Real Talk with Tina and Ann
Tina and Ann met as journalists covering a capital murder trial, 15 years ago. Tina has been a tv and radio personality and has three children. Ann has a master's in counseling and has worked in the jail system, was a director of a battered woman's shelter/rape crisis center, worked as an assistant director at a school for children with autism, worked with abused kids and is currently raising her three children who have autism. She also is autistic and was told would not graduate high school, but as you can see, she has accomplished so much more. The duo share their stories of overcoming and interview people who are making it, despite what has happened. This is more than just two moms sharing their lives. This is two women who have overcome some of life's hardest obstacles. Join us every Wednesday as we go through life's journey together. There is purpose in the pain and hope in the journey.
Real Talk with Tina and Ann
The Heart Remembers: A Young Cuban Immigrant’s Story of Escape, Family, and Finding Home
A motorcycle in the barrio. Forty‑eight hours to leave. A nearly six‑year‑old whose world narrows to the sound of an engine and the shape of fear—then widens again across an ocean. We welcome author Ana Hebra Flaster to explore her memoir, Property of the Revolution, and the intimate mechanics of exile: how a family becomes “gusano,” how permission to leave turns into a three‑year wait, and how love and duty hold when language and home are stripped away.
We follow Ana from post‑revolution Cuba to a New Hampshire mill town, where hunger, racism, and winter cold collide with simple, stubborn hope. She unpacks the difference between immigrants, migrants, and refugees—and why the words we choose can open doors or close minds. There’s the chilling classroom ice‑cream lesson that reveals how indoctrination works, and the everyday definition of freedom: the right to dissent without losing your future, the ability to live without ideology deciding your job, your school, or your healthcare. Ana’s mother becomes our north star—make yourself brave—standing up to mobs, protecting strangers, and refusing to adore any leader above principle.
We talk trauma without turning away: a child’s sleepless nights, the quiet tears of a grandmother who left her father behind, and the family story that kept them afloat—We won; we are not victims—until it was safe to name the wounds. There are vivid cultural insights, too: reading America through Rudolph the Red‑Nosed Reindeer (performance as currency), and Tía’s act of defiance—smuggling her doctorate out of Cuba sewn into a bra—because education earned should never be state property. Along the way, we challenge myths about Cuba’s past, listen for the throughline of dignity, and honor the resilience that keeps families together when history tries to break them apart.
If this conversation moved you, share it with someone who cares about freedom and family, subscribe for part two, and leave a review with the moment that stayed with you most. Your voice helps these stories travel.
Welcome to Real Talk with Tina and Anne. I am Anne. Today we welcome author Anna Hebra Flaster. When I opened your book, Property of the Revolution from a Cuban barrio to a New Hampshire milltown, I just had to have you on the show. The very first line stopped me cold, and I am not kidding you. I sat there staring at the page, thinking about what freedom really means. And I'm not talking about the flag-waving kind, but the kind that you fight for quietly, with fear in your throat and hope in your hands. Anna was just shy of her sixth birthday when her family fled post-revolutionary Cuba. They had 48 hours to get out, and they left behind everything: their home, their belongings, and the life that they'd known. What they found in America wasn't easy either. Language barriers, racism, hunger, and the ghost of trauma that followed them across the ocean. But through it all, Anna found her voice, first as a child learning to survive, and later as a writer determined to remember. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and on MPR's All Things Considered. And now with her debut book, Property of the Revolution, she takes us deep into the soul of exile, what it costs, what it teaches, and what it means to build a life with between worlds. Anna, thank you so much for being here. Oh gosh, Anne, a total pleasure.
SPEAKER_02:Really. I love what you're doing with your um show. And I've been enjoying these um recent episodes of yours.
SPEAKER_00:I think a lot of the themes carry across. Well, well, thank you for listening. And thank you so much for being here. You know, we don't get political on a show. We really don't. And this isn't about politics, it's about people. And your book really made me think about what it means to seek safety when home is no longer safe. Let's set the stage. In the late 50s and in the 60s, there was a lot going on. Cuba was under Batista dictatorship marked by corruption, censorship, and violence. Many, including your mother, hoped that Fidel Castro's revolution would bring freedom. But when it came into power, when he came into power in the late 50s and 59, I think, hope turned to fear. Businesses were seized, people disappeared, and families were torn apart. But your family made the impossible choice to leave everything behind for safety and a future in America. You were between two countries, sometimes feeling at home in both, and sometimes not feeling at home anywhere. You arrived here as a child after living in fear and witnessing so much loss. Can you take me back to when your family had to leave?
