Candela's Secrets and Other Havana Stories
Havana keeps secrets. Some are whispered behind closed doors; others remain buried for years, waiting for the moment when they can finally come to light.
In The Secrets of Candela and Other Stories of Havana, award-winning author Betty Viamontes brings together stories of love and betrayal, loss and hope, hunger and survival, spanning different eras in a city transformed by the Revolution-and by the lives of those who remained behind.
Through these pages move unforgettable characters: a woman whose beauty and ambition conceal secrets capable of destroying a family; young people willing to risk their lives at sea in search of freedom; an elderly woman who trades the roses from her garden for a little chicken to feed her family; and a widow who waits for hours beneath the scorching sun for a simple pizza, until the weight of everything she has lost finally catches up with her.
Through their stories, Viamontes takes us inside the homes, streets, and neighborhoods of Havana, where scarcity exists alongside generosity, sorrow alongside humor, and despair alongside the stubborn determination to keep going. Here, too, are the small things that survive history's great upheavals: a shared meal, a memory, a song, a love, a friendship, or the dream of a different life.
More than a collection of stories, The Secrets of Candela and Other Stories of Havana is an intimate portrait of a city and of generations of Cubans shaped by history, but never defined solely by it.
A tribute to the human spirit in the face of adversity, this collection captures the soul of Havana-its beauty, its sorrow, its contradictions, and its unbreakable will to survive.
"Betty Viamontes's stories are like Noah's Ark, gathering every 'specimen' to preserve for posterity the portrait of a people cast toward an uncertain destiny."
-Margarita Polo
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