As Nieve grows older as an independent woman, she faces the struggle to conform to her country's policies. The lifestyle in Cuba is captured in Nieve's diary in various entries, such as when he states: “But we live somewhere between what is forbidden and what is required. We don't really have that spirit of solidarity that they had in the 1960s. We live hidden in our bunk beds, the one thing everyone can agree to love and respect. Sometimes we sleep two to a bunk, four in total. Our cabinets are community property. We lend each other clothes on weekends. Nothing you bring to school is ever exclusively yours.” (114) Nieve's experience would make her especially wary of an environment where people are expected to rely on each other. As friends and family desperately try to leave the country, Nieve must pretend to be a devoted daughter of her government. Toward the end of the book, everything Nieve knows seems to leave her for her own gain. Oswaldo, Alan, Cleo, and other important characters in her life all leave the country in search of their future, leaving the promise of help with Nieve, but seemingly forgetting her once she disappears. In the last entry of the book Nieve leaves the reader with a final summary “Around here, I continue to write in my diary, wintering with my thoughts, unable to move. condemned to be in the exact same place” (254) Only in