SPEAKER_02:That was a great setting of context, and it's complicated. I think you really kind of captured the the stage. As you as you said, my mother, my family had believed that democracy would be restored. And then little by little, after the revolution, they saw one kind of freedom after another disappear. And each family, each family member came to the realization that their dream had vanished and that they were now living in a nightmare where they had barely recognized society, Cuban society, neighbors that had lived together for generations in the same barrio suddenly didn't trust each other because anybody could be an informant, because ideology, political ideology surpassed humanity. And that's always at risk in civilization, as we know. As you said earlier, it's not about politics. This is just what happens. People can glom on to an ideology, and it can be a religious ideology too, and we can lose sight of the human being in front of us. That's what they were basically seeing. But each of them, I call them the viejos, the older, the elders. The viejos all saw them, saw these this reality emerging at different times and in different ways. So that cost that caused a problem within the family because they weren't all seeing the same thing. And when my mother and father decided in 1964 that they needed to find a way out of the country, which suddenly, for the first time in Cuban history, Cubans couldn't just get on, you know, buy a ticket and leave. They had to get the government's permission. And Cuba, until you know, for decades after the revolution, remained one of the few countries that requires a citizen to obtain the government's permission to leave. It's actually a universal human right, the right to enter your country and leave your country. And that was denied. So as they realized that this was a new obstacle, they began searching for the rules. How could that happen? Because the government wasn't announcing how people could leave the country. They wanted everybody to stay. They had already seen a huge exodus uh in in the years after the revolution. So my parents found out through what I they called radio bimba, radio big mouth, which was the word on the street, that if you went to a certain office, if you went to a certain office in the Ministry of the Interior building and you asked a certain question and you went to another person and you did everything right, you could apply to leave the country. And and then that put you in gusano territory. You were an enemy from that point on because you were declaring yourself an enemy of the revolution. You lost your job. You really were at the bottom of society, and anybody could do whatever they wanted to you because you were a worm, a gusano, that's what the government called us. So from that point on, you waited, and we waited three years, not knowing if or when we would get the permiso, the permission. And this opening scene, which you referred to in Property of the Revolution, is of that moment when I, as a nearly six-year-old, I have no idea what's happening, but suddenly there's there's a motorcycle coming into the barrio. I had figured out that the motorcycle meant something big was going down. And in fact, that time it was our family. Our family was the family that was about to lose it all and win it all. So it was a moment, and I talk about this in the first chapter too, where the my parents' dreams came true, but they broke their hearts at the same time.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Because now, yes, they'd be able to leave the country, but that meant that they would never they knew they would never see most of their family ever again because they couldn't get out and we couldn't come back in. And that's usually a an important distinction too. Here is that refugees are part of the immigrant experience, but they have a different um path into the other country and out of their country. Usually they leave with nothing. Um, usually they don't want to leave. And usually they can't go back uh for safety reasons, for political reasons. That was that moment where where life was going to be different. It was the moment of the loss of our Cuban world when that motorcycle came into the the barrio. And it's it's uh you know, there's a sound effect that that's tied to it. I still to this day when I hear a motorcycle, I have a a reaction.
SPEAKER_00:Oh my gosh. I never out of reading your entire book, I never made that connection. And I remember you saying that in your book. But yeah, you know, sights, sounds, all that stuff can bring things back like it's right there. For children, yeah. Oh my gosh, especially for children. Absolutely. It was petrifying for you. I'm sure you were just absolutely terrified. Um, your parents had to make some tough decisions. I mean, they were promised freedom and democracy, but of course that didn't happen. Leaving family behind was against your culture. And when some when safety, when safety became the priority, and you had that 48 hours to leave home, surrender your possessions, and step into an unknown country with nothing but your fear and hope, there is loss and then there's loss. And there are so many layers of loss here. You had to leave so much behind. Possessions are one thing, but like your abuela, your abuela had to leave her father behind. Share with me, if you can, the depth of the loss that your family went through. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Uh the it's it's the depth of that loss has taken me my whole life to fully understand. Because uh the women in our family were so strong and they were very forward thinking. My grandmother less so um because of everything that she left behind. But the story we told in our family, or that they told us, was that we had won. We had beaten communism, we had beaten Castro, we had won our freedom, forward march. But then as time went on and I grew up, I realized it hadn't been so simple and there had been great loss. At the top of the of the sacrifices was my grandmother's, were my grandmother's sacrifices. My grandmother didn't really want to come with her daughters to the United States and leave her father and her brother behind, knowing that, and she was right, she would never see them again. She did it because her brother said, you know, I'll take care of papa, you take care of your daughters and your grandchildren. When those women and their husbands are working, who's going to take care of those children? And so she did. And it was a time when there was no Spanish TV, no Spanish internet. You couldn't find a Spanish magazine in in New Hampshire in 1967. And that's one of the differences today. These people, these these refugees from Syria, Ukraine, and and other uh places where there's political upheaval, there's at least a little bit of a chance that they'll be able to hear their native tongue. And that power of your home language and losing that is another loss. It's another layer of loss. I can't imagine. So I think that my grandmother, in the end of her life, um, saw that it was the right thing to do, but I think it took her a long time to come to terms with that. And it affected my mother and my aunt too, because and and my father and my uncle, we all grew up in, as you know, in the same house. Right. And we would have in Cuba and we did here in the United States in a duplex next to each other. But I think everyone understood in the house what Abuela had given up and honored that as much as possible. And uh I think in a way we're inspired by that. Like what we have given up and what she has given up is so great. Let's make this the best possible experience for everybody. And one of the ways they did that was staying together, keeping the family together, which isn't easy. And then you know in the United States, when you have so many opportunities and people pick up and fly across the country for work or for school, that didn't happen. You didn't leave your elders behind in Cuba. And that's what what haunted them for the rest of their lives. It haunted them.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I and I I can imagine that that would have been the hardest decision that Yorubuela ever made in her entire life. And um, I really respect that uh that your heritage, your culture really respects their elders so much so that they include them in everything and then they bring them along with everything that you don't leave them behind, that you don't, I mean, that you keep your family together. I think that uh that's just so respected. That's the way it should be. It should be that way.
