A homecoming in Havanna: Elena Sheppard didn't think much about her Cuban heritage until she visited the country her mother left decades earlier.

There is the glow of a love story surrounding my family's memories of Cuba; It is the story of the island my mother's family fled in 1960 when she was just 8 years old. My grandmother and her friends talk loudly of their previously perfect lives--how enchanting it was before Fidel Castro came to power in 1959.

I grew up in New York City--away from the Miami-Cuba hub--and my father is not Cuban, so I had never paid much attention to my Cuban heritage.

All that changed when I made my first visit to Cuba with my family in 2003. The scene in the Havana airport was incredible: Hundreds of people waiting by the exit, cheering and holding signs. They looked at us like celebrities just for having come from the outside world.

From the moment we left the airport, the effects of Cuba's failed economy were obvious. The country has been crippled by the Communist system and by a 44-year-old American embargo that has taken the country's nearest and most logical trading partner away.

Havana seemed like a city that had recently been bombed. The buildings were decaying; some had large holes in the walls, so we could see straight into people's ring rooms. Later in our trip, we were told never to walk on the sidewalk to avoid being hit by the building pieces that inevitably fall.

AVOIDING THE FORBIDDEN

Our evening with my cousins, Ana-Maria and Mariana, sticks in my mind. It had taken us years of paperwork and planning to arrive at their door. Five people from three generations rived in their tiny house. The conversation drifted from topic to topic, carefully avoiding forbidden subjects like politics, Castro, and civil rights.

They asked us about life in our world, afuera as they called it: outside. They asked us if we had stores in Brooklyn. And over the course of our conversation, I began to realize how different their lives were from mine and how trapped they were.

When we said we were planning to go to the beach at Varadero, Mariana said her boyfriend worked at a hotel there. Naturally, we asked her to join us.

"I am not allowed," she told us. I asked why: "Because I am Cuban."

It was shocking to discover that any place tourists go is off-limits for Cubans, while my U.S. passport and foreign last name let me through any door in Cuba.

When I was back in New York, far from the hardships my Cuban relatives live with, I found myself wondering, am I Cuban enough? Do I, as a New Yorker with so many opportunities, have the right to call myself Cuban?

But I realized that heritage is not relative. I am Cuban no matter where I rive. Visiting Cuba made me appreciate my American side, but it is my life afuera that makes me appreciate my Cuban side.

Elena Sheppard grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. She is a sophomore at Princeton University.