, Italians, Spaniards, even Americans. Ale knew women who had exchanged sex for money, clothes or food. Police threw many of them in jail.
She and the European man talked that first night.
"Cafe con leche,'' she remembered him saying, rubbing her arm, a shade of ice tea, and his, chalk white. In Cuba, many foreign men prize dark-skinned women as "exotic.''
The European made a second visit to Cuba just to see Ale. He took her to nice restaurants, places she couldn't afford.
On his third visit they became intimate; he rented a room in a building fronted by panes of broken glass and a view of the sea. At a hotel, Ale could be arrested if they weren't married.
Sex with him, she said, is like cooking rice and chicken: It's something to do because you need to eat, and because rice with chicken is fast.
They married in January at a civil ceremony downtown. Life would be easier this way, she thought. He sends her a few hundred euros a month - a small fortune here. She uses the money to buy toys and clothes for her son. Her husband brings her gifts, an iPod and a cell phone.
She told me she loves him, as a friend. He thinks she will join him in two months.
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On the drive to the embassy last month, he didn't realize she was stalling. She wasn't ready to go home with him. She told me she wants to wait until she has been initiated into espiritismo, her religion, which he opposes.
She also worries about her son. If he leaves the country with her, he'll lose a chance to study piano for free in one of Cuba's renowned music schools.
She's confused. She fears she'll miss Cuba, as hard as things are for her. She thinks maybe she'll travel back and forth until she can decide what to do.
This trip to the moon has left her feeling cold.
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