SPEAKER_02:And it's really hard. You know, I I'm now the vieja, I'm now the elder. And I have a tough job here. You know, I'm trying to hold together a 27, 29 member Cuban American clan that is growing up in a very different America with lots of opportunities and lots of uh distractions. So getting people together is so hard. And it that's what you need to do. It's not about zooming, it's not about texting or follow or uh even a phone call. It's the face-to-face, and that's something in the book. You know, you you've you've you you were immersed in the book, it sounds like you know that that was a day-to-day contact every day, those two families, for better or worse, and a bond happens with that that you can't have. It just doesn't happen. And so I'm I'm sitting here trying to hold the whole thing together, understanding that it's impossible, but doing what I can't. And part of it is through the through property of the revolution. Now, now the next generation will know.
SPEAKER_00:Right. I love that. Um, I did want to ask you a question about the importance between immigrants, migrants, and refugees, because you do bring that up in your book. For our listeners, can you help us understand the differences and why this matters?
SPEAKER_02:Yes, I'm I am no expert. It's not like I've I've studied this, um, but I have lived it and I have written about it as well. So those three groups, migrants, refugee immigrants, are all you know, people who are coming into another country. They're coming for generally different reasons. The immigrant is coming, a regular immigrant is coming because um they see an opportunity in another country, they have dreams, they want to have a life in that country. Uh, they know that they'll be able to generally go back and see their family and return to their culture, and that they their family can come. Uh generally, a refugee is fleeing uh a climate disaster, a political disaster, war, and they're not they don't want to leave, they are forced to leave. They usually they usually give up everything, they can't take anything with them, they usually cannot return. They their family usually cannot come with them. Okay. Not all of the family. A migrant is perhaps not a true immigrant, in that a migrant is someone who is coming and going and and between two countries or multiple countries. Although in this country, we've sort of lost track of what those words mean. So we we're calling people at the border migrants. You know, I don't think those people have any intention of going back, or most of them. I think they're in some cases they should be considered refugees. They're fill fleeing political, uh massive political unrest. Perhaps they have uh they're fearing for their lives, and uh yet they're being called migrants. And I don't think that that's an accurate term. I I I sometimes society finds itself, I think, in situations where our vocabulary hasn't caught up yet to what we're seeing. What so I feel we I feel like we we're lacking some vocabulary can help us understand what's driving people and what their journey is all about.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think that that's really important that people understand the differences. And I'm so glad that you kind of clarified that because I don't think that a lot of people do understand the difference. So I'm glad that you explained that a little bit. One of the things you had many stories that stuck out to me in your book, but one of them was when there was a so there were soldiers that were going into the classrooms and started to infiltrate young innocent minds. And you brought up about how they would say, I mean, pray to God, and there was no ice cream, and pray to Fidel. And oh, the ice cream is magically here. So trust Fidel over your own faith. How did moments like that shape Cuban youth and the way that you that they saw things and the way that you saw trust, faith, and authority?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Um, I that didn't experience that. Um but my mother, that scene is the moment that my mother decides this is not the revolution I I risked my life for. Uh so the the soldier came in, soldiers came in and said, Do you mind if we teach this class? She said, you know, what was she gonna say? And that was the message. Who here likes ice cream? Everything had disappeared from shelves, and those kids went crazy. Well, bow your heads, pray to God for ice cream. Oh, raise your heads, oh no, ice cream. Okay, bow your heads and pray to God, pray to fee for ice cream. And the soldiers came in and put ice cream cups on all the desks, and that was the moment. And so um that there was no question that education and this so-called freedom of ed of education was for a large part of it, if not the majority of the focus was reshaping minds, young minds, and preparing a revolutionary mentality. And that was the revolution's main thing was you uh you revered this human being. God and spirituality and religion were not uh to be trusted. And to this day, religious Cubans are persecuted under this new revolutionary society. It's just not something that is valued by revolutionary society, at least in Cuba. And I think, well, Marx, I think Marx was the one who called religion the opium of the masses, and they certainly believe it that in Cuba, the regime.
SPEAKER_00:With you explaining this to me, it just keeps making it reminds me of just the freedom that you experienced once you reached here. Um, what does it mean? What does freedom mean to you as a Cuban immigrant who had to run with her family to safety?
