I Let This Book Down:
Now I'm Making It Right.
Last June, I released I AM CUBA at just about the worst possible moment, not for the world, but for me personally. My husband was recovering from surgery. I hadn’t released a book in five years and was terrified I’d lost my audience. I was panicking, distracted, and running on fumes. The kind of fumes that make you make decisions you later look back on and wince.
I released it quietly. Amazon only. No real promotional push, no blog tour, no advance reader copies seeded with reviewers, no coordinated social campaign. I had an agent who was confident she could place it with a major publisher, so part of me was holding back, not wanting to muddy the waters. I was also deep in a movie script, consuming my creative energy. And underneath it all, I was simply afraid — afraid that five years away had cost me my readers, afraid that the book wouldn’t be good enough, afraid of the silence that follows a launch no one notices.
The book got wonderful reviews. Readers who found it loved it. But the sales didn’t reflect what the book deserved, and I know exactly why: I didn’t give it a fair chance. I let fear, distraction, and circumstance become a wall between the story and the people who would have wanted to read it.
I could hand you a list of excuses as long as the Malecón. But here’s the truth: none of them matters.
What matters is the book itself. And what the book is about.
I AM CUBA is a historical thriller set in 1959, at the precise moment when everything on the island was being remade. When a revolution that had promised, liberation was already beginning to calcify into something else entirely. Hidden beneath the political upheaval is a secret, buried literally in Cuban soil, that has been quietly fueling power struggles for centuries. At the center of it is Isabella, raised as Castro’s goddaughter, a true believer, until she discovers what her father’s discovery has really cost, and what it is still being used to justify. Drawn into her orbit is Gabriel, an American with ties to her family and a government with its own designs on the island. Together they pull at a thread that unravels decades of deception, and find themselves standing at the intersection of myth, Cold War geopolitics, and a love that neither of them planned for.
It is, at its heart, a story about an island that has never truly been allowed to belong to itself.
And that is where the painful irony lives. Because Cuba, the real Cuba, the island and its people, are once again in exactly that position. Once again in the crosshairs of outside ambition. Once again being discussed, debated, and decided upon by powers that have always seen it less as a sovereign nation and more as a strategic asset. The Cuban people have endured this for four hundred years. Spanish colonialism. American imperialism. Soviet entanglement. And now, a new chapter in a story that never seems to end for them.
When I wrote I AM CUBA, I wanted readers to understand that the Cuba of today didn’t arrive from nowhere. The hunger, the exhaustion, the fierce and complicated pride of the Cuban people, it all has roots that go deep and long. The revolution wasn’t born in a vacuum. Castro’s rise wasn’t simply the story of one charismatic man. It was the latest convulsion in a centuries-long struggle of a people who have been told, over and over again, that someone else knows better what their island should be for.
I believe that context matters right now. I believe that stories, especially good ones, honest ones, can do what news cycles cannot: they can make you feel the weight of history on an individual human life. They can make an island real to you in a way that geopolitical analysis never quite manages.
So, at the end of May, I’m doing what I should have done properly last year. I’m re-releasing the English edition of I AM CUBA and for the first time, I’m releasing the Spanish edition as well, because if there is any audience that deserves to read this story in their own language, it is the Cuban community itself, and the broader Spanish-speaking world that understands, perhaps better than anyone, what it means to watch an island you love be used as someone else’s chessboard.
This is my second chance to do right by this book. And given the moment we’re in, I think it might also be the right moment for this book to do something meaningful in the world.
Cuba, the island and the story, deserves a little positive attention. I intend to give it.
The book deserved better from me last year. The Cuban people deserve better from the world right now. I can only do something about one of those things.
📚 Redemption Songs 📚 Friendship Estate 📚 I Am Cuba
You can find the links at www.lyndaredwards.com.
So true, Lynda. I Am Cuba deserves another chance. It’s a great book, revealing both what has been and what could have been in Cuba. I wish you the best for the relaunch!
Heartfelt. I am sure you made the best choice for this important work. Mother knows best. Congrats.