Teresa Pineiro knew no fear. In 1960, thirty-one years old and pregnant, she is arrested alongside a group of men for attempting to hijack an airplane bound for Miami. The local newspaper splashes her image across its pages: a young woman defying convention, the daughter of a retired Army first lieutenant and professor, and the granddaughter of one of the pioneering Spanish families who had founded the town of La Palma in western Cuba. For her boldness, Teresa is confined to a maximum-security prison, where she eventually stands face-to-face with Cuba's Comandante en Jefe, Fidel Castro.
Four generations of her family soon find themselves drawn into the storm: her mother, her blind grandmother, her ten-year-old daughter, and, eventually, the newborn son Teresa bore behind prison walls. Together, they are swept into a hurricane of ideology and power, in which those who ruled held all the cards. Their future hinges on Teresa's resilience-an inner strength that kept her grounded while others in her position were driven to madness.
A woman ahead of her time, Teresa was already on her third marriage when she was imprisoned. Her life had been a tapestry of adventure, privilege, and scandal, one that had brought her into the orbit of the island's most prestigious families. But the past has a way of resurfacing, and now it threatens to consume her. Alone and unyielding, Teresa would have to summon every ounce of her courage to face what awaited.
Beginning with her first book, Waiting on Zapote Street, Mrs. Viamontes documented the terrors, losses, and triumphs of Cuban families. These are not stories of Cold War intrigue. Instead, they are the tales of common people caught up in the delusions of a monster. Most poignantly, they tell of aged grandparents hugging children that they would never see again. Most of Mrs. Viamontes' writing deals with the struggles of poor and middle-class families caught up in a social hurricane. The newest book, Raining Over Teresa, however, breaks new ground. It follows the life of the headstrong daughter of prominent planters who married into wealth.
In a single day, she went from a world of privilege to the barbarity of a death prison.
This true story gives readers a rare glimpse into a communist prison, headed by the legendary Ernesto "Che" Guevara. It also introduces us to Fidel Castro, not as a political leader, but as an arrogant interrogator, demanding summary executions.
Raining Over Teresa, however, is much more than a prison memoir. Astonishingly, Teresa Maria Pineiro did not die beside that lonely road where she was dumped. Instead, she began to walk. As I write this, she is 94 years old, retired from a successful career in the United States. Her large family lives throughout the world. Now thanks to the work of Betty Viamontes, a new generation will know how she survived.
Raining Over Teresa is essential reading in America in the 2020s. In our "land of the free," college students declare "Free Expression" as reactionary. Speakers with opposing views are shouted off campus. Opposition politicians are indicted and their followers imprisoned. Violent mobs riot in our streets before elections. There has never been a better time to study the lives of Teresa and her thousands of compatriots before we lose our own precious freedoms. Betty Viamontes gives us a window into their world.
Allen A. Witt PhD Lead Author of America's Community College: The First Century
