Whatever your ethnic background or personal opinion of Fidel
Castro, you will find something new and revealing in this book. It offers a frank firsthand account of one
woman’s journey, not only through Cuba, but through a life filled with unique
challenges and tragedies. When Castro
first rose to power, the author, like so many Americans, was entranced by the
romantic vision of a scrubby revolutionary defeating the hated dictator
Fulgencio Batista. But her years of direct experience with Cubans and within Cuba
itself gradually eroded that vision. Then, unexpectedly, she found herself
being attacked by a once close friend of Latino heritage, who not only
vehemently disagreed with her negative evaluation of Castro’s reign, but
harshly questioned her right as a non-Latina to even comment on it. He dubbed
her “lazy” and a “nunny bunny,” a phony
gringa do-gooder displaying lamentable “Republican-style
self-exculpation,” summarily dismissing her decades of involvement in
Cuban human rights as an Amnesty International volunteer. These very personal
attacks triggered her own self-doubts, launching her onto a meticulous backward
look over her entire life’s trajectory, especially her involvement with Latin
America and Cuba. The result is Confessions
of Secret Latina: How I Fell Out of Love with Castro & In Love with the
Cuban People , a book going beyond the author’s previous award-winning
memoir, Triumph & Hope: Golden Years
with the Peace Corps in Honduras, bringing to light new details about a
singular life that may surprise even those closest to her.
In Confessions,
readers will meet real people, both dissidents and ordinary Cubans, as well as
other Latin Americans encountered during the author’s 75 adventurous years. She
was privileged to have had a front-row seat at pivotal events enabling her to
meet important regional players while serving as an election observer in Chile,
Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Fluent in Spanish, she not only
visited Cuba multiple times, beginning in the Batista years, but she had a
Cuban foster son, Alex, an unaccompanied minor arriving during the 1980 Mariel
boatlift, who died of AIDS in 1995, just one year after the death of her
beloved son Andrew. This book recounts her emergence from that dual tragedy to
resume her human rights work in Cuba and elsewhere, then joining the Peace
Corps in Honduras in 2000 at age 62. Now working as a Spanish hospital and
school interpreter, she continues her volunteer role with Amnesty
International, coordinating human rights actions in the Caribbean, including
Cuba, and in this most recent book recounts her recent meetings with Cuban
dissidents finally allowed by the regime to travel. Her life shows that even unsung individuals
working quietly behind the scenes to carry out daily tasks can make a
difference.
Barbara E. Joe, MA, (last name thanks to a Korean
father-in-law) is a Boston native and an alumna of the University of
California, Berkeley. A mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, she works
as a freelance writer, Spanish interpreter, and translator out of her
century-old house on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. An Amnesty International
volunteer since 1981, she was a founding member of local Group 211 and has
served in various national leadership positions, including 14 years as
volunteer Cuba and Dominican Republic country specialist and the last ten years
as volunteer coordinator for the Caribbean. She is also a member of the
National Peace Corps Association and a board member of several non-profit
organizations working internationally. She was an election observer in Chile,
Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. In 2005, she received a UN Foundation award
for her human rights work and, in 2006, she went on a humanitarian mission to
south Sudan. After the deaths of her
older son and a Cuban foster son, she joined The Compassionate Friends, a
bereaved parents’ support group, and also leads a Spanish-language parental
bereavement support group. She belongs
to a small, intentional Catholic community called Communitas. From 2000-20003,
she served as a health volunteer with the Peace Corps in Honduras and wrote an
award-winning memoir, Triumph & Hope:
Golden Years with the Peace Corps in Honduras (Amazon.com, Kindle, &
Nook). She has also written articles about Cuba, Haiti, Romania, Sudan, and
other countries visited for humanitarian reasons. She firmly believes in
walking the walk, not only in talking the talk, expressing her ideals in
action, not just in writing and speeches that exhort others to do so. In April
2011, she was featured in Woman’s Day
and in August 2011 and April 2013 appeared on Voice of America News in internationally distributed videos.
Readers are invited to view her blog, http://honduraspeacecorps.blogspot.com,
where she posts comments about Washington, D.C., Cuba, and her annual
humanitarian visits to Honduras. Her tenth humanitarian return trip to Honduras
took place in 2014.
