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NEWS RELEASE

For Immediate Release                                                           

                                                                                                                   drnasca@hotmail.com

                     

                                  GROWING UP CATHOLIC IN FIDEL CASTRO’S 1960s CUBA  

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.

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, his hijacking of the Cuban Revolution, and his persecution of the Catholic Church.  When she was twelve, she and her family immigrated to the United States through a US-sponsored Freedom Flight.

Lights Out captures a child happily living the last remnants of traditional Cuban culture and then a child trying to make sense of the world changing around her while climbing the rail-less stairs of San Isidoro’s bell tower to prepare in hiding for her First Holy Communion—all while Fidel was waging a war to stamp out religion, self-reliance, dignity, joy, and hope, especially in Cuban children. Lights Out is a window into true Cuban history and into the life of a people trying to live their Catholic Faith in Fidel Castro’s totalitarian Cuba.

Nasca’s Cuban story is not atypical, yet it is largely untold. English language memoirs of the Cuban Revolution are few. Cuban memoirs of Fidel’s persecution of the Church to establish an atheist state are even fewer, if not non-existent. Through the eyes of a child, Lights Out enlightens and informs by clearly showing the difference between freedom of religion and freedom to worship.  Fidel fooled many adults but he could not fool a child.