Nunca fui primera dama

Revised, corrected and augmented by its author. Includes a new chapter: "Without Fidel"

“The kidnapper has died; the cage has been left open and I do not feel the impulse of coming out but rather the panic that the unknown will come through the door. How are we supposed to live now, without someone who tells us what we are meant to do.”

The previous lines summarize the paradoxical state of today’s Cuba, both liberated and orphaned at the same time after the death of Fidel Castro. Several generation of Cubans scarified a good chunk of their lives and per-sonal hopes in the pursuit of national objectives and ide-als… Nadia Guerra, nightly radio host and born long after the revolutionary generation, is not convinced with the utopia and most of the time is at odds with the regime, even beyond the political reasons. Today she seeks to settle scores with herself.Nadia, her mother Albis Torres, who abandoned her when she was a child, and the exceptional Celia Sánchez Mandulay, assistant and probably Fidel’s lover, are the three main women in this story of recovery and fare-wells, of nostalgias and transformations, of exiles and continuation. Everything in Cuba, it seems, is either a loyalty or a betrayal.