Wendy Guerra – författare

“I Was Never The First Lady stitches together threads of island and identity until they became one and the same…Guerra’s own unpredictable book is haunting, complicated, [and] linguistically beautiful.” -- The New York TimesA lush, sensuous, and original tale of family, love, and history, set against the backdrop of the Cuban Revolution and its aftermath.Nadia Guerra’s mother, Albis Torres, left when Nadia was just ten years old. Growing up, the proponents of revolution promised a better future. Now that she’s an adult, Nadia finds that life in Havana hasn’t quite matched its promise; instead it has stifled her rebellious and artistic desires. Each night she DJs a radio show government censors block from broadcasting. Frustrated, Nadia finds hope and a way out when she wins a scholarship to study in Russia. Leaving Cuba offers her the chance to find her long lost mother and her real father. But as she embarks on a journey east, Nadia soon begins to question everything she thought she knew and understood about her past.As Nadia discovers more about her family, her fate becomes entwined with that of Celia Sanchez, an icon of the Cuban Revolution—a resistance fighter, ingenious spy, and the rumored lover of Fidel Castro. A tale of revolutionary ideals and promise, Celia’s story interweaves with Nadia’s search for meaning, and eventually reveals secrets Nadia could never have dreamed.Translated from the Spanish by Achy Obejas

“A classic story . . . delivers real news from Cuba in a lyrical way.”–NPRAvailable for a new generation, Wendy Guerra’s intoxicating and heartrending classic—a portrait of economically depressed post-revolutionary Cuba in the late 1970s, written as the diary of a young girl left behind by her parents and the state, who becomes caught in an acrimonious custody battle.It is 1978, and Nieve finds herself caught between the tides of her parents' turbulent relationship and a country in turmoil. To try to control her situation, she begins to record the intimate and harsh details of her life in her diary. Becoming her sole means of expression, the diary is her only constant and her only friend. From being torn from her mother, her mother’s free-spirited and loving boyfriend, and her childhood city of Cienfuegos, to living with her abusive father, an alcoholic theater actor, to her forced induction as a Cuban “revolutionary Pioneer,” Nieve records in honest detail a life in which she is powerless as she loses the people and freedom she loves.Mirroring the author's own experiences between the ages of eight and twenty, Everyone Leaves paints a vivid portrait of family life and social and political unrest in Castro's Cuba while exploring how the patriarchal and conformist notions of the Revolution betrayed the nation's women.Translated from the Spanish by Achy Obejas

Poems from a critically acclaimed Cuban writer available in English for the first time.  Imbued with a sensuality reminiscent of the work of Anaïs Nin, Wendy Guerra’s Delicates takes readers on an exhilarating journey through the cities of love, where women leave their bodies “in the showers of men,” marking their territory “like animals in heat,” their panties “saturated with sand and a sidereal isolating odor.” Guerra’s shocking metaphors and images invite us to enter her gallery of striking and provoking poems where we witness a flight through the air from a thirty-fourth-story window and a woman’s pilgrimage to the salt flats “to taste the pink in stones” on her lover’s behalf. Guerra’s relationship with her native Cuba—much like her relationships with men—is complex and multilayered. Her work confronts the realities of a political system that doesn’t celebrate artistic freedom. Here we have a new way of looking at a woman, an artist, a country, and the colonizers of that country. In these music-infused poems, Guerra shares with us her hard-won truths.

Nieve wächst auf Kuba bei ihrer schrägen Hippie-Mutter auf und erzählt nur ihrem Tagebuch, was sie wirklich denkt. Als sie zu ihrem alkoholkranken und gewalttätigen Vater ziehen muss, wird ihr Tagebuch zu ihrem einzigen Rückzugsort, zu dem Ort, an dem sie vor den Schlägen und Demütigungen sicher ist. Hier darf sie sich fürchten, hier darf sie zweifeln, lieben, streiken. Über die Jahre hinweg bleibt ihr Tagebuch ihr treuester Begleiter, denn nach und nach verlassen alle um sie herum die Insel – Freunde, Familie, Geliebte. Sie wollen fort, den Enttäuschungen Kubas entkommen. Nur Nieve bleibt zurück, auf der Suche nach sich selbst und ihrem Platz im Leben.