SPEAKER_02:Uh everything. It means everything. And um I know that there are people in the United States who think that we're at the precipice of losing our all of our freedoms. And I can see some some signs of trouble and concern and all of that, but right now you can still stand in the middle of the street, shout horrible things about our president. Uh you're not gonna lose your job. You're not gonna, well, you know, we have some some high-profile entertainers who've had some issues, but then again, a private company has a right to fire its employees uh if if so, if if it decides it's not um to their benefit to keep the employee. But what you want to do, and what we've always strived to do here, is keep that separation so that political ideology isn't affecting who can get a job, who can uh go to school, how you're how you're gonna live your life. And that's what happens in these authoritarian regimes, whether they're from the left or the right. You it's a political apartheid system where if you believe the right thing, if you think the right way, you have a whole other kind of life ahead of you. But if you don't, you you will not go to school, your children will not go to school, um, your uh job opportunities are lit limited when you need health care. This happens in Cuba too. When you need in supposedly Cuba has this wonderful healthcare system, which is a complete myth. Um uh and and it is not even and equal. And members of the political elite, the military elite do not go to the regular hospitals that average Cubans go to. And certainly, if you're if you're um opposed to the regime and you've you've come out and you've challenged it in any way, criticized it, you're not going publicly, you're uh not going to even be treated. Uh, there are cases of people being turned away at emergency rooms and a dentist's office, and no, you're not gonna be treated. So that's what freedom, what not having freedom looks like. So it's everything, and and standing up for freedom and being on alert and doing the decent thing and calling it out when it really is being eroded is critical.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, your mom had a saying, which I won't say in Spanish, but um in English, it was make yourself brave.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And guava. And she made those hard decisions based, I think, on a mother's instinct, which I felt as a mom, you know, even she would do anything to protect her immediate family. And like I said earlier, family was everything in your culture. And your mommy was courageous. Can you tell us more about who she was? Because, you know, in your book, what I loved was it's not just your story, it's everybody has a different story that's woven throughout this entire book beautifully, by the way. So I was hoping that you could talk more about her. I she was something else.
SPEAKER_02:Um she was just this person. She she knew fear, but she conquered her fear uh a lot. As a 17-year-old, when she risked her life collecting money and medicine for the rebels who would one day take over and eventually force her to abandon her culture, her life, as she knew it, and cost her everything, almost everything. Uh, then she, you know, there were examples in the book in Property of the Revolution where she stands up to that mob as they're denouncing a teacher and takes them to task and says, You are wrong. This is a decent teacher, this is a decent person, and you're not being fair. And she risked a lot then because she we were already at Gusano. She also saved the life of the man who saved her when she was caught after the revolution, this man who had saved her from being arrested while Batista was in power and she was working with the rebels. A mob showed up at his house to hang him because he was a policeman under Batista. And she stood up for him then and saved him. And then in the United States, she, I think uh you may remember, she risked her own job as the manager of this CVS, one of the first CVSs in in New England, because the eight the the investigators who came by to detect theft thought this woman had stolen something or had not run up something properly. And she she said, No, that that woman, I know that young woman, and you're not gonna ruin her reputation by accusing her of something that I know she could not have done. And then she was right and they found the evidence. And so she saved the girl's job, but she saved the girl's reputation. And on and on, I could tell you so many other stories like that. But what what she what she taught me was that you make yourself brave. Make yourself brave, do the right thing, be decent, be a good human being. Uh and we know what that is. We know what that is, and stand for justice whenever you can. Right. And part of part of um the mission of the book, speaking of justice, is and you as a mom and a grandmom know probably, and you've seen it, that children sense injustice, even though they may not have the words for it, but they know they know when there's an injustice happening. Yes. And I think that that night and and what happened to us stuck with me as an injustice as a child. And I think that writing the book has been a way of redeeming the injustice, telling the story, and honoring what what people what these people did in the face of an injustice, what they accomplished, and largely by staying together, which is a big part of the message of the book.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, your mom, like you said, she did risk her life to support Fidel Castro because she truly believed that restoring democracy, that they that was going to happen and bring back the 1940 constitution, but once that did not happen, and communism was everywhere and complete control over the people. Yeah. Um, your mommy said, and this is a direct quote from the book, that a certain level of mistrust is essential in life, especially when choosing sides. Her country had over-trusted one man and then failed to stop the train as he ran it off the track. They'd paid dearly for that mistake. Looking back, how did that lesson of trust, mistrust, and blind faith in leadership touch your family and your life?