With three days left to go in my trip, I was walking around Havana flat broke. I had been spending my convertibles, the secondary currency used by tourists, like Monopoly money. I figured when my cash supply got low, I’d simply slow down my spending. With funds dwindling, I realized I had miscalculated the cost of my lodging, and forgotten about the exit fee at the airport. Cuba is not a place where one can access American banks or use credit cards, so if you run out of cash you cannot get anything. You can’t even get off the island. I had been staying in a casa particular, where specific families are licensed to rent out a bedroom in their homes by the night. The couple putting me up had become like my surrogate Cuban parents; Carlos knew just how I took my coffee, and would stay up waiting for me if I came home late at night. We would sit in their sun room and chat about everything from rations to folkloric dance, and I couldn’t bear the thought of not being able to pay my bill. When he tried to teach me a Spanish phrase using the tricky subjunctive tense, the example he gave translated to, “I would go out with you tonight if I had the money…” I almost choked on my own tongue. What could I sell? Who did I know that I wouldn’t be ashamed to ask for a loan? How would I ever reimburse Carlos and his wife if I couldn’t send a check back from the States? I thought about reciting monologues in the Plaza Vieja for spare change.

I could swallow my pride and ask to borrow from someone in the humanitarian aid group that brought me, but they had already left for the other side of the island. With few cell phones, most everyone is still accustomed to leaving messages at someone’s home and waiting for a return call. My younger sister, who was there with her college, had agreed to cover for me. That is, if anyone could find the person to unlock the dormitory safe, and that could take days. I knew I might not starve, but I would have to beg, borrow or steal to pay for the rest of my stay.

Producer says she’s not dead so she could be back…

Dexter producer Sara Colleton says Julia Stiles may return to the show next season to reprise her role as Lumen.

Colleton said, “She’s alive, so therefore the door is, of course, open [for her return].”

“From the very beginning we knew that Lumen would leave Dexter,” she confirmed. “It’s devastating for Dexter to lose her, and he has never wanted anything before like this. But at the same time there’s something so incredibly direct about Lumen that when she tells him why she has to leave, it makes perfect sense to him.”

Colleton also said that making Lumen likable was “a very hard thing to pull off”.

“Society holds women up to a different standard of behavior, so having a woman who wanted to avenge what was done to her and is single-minded about it was [difficult],” she said. “It’s a thorny, hard character that is not feminine. And yet Julia played it so real that you care about her, and you end up rooting for her and for this odd romance [with Dexter].”

Julia is the December cover girl of Cosmopolitan. She looked gorgeous in a brand new shoot. I added scans to the gallery.

She may play the friend of a serial killer on Dexter, but in real life this actress gets totally freaked out by watching scary movies alone. In this exclusive video, Julia spills the fright flicks that leave her shaking. Watch the clip then pick up the December issue of Cosmo, where Julia talks about the vice she’s not at all apologetic about, her freaky phobia, and what she finds to be most confusing about celebrity life.

You’ve just finished shooting the season finale, right? What was it like to say good-bye to this character?
It was bittersweet. It was nice to complete the thing, but it was sad to say good-bye to everybody. And the last couple of scenes were kind of harrowing.

Do you find those kinds of scenes draining?
I’m not sure if this makes me a masochist or something but I think, as draining as the emotionally and physically demanding scenes can be, they’re also very rewarding. There was one scene in particular where I was surprised by how difficult it was for me to shake the emotional stuff. Yet when a day or two goes by and I can step away from it, I have no regrets. It’s very exciting to know I can go to those places and be surprised by work.

Is there anything you can tell us about those disturbing scenes without giving the story away?
It’s in episode ten, a few episodes away from the finale. The implications of the scene in terms of what Dexter tells me is pretty shattering.

I love the scene, in an early episode, in which you and Dexter meet in the coffee shop and you’re pulling apart all the sugar packets. Where did that impulse come from?
We needed something to physically show how she’s dealing with all this. I thought about what she had experienced before we meet her, about how she would have gotten through all of that. I did a lot of reading about trauma victims, abduction victims, torture victims, and physically, in order to survive, they have to focus on something that helps them detach from their bodies. I needed something that she would keep to help her get through every day of her life after she escaped. The writers had written she was pouring the sugar in piles, and I just changed it to crumpling the paper.

You mentioned reading about trauma — did you do much research for this character?
I read about torture victims and people who were abducted and rape victims, but that all felt very intellectual to me. I needed something that would make me connect emotionally, so the most helpful thing was details, specific memories, or smells or sounds. I would elaborate on those in my imagination, almost like meditating, I would sit and imagine those horrible experiences and eventually your muscles connect to your brain and it settles in. In a certain way, characters become people and you don’t want to do a disservice to them. I wanted to be as dark as I could about what the reality of that experience would be. I felt like I had to do that to do justice to anybody who had an experience even close to that.

Did you have any misgivings about spending all that time in the head of someone really damaged?
No. The thing that really got me is that she wasn’t going to be a victim the whole time.

Lumen is an exception for Dexter: He has rules about how to handle people who are innocent and rules about how to handle people who are a threat to him, but Lumen is both. What do you think really bonds them?
That is so interesting that you say that. The true nature of their bond is something we deal with throughout the season, even up until the finale. What Dexter sees in her is the kind of rage and darkness that has been unleashed in her because of what she’s experienced. They’re connecting about how to channel that hateful, destructive energy.

Okay, bottom line: Why should we keep watching? What does Lumen have in store for us?
She will surprise you. That feral animal quality we saw when she is first introduced shows that she is not going to take things lying down.

America Ferrera and Julia Stiles are set to star in Neil LaBute’s Tony award-nominated play reasons to be pretty on the London stage!

According to producer Howard Panter, the show is “about people being drawn to the superficial, and how we all get seduced by the surface – and how that can be a thorny path.”

LaBute’s material is generally pretty dark and effed up, so we’re curious to see how Stiles and Ferrera would tackle their roles! It would certainly be a change of pace for both of them.

Well, not Stiles – she’s on Dexter right now – but you get what we mean!