Love Letters from Cuba

De: Betty Viamontes

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

It’s 2021, in the midst of a global pandemic, when twenty-four-year-old Lena Pérez stumbles upon a collection of her grandfather’s love letters.

Reeling from the end of a three-year relationship with Paulo Oliveira—a charming Brazilian ex-soccer player whom her Cuban-American mother never accepted—Lena feels adrift and unmoored.

As she unpacks the weathered letters left behind by Rolando Pérez, a wounded Vietnam veteran, Lena begins to piece together a powerful story that predates her birth: a journey that carried her grandfather from the streets of Havana to the battlefields of Vietnam.. Through his heartfelt words and confessions, Lena not only uncovers buried family secrets and intergenerational wounds but also begins to understand the forces that shaped her family—and herself.

What begins as a window into the past soon becomes a mirror. In rediscovering her grandfather’s voice, Lena finds her own.

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“In her newest novel, award-winning author Betty Viamontes uses the first-person narrative and brilliantly exploits the epistolary approach. As in her prior works, she continues to describe life in Cuba.

The novel is set in the present day and is full of surprises that will keep you guessing what will happen next.” –Susana Jiménez-Mueller, storyteller and podcaster, author of Now I Swim and The Green Plantain - The Cuban Stories Project podcast.

About the Author
Betty Viamontes was born in Havana, Cuba. When Betty was fifteen, she and her family crossed the Florida Straits in an overcrowded shrimp boat on a stormy night when many families perished. This trip would reunite the family with Betty’s father in the United States after a twelve-year separation. Betty completed graduate studies at the University of South Florida. Upon her mother’s death, Betty dedicated her life to capturing the stories of people without a voice.

Her stories have traveled the world from the award-winning Waiting on Zapote Street to the No. 1 newest releases, The Pedro Pan Girls, Brotherhood: The Pedro Pan Boys, and The Girl from White Creek.

Betty has published seventeen books, including the novel she wrote to fulfill a promise she made to her mother before her death. Despite her mother’s battle with cancer, Betty witnessed many of her accomplishments. However, she was unable to see the publication of "Waiting on Zapote Street," her story.

In 2018, actor Edward James Olmos announced that Waiting on Zapote Street had won the Latino Books Into Movies Award. The Latino Author website also lists this autobiographical novel as one of the best ten books of 2016. In 2017 and again in 2020, it became an Amazon bestseller in its category, following its selection by a United Nations women’s book club and multiple others.

Betty’s life has been filled with many challenges, but she has managed to overcome them and help others along the way.