ABOUT THE BOOK

Ana Hebra Flaster’s Property of the Revolution: From a Cuban Barrio to a New Hampshire Mill Town is a captivating history-rich memoir that chronicles the extraordinary journey of a Cuban refugee family from post-revolutionary Cuba to a snowy New Hampshire mill town in 1967. Through vivid storytelling and loving vignettes (some of which have been prominently featured on NPR and PBS), Hebra Flaster brings to life her childhood in a vibrant Cuban-American household, complete with an abuela, tia, cousins, and canaries. She reveals how the strong-willed women in her family wove stories of their scrappy Havana barrio and Cuba into daily life, creating a new origin story of triumph over communism and repression, even as they struggled to assimilate to life in a new country.

At heart, all of the intimate stories in Hebra Flaster’s memoir highlight the indomitable spirit of immigrants, as she recounts learning English by watching Gilligan’s Island and deciphering American culture through the lyrics of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Throughout the chaos, her family’s quirky wisdom and her mother’s battle cry of “ponte guapa” (make yourself brave) provide strength when it is needed most, showing how fierce love, stubborn will, and the power of family can put nine new Americans back on their feet – even when they’ve lost nearly everything in the process.

As Hebra Flaster recounts her unlikely journey from refugee child to successful American professional, she eventually uncovers the hidden costs of her family’s displacement. When her own daughter turns five, the age at which Hebra Flaster fled Cuba, long-buried memories resurface, demanding an adult’s reckoning with the psychological trauma of the past – a powerful testament to the enduring impact of the refugee experience, even generations later. Property of the Revolution celebrates the resilience of the immigrant spirit as a whole, while honestly portraying the enormous challenges and complexities of cultural assimilation and identity formation, as well as illustrating how the journey of refugee-dom never truly ends.

Perfect for readers of memoirs, immigrant stories, and family histories, Property of the Revolution offers a unique window into a pivotal moment in Cuban-American history while speaking to the universal themes of loss, reinvention, and the unbreakable bonds that define family.  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ana Hebra Flaster has written about Cuba and the Cuban American experience for national print and online media including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Boston Globe, as well as for her popular Substack, @CubaCurious. Her commentaries and storytelling have also aired on NPR and PBS’s Stories from the Stage. Property of the Revolution, her first book, has won early recognition in several international writing competitions, including being shortlisted in the 2023 Restless Book’s New Immigrant Writing Prize and the 2022 Cintas Creative Writing Fellowship. She loves watching birds, walking in the woods, and chatting with just about anyone. After almost forty years in the Boston area, she recently moved back to southern New Hampshire with her husband, Andy, and their Havenese pups, Luna and Beny Moré.

TALKING POINTS

• Portraits of resilience, fierce love, and the power of the human spirit to overcome adversity as seen through Ana’s gripping journey as a five-year-old Cuban refugee who, within a 48-hour period, lost her home, country, and identity. 
• The importance of storytelling in Ana’s family’s journey and the power of narratives in shaping individual and collective identities – particularly for immigrants struggling to maintain their cultural heritage while assimilating to life in a new country. 
• The matriarchal structure of Hebra Flaster’s family – a not uncommon dynamic in Latin culture – and the vital role of female family wisdom, particularly Ana’s mother’s battle call of “ponte guapa” (make yourself brave), as a source of strength and resilience. 
• How this book gives voice to the “working-class immigrant” story, often overlooked in literature about refugees (and about Cuban immigrants in particular)
• The emotional journey of revisiting childhood traumas as an adult, particularly for refugees who have worked their entire lives to overcome the challenge of being strangers in a new country.
• Ana’s personal journey from being a young Cuban refugee to becoming the proud matriarch of a 27-person Cuban-American clan. 
• The important distinctions between an immigrant, who is choosing to move, a migrant, who plans to go back, and a refugee, who has fled because of their government or for other reasons, and how the blurring of those definitions have led to a skewed perspective on immigration and immigration policy.
• The diversity and complicated dynamics of the Cuban-American community, and how infighting and suspicion still impacts the everyday lives of millions of Americans with Cuban ancestry. 

TIMELY TIE-INS

April

• Drop Everything And Read (DEAR) Day – 12 
• World Book Day – 23 
• Independent Bookstore Day – 26

May

• Mother’s Day – 11

June

• World Refugee Day – 20

August/September/October

• We Love Memoirs Day – August 31 
• World Day of Migrants and Refugees – September 29
• Cuban Independence Day – October 10