The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes - 29

The first time I read A Time for Forgetting was in the apartment in Havana that I shared with my husband Enrique. The year was 1966 and Fidel Castro and his revolution had changed my life irrevocably. My husband had been arrested for political subversion—a catchall term that covers all manner of behaviors deemed to be a threat to the regime. When my neighbor Zenaida knocked on my door in the middle of the night and entrusted Eva Fuentes’s novel to me, my life was forever changed. A Time for Forgetting came to me at the time in my life when I needed it most, when hope was ever in short supply.

Our lives were separated by nearly seventy years, and yet the words that Eva wrote in her incredible novel resonated with me in a manner that no other book had. I no longer felt so alone, no longer felt as though my voice had been silenced by the regime, because here was someone who understood, who knew what it was like to live through such difficult times. I found hope in Eva’s words, in the power of them, and her strength in turn inspired me. In the dark nights when I wondered how I could possibly go on, Eva Fuentes’s novel saved me. For that I will be forever grateful.

I have dedicated my entire adult life to books. In Cuba, where I worked as a librarian, I learned the power of words—how they could be twisted by politicians like Fidel offering lies and false promises, how their existence could be viewed as a threat because of their power to inspire, to transform. I could offer a myriad of reasons why A Time for Forgetting spoke to me—the biographical similarities between my life and the heroine Ana’s, the inescapable parallels in the two periods of Cuba’s turbulent history, the timing and manner in which the book came to me. But there is an inexplicable magic in books, something that is not so easily weighed or quantified.

I cannot promise you that A Time for Forgetting will speak to you as it did to me. That is the beauty of the nature of books, a truth I have seen throughout my career as a librarian. There is a book out there that is meant for you. It might not be this one, but there will be a moment in your life when you will slip inside a story, and a book will speak to you as no one ever has before.

There are special books that come around once in your lifetime, books that change lives.

This one changed mine.

Pilar Castillo

Librarian