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I think in that same page, I talk about how she never adored anyone outside of her children. Again, uh, she never she loved music and she, you know, was a fan of musicians. Um, she was a big, you know, Tom Jones in the 70s and, you know, but she never let herself cross that line of adoration. And you see it sometimes. People put everything they have into a political figure. That figure becomes godlike. This happens with religion too. And so that skepticism stayed with her, and we learned from it. Um, she they were very skeptical about political parties in the United States, too, uh, and saw problems with both. Although they tended toward conservative politics more because of foreign policy. They wanted a strong foreign policy, thinking that they could avoid for us what had happened to them, and and that democracy would be protected more if conservatives were in power. That's a that's a line of thinking that's still strong in the Latino community, especially the immigrant Latino community. Okay. Um, so that that was the main thing is don't don't just believe what people are telling you. Always wonder what their agenda is. Um, and yet the goodness in in her and in and my father and my aunt and uncle, my grandmother toward other human beings as human beings, that never faltered. That was different. Someone in need, someone um needed to be helped, they were going to help them. And you saw we saw that during Marielle. I don't I don't know if you remember that part in the book. There have been many waves of exile, exiles, and emigration from Cuba after the revolution. And one of them was Marielle, the Marielle boat lift in 1980. And when all of our relatives from up and down the East Coast were saying, don't sponsor one of those couples, whatever, they decided they were going to sponsor one of them. Right. Thinking that, you know, yes, there might be, because it this was true, Fidel had opened prisons and was actually in some cases hand selecting the criminals who would be forced to go on the boats of the people whose families had come to take them. So you couldn't just take your family. You were gonna take violent criminals with you. And in some cases, um, he he all they also took the patients from mental wards from psychiatric hospitals. Okay. Anyway, so that was the the the the rumor, but they didn't care. They said, no, this country's been really good to us and we're gonna help a couple. So they wanted us to sponsor a married couple and they did. And you know what happened with that. They had a little surprise with that. Right, right. But it's an example of how mistrust but goodness. Ske skepticism, but do the right thing and but trust your own sense of what's right and wrong.
SPEAKER_00:And I I think that your mom had a very strong Instinct, even with her gut. I mean, she wanted what was right for everybody. She just wanted what was right. And, you know, even if we end up trusting and it ends up not working out, I mean, her, she just wanted the best for your country and for her family. And you can't fault her or anybody for that. She just wanted democracy for her family that and her and everybody in your country. That was all she wanted. Yep, she did.
SPEAKER_02:And and you know, there's this theory, it's still not it's still a misunderstanding that I think a lot of Americans and a lot of people internationally have about the Cuban Revolution that the Cuban people wanted a communist revolution. They did not want a communist revolution, they wanted a return to democracy. And the three rebel fronts all promised the same thing. Fidel was one of those rebel fronts, and he promised that too. And that's not what they got. Right. Um, I I think that that's a myth that a lot of people who fell in love with the revolution in the 60s, uh, they saw these young, charismatic, you know, Che Guevara, um, Fidel rebels taking over a country. They were 30 years old, 33 years old. And they they put in them this belief, they saw in them these heroes, these romantic young rebellious heroes who were freeing up the oppressed people of Cuba. But Cuba had a very high standard of living in the 50s, and a lot of Americans don't know that or don't stop to think about that, unfortunately. They had a high level of medical care, education, literacy rates, um, lots of really solid infrastructure. Their GDP per capita was this the same as some of the uh some of European countries. They ranked second, third, fourth in most economic development categories in this hemisphere. And uh what they needed was freedom again. They needed democracy. The country had had that, and they wanted to return to it. And that's not too much to ask. Yeah, and to be able to speak your mind and think what you want to think. Yeah, not have to hide, not have to hide your belief.
SPEAKER_00:When you arrived here in the United States, it was the 60s, and the Vietnam War was going on, and there were anti-war demonstrations, race riots, people openly criticizing the president, like you talked about earlier, without fear of going to jail. So, what was that contrast like for you and your family as you witnessed the freedoms here that you had never seen before?
SPEAKER_02:I think that it was the one thing that calmed them because as they had just fled all this unrest and a revolution, they thought, is this gonna happen here? Are we gonna have a revolution here? And is socialism, communism? And they what calmed them was no, as long as people can go out in the street, protest, write what they want to write, say what they want to say, and not lose their jobs and not have a mob come to their door. There's hope, and we're in a free country. And they always believed, too, that the fact that they were in New Hampshire and that the Canadian border was right there, they had an exit plan. That's the thing, that's the thing that happens. That's the thing that happens when you lose your country, is you always have an exit plan. And they used to joke make sure the Studa Baker's gas gas tank is half full. And you know, you don't you can't undo that experience from your soul. That's what happens when when something huge like that happens to you. You can't just erase it. It's just it becomes part of you. It shapes how you think, it shapes what you do. And there's a level of fear that that I don't think ever goes away. Maybe that's the telltale sign between a refugee and an immigrant. There's a kind of fear that a refugee has experienced that marks them. I mean, look at me. I'm marked still. And I I didn't make these hard decisions. I just got dragged along. But I'm marked by it. I think about it. I think about what they gave up. Um, I'm still tied to my home, my native country. I worry about my my relatives there and what they're experiencing and uh our story hasn't ended. And part, you know, property of the revolution. In a way, I'm still property of the revolution. Yes, they took my house, our house, and our Cuban lives, but in a way they took a part of me too.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, absolutely. When I saw a lot of the different fears that you had demonstrated throughout your life, and one incident in particular really stood out to me as a young child, and you didn't really know the language, you had hadn't been here very long, and you were new to everything, and you had a situation in school where a Vietnam soldier visited and you were so scared, you were petrified, you froze, and the teacher picked up on it. Could you talk about this incident?
