When Northwestern theater and creative writing junior Lux Vargas wrote and brought to life La Ventanita, she created a space of rest and home for those who live in the grief of not belonging anywhere, yet still yearn for a sense of belonging together. By closing night, Vargas had mothers and daughters, once splintered by politics, in each other's arms. In a small, sold-out theater in Evanston, the story on stage became a mirror: centering on mothers who fled the country and daughters who left again for college.
Performed four times on May 9 and 10, La Ventanita unfolds in a fictional cafecito window inspired by the walk-up restaurant counters found throughout Miami. “The ventanita breeds conversations and political exchange,” said Vargas.
At the center of the play is Renata, a longtime Cuban immigrant who owns the ventanita. The story follows Ines, her college-bound niece who wants to leave Miami behind, and Genesis, a newly arrived immigrant from Cuba struggling to find her place in the U.S. Their lives intersect as the real-life Patria y Vida protests erupt in South Florida and across Cuba, forcing each woman to confront the ghosts of displacement, the cost of political detachment, and the emotional burden of leaving home behind. As the protests escalate, the play turns surreal — a dreamlike sequence filled with music, dance, and protest, revealing Renata’s internalized grief and guilt for staying silent. Meanwhile, Genesis wrestles with survivor’s guilt and ultimately accepts that she may never return to Cuba. Her small act of adding mango coffee to the café’s menu becomes a quiet but powerful gesture: a way of honoring the past while carving a new future. At its core, La Ventanita is about what it means to grieve a country you can’t return to — and the uneasy peace that comes with trying to move forward not despite that loss, but because of it.
The song, Patria y Vida, released in 2021, replaced Fidel Castro’s slogan Patria o Muerte (“homeland or death”) with a call for “homeland and life.” That summer, the soundtrack became a route for Cubans to protest, a defiant anthem against food shortages, censorship, and repression. This song served as a rallying cry, giving voice to years of frustration for Cubans both on the island and in exile. In the play, this protest surfaces in the living rooms and kitchens – in mothers who still defend the revolution as survival and daughters who see Patria y Vida as the urgency of demanding more.
Vargas began writing the play two years ago after finishing her first quarter. Missing home, she started to write characters who reminded her of the community she left behind.
“I wanted to make sure that people understood that you can't just generalize a group of people under the umbrella of where they come from. We are American too, like we were living these different experiences, and we Latinos come in multitudes,” said Vargas. “I really wanted people to understand that. Despite how conflicted I felt knowing the majority of Cubans had voted for Trump, or that Miami-Dade County had turned red, I knew that I still wanted to tell this story, and I know that there were people who wanted to be heard and wanted their story to be told.”
In the hands of the student cast, these characters became family. For Cuban-American Northwestern students Rachel Ramirez and Steph Martinez, the roles made them — and more importantly, their mothers and Steph’s grandmother — feel seen in an institution that has long overlooked their stories.
For parents and grandparents, the revolution is as real today as it was in the past — many remember when Fidel Castro’s rebels overthrew Fulgencio Batista in 1959 and Cuba became a communist state. That shift forced thousands into exile, including the families whose daughters now wrestle with how to carry both their parents’ trauma and their own sense of belonging.
As liberal daughters of Cuban Republican mothers since they were 11 years old, Ramirez and Martinez have held a friendship that has carried them through college and helped them build communities that feel like home. Ramirez and Martinez became my friends and later my roommates after our own long search to find familiar faces in a predominantly white institution with few spaces for Hispanic students.
Senior Communications major Ramirez connected deeply with Renata’s quiet ache — the experience of building a new life in a new country while still mourning what was left behind. Resonating with Renata’s grief over Cuba and her complicated Americanness helped Ramirez feel less alone. The play made it easier for her mother to understand that she carries Cuba — and her mother’s story — with her, wherever she goes.
“It's hard to disagree with the play, it's saying people are dying, people are hungry, the dictatorship is restricting our freedom of speech,” said Ramirez. “In terms of her political views, it's remembering that she's been through a lot. She didn't have a good experience growing up. She was very poor; communism affected her insanely. And then in terms of how she handles that, and addresses me about it, it's remembering that she has her own trauma that she hasn't overcome, and like in her way of expressing her emotions, and she really just wants to be heard, and I don't think she was very heard growing up.”
Learning and Organizational Change major Martinez, who played Ines, added that the way her mother talks about those issues stems from unprocessed trauma and a deep desire to be heard — something she likely wasn’t afforded as a child.
“Trauma takes over knowledge,” said Martinez. “I have to remember that my mom is not a bad person, and that's honestly it. She's done everything for me.”
At a time when Cuban-American identity is often reduced to voting patterns, La Ventanita dares to be messy, tender, and human. It doesn’t ask for resolution — it asks for recognition. In a cultural landscape that often flattens or romanticizes the Hispanic experience, Vargas’s play pushes back.
“Cuba is not a tourist destination. That’s not what our families fled,” said Martinez. Cuba is not a Caribbean paradise — it’s a dictatorship where everyday people can’t access basic necessities. Tourism dollars don’t reach families; they fuel the regime.
La Ventanita offers a return. In a world that flattened Cuban identity into red and blue, the play became a place where mothers and daughters could finally see and hear each other again.
Maria Jose Arango Torres, a student at Northwestern University and an intern with the Latino News Network.
