Born in the year of Castro’s revolution, and the daughter of a hero of the sugarcane harvest—Che Guevara himself draped a Cuban flag across her mother’s pregnant belly—Yocandra embodies the revolution’s promise and hope. But she grows up to see how the regime is turning her beautiful island into a wasteland of despair and dearth, and embarks on her own course of survival. For Yocandra and her friends, coping with life in Cuba means escaping into dreams, humor, and sex, and developing an appetite for the absurdities of existence. Kindred spirits and lost souls, their rebellion and rage also express their fierce love for their country, a patriotism that can feel like a prison sentence. Searing and sensual, earthy and elegiac, called “a knockout” by the <em>Miami Herald</em>, this is the story of a woman at sea in a land where government dogma has turned a tropical haven into a paradise of nada.