In 1962, the 20 years young Monika from East Germany marries the youngest Captain in the world and moves to Cuba, a country with a very different climate, culture, and customs. Soon she clashes with Afro-Cuban saints, food shortage, and the macho mentality.

Monika’s memories and recollections, told with humor and heart, provide a unique glimpse into the turbulent first thirty years of the Cuban Revolution. The young mother of two boys experiences the follies of the Cuban educational system, when a whole country was turned into a laboratory for the formation of the New Man. Like so many others who once believed that the Revolution would lead to utopia, Monika Krause gradually came to realize that she was in, and part of, a totalitarian system based on the cult of a caudillo.

As fate would have it, Monika became Cuba’s first Sex Educator, charged with developing and implementing an ambitious and impactful national program of sex education and planned parenthood. Monika was the first director of the National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX), a celebrity with own radio and TV programs, a strong advocate for women’s rights, and a staunch fighter against institutionalized homophobia.

In 1990, exhausted and disillusioned, with her marriage over, and her grown children eager to break free from the rigid ideology, Monika returned to Germany, her country of birth.