Property of the Revolution: One Cuban Refugee's Story of Loss, Legacy, and the Power of Intergenerational Storytelling | Ana Flaster
What does it mean to carry a country inside you — one you were forced to leave before you were old enough to understand why? In this deeply moving episode, Jennifer sits down with Ana Flaster, Cuban-American author of Property of the Revolution, to explore the story that shaped her entire life: fleeing Cuba as a child in 1967, arriving in the snowy mill town of Nashua, New Hampshire with one suitcase and a family that refused to let loss have the last word.
Ana recounts the visceral moment she stood outside her childhood home in Havana as a banner was nailed across the door reading "Property of the Revolution", and the decades of storytelling, grief, humor, and resilience that followed. She and Jennifer dive into what it truly means to be a refugee (not just an immigrant), the multi-generational Cuban household that became Ana's entire world and moral compass, and how the women of her family rewrote their trauma into a survival story rooted in pride and laughter.
They also explore the realities of how the Cuban Revolution has been romanticized and misrepresented in American classrooms, the unique identity struggles of being Cuban American in a country that doesn't always know how to hold that complexity, and why Ana believes stories are the only real antidote to division. This is a conversation about belonging, memory, and what we owe the people who carried us here.
📍 This episode was recorded in Concord, New Hampshire.
MEET ANA FLASTER
Ana Hebra Flaster was just shy of her sixth birthday when her family fled post-revolutionary Cuba, in 1967, and settled in Nashua, New Hampshire. She graduated from Smith College and was a software consultant before beginning her writing career. Her essays have been published by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, among other national print and online media. Her commentaries and storytelling have aired on national broadcasts of NPR’s All Things Considered and PBS’s Stories from the Stage.
Property of the Revolution, her first book, has won early recognition in several international writing competitions, including being shortlisted in the 2023 Restless Book’s New Immigrant Writing Prize and the 2022 Cintas Creative Writing Fellowship, and first place in the 2025 International Book Awards (Creative Nonfiction) and the 2025 Discovery Book Awards (Nonfiction overall). After forty years in the Boston area, Ana recently moved back home to southern New Hampshire with her husband, Andy, and their Havanese pups, Luna and Beny Moré.
CONNECT WITH ANA
📘 Facebook: facebook.com/anahebraflaster
📸 Instagram: @anahebraflaster
✉️ Substack: anahflaster.substack.com
📖 Book: Property of the Revolution — available wherever books are sold
💼 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/anahebraflaster
🌐 Website: anacubana.com
🐦 X / Twitter: @AnaHebraFlaster
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Here's what stayed with us long after this conversation ended:
- Stories are not just nostalgia, they are survival. For Ana's family, retelling the stories of Cuba wasn't about living in the past. It was how they processed grief, preserved identity, and gave their children something solid to stand on. The stories kept them alive in ways no amount of material stability could.
- Children sense injustice before they have the words for it. Standing outside her locked Havana home at age five, Ana didn't have the vocabulary for revolution or displacement, but she knew something deeply unfair had happened. That early, wordless recognition never left her, and it became the driving force behind her life's work.
- The refugee experience doesn't end at arrival. Ana draws a sharp and important distinction between immigration and refuge: refugees flee, often with nothing, knowing they will likely never return and may never see their loved ones again. That particular grief doesn't resolve. It travels with you, and it shapes every generation that follows.
- The women who spin the survival story are also the ones quietly grieving. Ana's mother, grandmother, and aunt transformed their trauma into a story of triumph — "We beat Castro, look at us go." But behind closed doors, they were crying in dark rooms. Both things were true at once: the resilience and the grief. Holding that complexity is how they protected their children.
- History written by the victors can silence an entire community's truth. Ana encountered the romanticized version of the Cuban Revolution in her own college economics classes, and she pushed back. The propaganda around figures like Fidel and Che has obscured what most Cubans actually wanted and what they actually lost. Telling the fuller, more complex story is itself an act of resistance.
- We are drowning in data and starving for wisdom. One of the most striking lines of the conversation: "We're drowning in data and starving for wisdom." Ana sees storytelling, especially from older generations, as the antidote to the noise, fear, and tribalism that fragment us. Wisdom lives in the stories we no longer have time to sit still for.
- Start with the human, not the label. Ana's message to high schoolers — and to all of us — is the same: before you try to figure out someone's politics, ask who they are, what they've been through, what they care about. That's where common ground lives. The extreme version of what happens when we don't? She watched it happen in Cuba.
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