Wendy Guerra

An intimate look at Cuba.

"I don't know when I decided to stop being a child. I paid a very high price, growing up alone while everyone left he island. They abandoned me, one by one; now I can't behave like a regular woman, I'm out of this world. The tools they gave me no longer work, I take shelter in my Diary and I'm only com­fortable and normal between its pages. There I've always been an adult; I pretended to be a child, but it wasn't true: too grown-up for the Diary, too much of a girl for real life."

From the age of eight to twenty years old, Nieve Guerra takes refuge in the pages of her diary, writing down her story, the story of her survival during her childhood and teenage years in contemporary Cuba. 

As a child, Nieve lives with her hippy mother and her mother's boyfriend, a Swedish nuclear engineer that shocks the community by practicing nudism, until her biological father wins custody of her. From then on, Nieve finds herself forced to live under the bru­tal control of an alcoholic father that forgets to feed her or take her to school, and forces her to be a witness to his erotic adventures. As a teenager, Nieve goes to the compulsory military school. Later she attends art school and becomes part of the island's artistic and intellectual circle, where the ruling trend is No Love - don't fall in love - don't kiss, don't own another person's feelings. But Nieve can't help falling in love with Osvaldo, a promising artist with whom she lives a stormy and passionate love story.