How to Say Goodbye in Cuban

How to Say Goodbye in Cuban. By Daniel Miyares. Anne Schwartz Books / Random House Graphic, ISBN 978-0593568309 (softcover), 2025. US$13.99. 240 pages.

Another good book from 2025 that I've read just now, in 2026:

How to Say Goodbye in Cuban, a middle-grade GN set during the Cuban Revolution, is not a memoir but a fictionalized biography of the author Daniel Miyares' father, Carlos, or at least a character based on his father. In the back matter, Miyares acknowledges that he "aged [Carlos] up a few years" to better "connect" with the book's target audience; I take it that a middle-grade coming-of-age story was the goal. It seems obvious that the story entailed a lot of imaginative projection and fictive patterning as well as serious research. Carlos is the first-person narrator, and in effect a mouthpiece character explaining the Cuban Revolution to young readers. This is a challenge, because Carlos doesn't really know what's going on. Essentially, the novel treats the Cuban Revolution as a family story interrupted, and partly dictated, by obscure outside forces. These forces, and how his parents respond to them, frustrate Carlos, and anger him. 

Historical exposition of this kind is a heavy lift for a concise middle-grade book, but Miyares meets the challenge ably. While leaning into familiar tropes of children's historical fiction (children overhearing or spying on adults and questioning them; adults trying to protect children from knowing), Miyares also provides interchapter pages that, very briefly, give the larger political context from a perspective beyond that of Carlos. These pages consist of just one image and one or a few sentences each. They punctuate the narrative. Miyares mostly lets things unfold from Carlos' viewpoint without added explanation, while also showing how partial and uncertain Carlos' narration is. In fact, Carlos gets frustrated when patronizing elders try to shield him from political news (a major plot point). The novel's messages are mixed: Carlos would like to know what is going on, and clearly deserves to know more, but on the occasions when he does learn what adults have been keeping from him, he is overwhelmed. In this way, Miyares stresses both children's need for honest communication and their vulnerability. ​

In the back matter, Miyares acknowledges that this book project began some twenty years ago with a sudden outpouring of stories by his father Carlos. At the time, he notes, the two of them "weren't close," yet the project became a way for them to "make up for lost time." Interestingly, much of the book's suspense stems from Carlos' fraught relationship with his own stern father, Papi, a man driven, first, by dreams of success, and then by the desperate need to get his family out of Cuba. Carlos' unhappy displacement from his idyllic rural hometown, caused by his father's ambitions, and his anger toward his father's remote and controlling ways, fuel the story, even as Miyares sketches in looming political dangers. The book's anticommunist (but not reactionary) thrust could compare with that of the 2011 graphic novel Cuba: My Revolution; its depiction of popular revolution turning into statist oppression might seem familiar to readers of, say, Persepolis, The Best We Could Do, or Feeding Ghosts. But the father-son dynamic defines the novel as, first and foremost, an intimate coming-of-age story happening against a political backdrop. The resolution of that dynamic feels a bit fated and oversimple, I think: a quick reconciliation just when things seem most difficult. This comes just before the book's final act, in which Papi has to do some truly dangerous and violent things to ensure the family's passage out of Cuba. Had the father-son reconciliation not happened first, the book's climax might have left a frightening or ambiguous impression of the father. Creative license and a shaping hand are evident in these moves. 

Miyares is an experienced children's author and picture book illustrator, one who seems to have an earned sense of that market and its genre expectations. How to Say Goodbye in Cuban is a children's graphic novel, not coincidentally or as a matter of marketing only, but because Miyares has a firm commitment to creating for child readers. I see that both in the book's sensitivity and in its silences and feints. I also see Miyares' picture-book craft in the drawings, which are rendered in old-school, predigital ink and watercolor (though lettered in a custom digital font based on Miyares' handwriting). The style is less cartoony than illustrative, marked by extensive hatching (delicate penwork) and evocative washes of color. I enjoy seeing the grain, the earned texture, of the drawings. Sometimes, especially when conjuring place, the pages are very immersive. On the other hand, sometimes the scene-setting is loose and gestural. Miyares avoids overcrowding and has a good sense of when to let the page breathe out. If his depictions of sudden action or movement are sometimes a bit stilted, or his compromises between naturalism and stylization a bit tentative, still, the book is a feast of textures and Carlos and his family remain vivid and recognizable throughout.

On balance, How to Say Goodbye in Cuban is an ambitious and assured, but still vulnerable, open-hearted, and deeply personal work. It wears its didacticism lightly, and at times seems genuinely heartsore and challenging, though its ending is affirming enough. This historical fiction could be a revelation for many young readers, as its depiction of the Cuban Revolution is not one-sided or flat.  It's worth reading for comics lovers, period.