SPEAKER_02:Yes. Uh I the the man must have been uh father, older brother, I don't know, of someone in the class, but he just appeared one day and the teacher announced him. Mrs. Drew, my first grade teacher, a wonderful human being. And he had a uniform. He was in uniform. And I had been taught in my first grade class that American soldiers killed women and children. That was what I was being taught in first grade. Uh, one of the things I was taught. And so when I saw that soldier, I lost it. I ran to the teacher. I was hysterical. And um I was I I still remember how terrified I was for my life because I've been taught that in my school. Right, right. In my school, and that and I would never have been able to explain any of it, but I felt like she she understood the level of fear that I had. Maybe she did understand. Maybe she did. Because she she she seemed to sense it. Yeah. And the the the soldier was just a human being and he was I remember he had a missing tooth. Okay. Um, but I I remember him smiling and uh but that didn't do a thing for me. I thought we were gonna be shot and killed because I had been told that by my teacher in first aid.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, uh, there that is the highest level of fear. I mean, I can't even imagine, and then you can't even speak the language very well. And so for you to be able to it really even explain what was going on within you, and also, I mean, this was an interesting part of who you were. It it came across on your pages that, and it took you a while to realize the deep impact that trauma had had on your life. And shortly after arriving, there was a child who had died in a nearby house fire, which was another traumatic event after everything that you had already been through in Cuba. And you showed clear signs of PTSD, but kept it to yourself. And I could really feel that responsibility that you felt to your family and that you needed to be brave. And it really felt to me that you needed to be responsible to help keep your family safe. Did you feel that?
SPEAKER_02:Yes. I got emotional listening to you um describe that because you know, I look back, I was six years old, and I never told anybody what I was going through. Um, but yeah, so this was a fire that happened. Um, so so soon after we arrived, and we were living in this, you know, we arrived as you know, in December, it was freezing cold. There was this fire in a house down the street, and one of the children died in that fire. And they I heard the par my parents reading the paper or trying to understand the new the account the next day. And uh it said that the boy the the bull older boy who had woken the family up had mistaken the sound of i icy rain on the window. That that clicking sound. Thought that the fire, the what was he he was hearing fire, but he thought it was the icy rain. And so I was terrified that there would be a fire and that if it was windy or rainy, we nobody would know. And we would lose we would all die in the fire, or we would lose our house in the fire, which is what I finally realized later on was really at the heart of it. We would be homeless again. Okay, and I needed to be awake, I needed to save the family. Yeah, because everybody else was asleep. Who was gonna save us? Who's gonna save us? That's right. That was just a a house could disappear, a family could disappear overnight, and as a six-year-old, that makes total sense to you. And so Well, you had just you had just seen that happen.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, and so you had just lived it.
SPEAKER_02:Yep. But but you're you know, that was um, I I don't I cannot understand how I never told anybody what because as you know, I mean, I was I couldn't sleep, I had massive insomnia. I slept with my grandmother who cried herself to sleep every night. I'd put my arm over her and feel her crying every single night. Um I heard voices that kept me awake. I never told anybody that because I asked my parents later on as I started writing about all this stuff, they had never heard anything about that. They would have remembered that. How did how did a six-year-old kid hold all that in? I don't think I'm that brave or whatever, even now, to hold on to something like that. So, and I do remember, remember the song Sugar Sugar by the Yarchis? Yeah, that came out soon after we arrived here, and I remember being in that Studa Baker full of Cubans driving somewhere, and and that song came on, and I wanted to sing it, and I didn't sing it because I thought it was wrong to sing when people were so sad. Oh my goodness. What even even though they my my parents, my as I told you earlier, they everybody put on the bravest face they could and acted happy. And right, they acted happy, they were they we had won, we had looked, we had we had our liberty. Um but I knew at a gut level that people were crying in their dark rooms at times because I would find them. And I knew my grandmother was just she was wet. Every time I touched her, she was wet from tears. So so that's what it was like. And you have no words when you're that age. Maybe the fear was what silenced me from telling anybody. I I felt totally loved in my home and protected, but I guess I don't know where that came from. Why I maybe I was ashamed. Maybe I knew that those voices were something embarrassing and strange, and that because I knew only I could hear those voices. And they they terrified me. And I only recovered those memories at the age of 38, I think, was when I finally started looking at what happened to us as a trauma, never considered it a trauma. Our parents were we were not victims, there were no victims. We were we were awesome superheroes, and that saved us in so many ways. And when we encountered discrimination, those poor Americans, they're so ignorant, they don't know how awesome Cubans are. You know, the stories we tell ourselves can really save us. But looking more carefully at them, once you're safe, is also a way to save yourself. My cousins who I grew up with, and my brother have had a very hard time with a book because it is it is it has forced them to look at a time that they that it has forced them to rethink the story they believed of their lives and of our view and to look at what the Viejos endured and what we endured, because we you know, kids the kids went through things too. Um, and so you know, my brother finished the book and you know, he loved it and he was so grateful and all of that. But as he would read it, he would text me, I'm on such and such a page, this is happening. And he didn't want to look at that. It's a it's a strange um paradox, right? That the thing that's saving you is the thing that can sink you later if you don't deal with that trauma. And I didn't want to myself when uh a psychiatrist helped me see that it what had been a trauma. I I rejected it outright. Right. That was an American thing to think of yourself as a victim. I'm not a victim. What are you talking about? Yeah. And that's when the memory started to come back.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I think that that was one of the best gifts that maybe your husband gave you is when he actually pointed that out to you. Why you could be both. You can be strong and also be like a you know, have this trauma within you. And it wasn't weak for you to have that in you. You can also be strong. I I thought that that was beautiful that he gave that to you. He did. He did.
