Pre-Castro Cuba, 1956. When eighteen-year-old Liliana meets handsome Santino Navarro visiting his uncle on the sugarcane plantation her father manages, she believes she’s found a way to escape her father's plans for her to marry the plantation owner's arrogant son. Liliana opens her heart to Santino, sharing her dream of enrolling at the university of Havana, of becoming a doctor, of opening a free clinic one day for the farm workers and peasants. Santino agrees to help her run away from the dictates of her father’s future and the two flee into the darkness of night.

What Liliana doesn't realize is that Santino is a leader in the M-26-7, a violent, urban-underground organization supporting Fidel Castro’s plans for revolution. When love blossoms between the pair of them, Liliana turns away from her own dream, deciding instead to accompany Santino into the Sierra Maestra Mountains where Castro and his guerilla forces are preparing for war. It’s not long before Liliana discovers Castro’s lust for absolute power over the Cuban people. She reveals Fidel’s sinister side to Santino, but his heart has been blinded by his unwavering loyalty to Fidel and the Revolution.

Will Liliana’s love for Santino win the war for his heart? Can Liliana convince Santino that they need to leave Cuba before it’s too late, that Fidel Castro’s revolution is without end, and the only way out will be death?

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Release Date: June 16, 2025
Genre: Historical Romance

A Pink Satin Romance

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Excerpt

Prologue

1951
Yara, Oriente Province, Cuba

The day Nenita Garcia died in my arms was the day I decided my future.

It was already too late when Nenita’s daughter arrived. The nine-year-old had pounded on the kitchen door with both fists, out of breath from running up the steep incline that overlooks the hectares of sugarcane my father manages for Señor Galvez, the owner of the plantation.

“Señorita Liliana, come quick!” She had grabbed my hands, pulling me toward the fields, gasping for air. “Mama’s baby is coming! Hurry! She’s with Papá in the fields. She was calling for you. There is blood, Señorita Liliana, a lot of blood.”

The time of the zafra had come. When the fields of ripened sugarcane open their verdant arms to the peasant families—laborers the plantation managers depend upon. Fathers, mothers, children. They descend from their shacks in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, ready to toil from dusk to dawn for meager earnings.

In Cuba, sugar is the king, and men like my father and Señor Galvez count on these hard-working men and women to lay down their lives for the kingdom. Without the peasants, the kingdom collapses.

Nenita Garcia was thirty-five years old when she died in my arms. She didn’t know how to read or write. She didn’t have a cent to leave to her five children. She didn’t own anything but the ragged dress on her back. She was a survivor, as are all the peasants. But there are things a human cannot survive. And giving birth to a breech baby in a sugarcane field at the end of a day of backbreaking work was a mountain Nenita Garcia could not climb.

 

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