Author Talk: Exile, Memory, and the Meaning of Home

Brought to you in partnership with the Library Speakers Consortium. Register and submit questions for the authors . What happens when the country you love forces you out, leaving you just 48 hours to abandon everything you've ever known? Join us online for an extraordinary online conversation with author and essayist Ana Hebra Flaster as we discuss her sweeping yet deeply intimate memoir Property of the Revolution: From a Cuban Barrio to a New Hampshire Mill Town . Ana Hebra Flaster was six years old when her working-class family was kicked out of their Havana barrio for opposing communism. Once devoted revolutionaries themselves but disillusioned by the Castro government's repressive tactics, they fled to the US. The permanent losses they suffered - of home, country, and loved ones, all within forty-eight hours - haunted her multigenerational family as they reclaimed their lives and freedom in 1967 New Hampshire. There, they fed each other stories of their scrappy barrio - some of which Hebra Flaster has shared on All Things Considered - to resurrect their lost world and fortify themselves for a daunting task: building a new life in a foreign land. Weaving pivotal events in Cuba-US history with her viejos' - elders' - stories of surviving political upheaval, impossible choices, and "refugeedom," Property of the Revolution celebrates the indomitable spirit and wisdom of the women warriors who led the family out of Cuba, shaped its rebirth as Cuban Americans, and helped Ana gr