SPEAKER_02:He really worked on me until I could see that you could be two things. You could be two things, but you had to be, I think, one thing when you were in the thick of it. Strong. Brave. You had to be brave, strong, stay together, and not be a victim. Because if you started to wallow in any of that too much, you weren't you weren't gonna make it. You weren't gonna make it in the same way anyway.
SPEAKER_00:Right. And it might have been difficult because it's one with your brother and maybe who cousins or whoever whoever else was reading it. Um, it it's one thing to say it, it's one thing to write it, it's one thing to read it. You know, all those things add a whole different layer of healing and dealing with what happened to you. And when you're actually reading, I mean, it's you just want to close those pages because you don't really want to face it, it makes it a lot harder.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:It uh it's taken, it's taken them a lot. You know, I I had not stopped to think about what it would mean to them to revisit those days and look at that trauma again and actually decide. And I think they have realized this too, the same thing that I realized, which was that wow, those people, something really huge happened and really painful. And look what they were able to do. I mean, that's where I'm hoping they come out with is yes, you know, in order to really appreciate what they were able to do, what we were able to do, what human beings can do, you kind of have to know what what happened. Right.
SPEAKER_00:That's the win on the other side of that pain. And in Cuba at the time, all the newspapers and broadcast networks were being shut down, and the regime began to rule by edict. New laws appeared overnight. Families were desperate to flee, as we talked about, and the rumors of uh spread that children would be sent to indoctrination camps. Parents began sending their kids to the United States through what became the Pedro Pan flights, a secret resettlement program that eventually whisked 14,000 Cuban children out of the country. And your mom felt deeply betrayed. It wasn't the democracy, like we said, that she had been promised. And she even compared Fidel with Mussolini and Hitler. How do you think that this betrayal affected your mom? I mean, we've touched on it, but I think that there was such a deep layer of betrayal in her that left her, that left was left in Cuba and really became who she was in America.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, uh that that if you talk to Cubans who are here around the world, because the diaspora is everywhere, um who were of that age and who believed the lies of of the revolution, um they you'll pick up that same sense of trick, you know, they were tricked and they were lied to. And and and it it does still stick stay with people. I know that there are people, Cubans around the world, who still talk about that that sense of betrayal and it's deep, it cut deep, it costs them everything. And literally, yes. Yeah, everything. And so you know, a lot of times I've run into I've run into people in the United States who who have a view of the Cuban immigrant, Cuban refugee immigrant, as having of of that era, as having fled because our riches were taken. And when we criticize the regime now, that that we're only doing that because we want our riches back and our farms and our banks and whatever. And that's just not has not been my experience at all. And uh I all the Cubans I know are working class Cubans and uh you know professional class Cubans who lost those the you know middle class lives. And so it's just an example of how there's this misconception about what drove people out to begin with, and what what sometimes in the United States when when Cubans criticize the the revolution and and the regime it gets misinterpreted. Um and also sometimes you know Latinos we we feel things and we convey uh our um emotions, I think, in a more direct way than um a lot of Anglo culture people. Um and sometimes that comes across as these hysterical Cubans fighting against the regime here in the United States, and they're they have these and exaggerated reactions sometimes, you know, because in the United States you speak calmly and you're um dispassionate, and when you're making your points, they're expressing their sense of that very same betrayal we were talking about. They have a sense of that betrayal, and that's what's coming out, I think, often. And and it's misunderstood, it's misconstrued.
