NEWS
RELEASE
Lights Out: A Cuban Memoir of Betrayal and
Survival
Castro is dead, but his dark legacy lives on in a forever-changed Cuba. Just how changed is revealed in Dania Rosa Nasca’s just released book, Lights Out: A Cuban Memoir of Betrayal and Survival.
As a child in 1960s Cuba, staring at her old, black and white Philco TV, Dania did not know that the man ranting and waving his arms like a maniac was imitating Hitler. She only knew that he—Fidel Castro—was making people disappear and would soon make her family choose between family and freedom.
Lights Out, Dania’s portrait of the loved and lost Cuba, is a heartbreaking look at the island and its people. She chronicles Fidel Castro’s rise to power and the truth behind the dictator. His fascination with Hitler, Mussolini, and other fascists lead to a totalitarian state of sorrow and pain.
Lights Out captures a child happily living the last remnants of traditional Cuban culture and then a child with an empty stomach trying to make sense of the world changing around her—all while Fidel was waging a war to stamp out self-reliance, dignity, joy, and hope, especially in Cuban children. Lights Out awakens and delights. The book is a window into true Cuban history and the life of a three-generational Cuban family trying to survive the catastrophic cultural and economic changes Castro imposed.
Her Cuban story is not untypical, yet it is largely untold. English language memoirs of the Cuban Revolution are few. Cuban memoirs such as Carlos Eire’s award winning Waiting for Snow in Havana lack the historical context that offers and skim the surface of the disaster the Cuban Revolution became in the years after Eire left for the United States. Lights Out combines the childhood memoir intimacy of Molnar’s Under a Red Sky with the hard-hitting historical accuracy and relevance of Demick’s Nothing to Envy.
Castro is determined to erase the past, but Lights Out is a monument to the Cuba before Castro.
Nasca was born in 1958 in Holguín, the City of Parks, Oriente, Cuba, the year the Cuban Revolution drove Batista from power. She was given a front-row seat to Fidel Castro’s betrayal of the Cuban people and his hijacking of the Cuban Revolution. When she was twelve, she and her family immigrated to the United States through a US-sponsored Freedom Flight.
https://www.amazon.com/Lights-Out-Memoir-Betrayal-Survival-ebook/dp/B01MG5NEL6/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1
