The Heart Remembers: A Young Cuban Immigrant’s Story of Escape, Family, and Finding Home
Send us a text 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 pos...
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.
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@Real Talk with Tina and Ann
00:00 - Opening, Book Hook, Core Theme
02:30 - Cuba’s Revolution: Hope to Fear
05:20 - The Permission to Leave and “Gusano”
08:10 - Loss, Exile, and Abuela’s Sacrifice
12:40 - Holding Family Together in America
14:20 - Immigrants, Migrants, Refugees—Definitions
17:10 - Indoctrination in Schools and Faith
19:10 - What Freedom Feels Like
22:00 - Make Yourself Brave: Mother’s Ethos
25:00 - Trust, Mistrust, and Leadership
28:20 - Protest as Reassurance of Liberty
30:00 - A Child’s PTSD in Silence
34:30 - Rethinking the Family Story
37:10 - Betrayal, Diaspora, and Misconceptions
40:30 - Reading America: Rudolph and Performance
43:20 - Tía’s Diploma and Dissent
45:40 - Closing and Tease for Part Two