SPEAKER_00:I think what our parents go through deeply affect us, and we can definitely sense what the generations before us went through. I think it definitely is passed down.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, as children, right. You don't even um you don't you're not aware of it. Um, but the older I get, the more I mean, I used to laugh at my father when he would think everything was a comedy. Everything that like do you remember Rafi, the the the singer-songwriter, children's musician? He had a beard. He had a beard, right? Yeah. And um he my father was with us, the my kids were little, and he understood English enough to know that he was singing about a song, Food in My Belly, not all I really need is a song in my heart, food in my belly, love in my family, something like that. And my father said, I think that guy's a communist. Oh wow. I laughed so hard. I mean, I said, What? He goes, Look at him, he's even got a beard. I said, Oh no, Bobby, that's not, that's not, that's not what he's singing about. But that that's where the betrayal that heap betrayal and fear. And I used to laugh at that. Yeah, but now I I understand as an adult, uh, as an older adult, what it cost him, yeah, and why it was there, why he feared that would happen for his grandchildren and his and his children.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, he was very protective. We will talk about that in a little bit, but I want to talk about um Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer talking about songs.
SPEAKER_02:You were asking about mommy earlier, and uh I think that that is a great manifestation of her intelligence, her wisdom, her insights into the world around her.
SPEAKER_00:I absolutely wrote that down. Yes. Yeah, yeah. You were so insightful what she said.
SPEAKER_02:She, yeah. So, like all immigrants, we were looking for clues, especially at the very beginning. What does this country run on? What is valued here? Because what we valued really wasn't being valued by the culture at large. And we were seeing seeing this in different ways. But because we were all together in that house, it we were, you could speed up the learning because it's a very verbal family, lots of stories, lots of telling people this happened to me, and what do you think that meant? And so one day she asked us, it was Christmas that first. We arrived right around Christmas time, and she said asked us kids to translate uh Rudolph the Red Nose reindeer, and we explained what it was, and she said, So, so wait a minute, you mean so this this reindeer has no friends because he's different, but then because he can get them out of this jam, because he can do something that they can't do, everybody loves him. And uh we're like, Yep, that's makes sense to us. That's what we're seeing out there in the world, in this new world. And she said, Caballeros, gentlemen, I think this country is going to be all about performance. And I I remember her saying that. I wasn't sure what she meant. Later on, I understood. And in in a way, it's a very accurate distinction in the way that those two the two cultures view the world. You know, Americans show me what you got, show me what you can do. Cubans, Latinos are more about who who are you, what have you done for your family? Um, are you a decent person? What what you know uh like in interior emotions and um dedication to your family, I think. So performance just wasn't at the top of the value uh scale, like independence. Being independent is so important here in the United States, and it's just that wasn't valued in our culture in the same way. And in fact, when you were called tu eres muy independiente, you're very independent. That was a negative thing.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, yeah. Well, she was very wise um before her time, and I think that uh she saw things that I don't even think that US-born people saw.
SPEAKER_02:No, I uh I she just had that where some people, you know, I I I used to think of that that it was just because she was my mother that I saw so many amazing things in her personality, and but now I know that she just was truly exceptional in as a human being and as and her her natural intelligence and her interest in doing being a good human being, seeing human beings and speaking the truth and and telling her truth. Um, I felt I feel very lucky to have had her as my mom.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, she seemed like a really great lady. Uh and your Aunt Tia, she was very fascinating to me. She was a very complex woman, and I liked her story a lot. Um, how she wanted to get her master's degree in math, but faced expulsion when she refused to join the militia. And she did have a degree, though. And in your country, from what I understand in Cuba, you weren't allowed to take anything for gain. And so what did she do? Because I love this.
SPEAKER_02:So she and this is another um example that I think Americans that resonate with Americans, you know, we're talking about performance, right? Right, right. She performed and she had she had evidence of what she had earned, her her diploma.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And what I'm getting from American readers is store her story really gets to them because when we earn something, that's ours. And education really is one of those things that when you earn it, no, nobody should be able to take it away from you. And as with your home, as with private property, when you left, you couldn't take anything of value with you. And a document like that um was valuable, therefore it could not go out. So she decided she would risk it all. And uh a neighbor who was a seamstress helped her tear it into it, it was a PhD in education. She wanted to teach in the United States, needed documentation, she knew. They cut it into strips and created a full panel bra, and that's how she snuck it out.
SPEAKER_00:That is the end of part one. And what a journey that we've already taken with Anna from childhood memories in Cuba to the complicated love that we carry for our roots and the people who shape us. We've seen how identity isn't something that you discover once. It's something that you keep uncovering layer by layer as life pulls you in new directions. But just as Anna begins to open the door to her sister Tia's story, which is a really great one, by the way, you really can't miss the rest of this story, but I really don't want to give it away. In part two, Anna takes us deeper into family resilience and the way that love can bind and make their generation stronger. It's emotional, it's raw, and it's unforgettable. I it's been a history lesson for me, and I hope it has been for you as well. So join us next week as we continue this powerful conversation on Real Talk with Tina and Anne. Until then, hold on to this thought. Sometimes the stories that we inherit aren't just about where we come from. They're clues to where we are going and who we're still becoming. And as we always say on Real Talk with Tina and Anne, there is purpose in the pain and there is hope in the journey. And we will see you next time.
