CAROL ASCHER

Ten-year-old Mary Todd had been a curious, sociable, and joyful child when she was kicked out of the Girl Scouts and ostracized by her peers.  It was the height of Senator McCarthy's search for communists, and the Saturday Evening Post had called her father, who was Washington Bureau Chief for the Soviet news agency TASS, "a spy for Stalin." Turning into a wary loner and big reader, Mary would find like-minded peers during high school summers in the early civil rights movement. 

Mary was living with a black friend when she discovered she was being watched by the FBI, as her father had been. Having visited Cuba soon after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, she moved to Havana in 1964, hoping to be useful and live in peace under Fidel Castro. 

 
While Mary found purpose and ease in the multi-racial revolution, her romantic relationships with men were laced with dangerous conflict. After her four-year-old son was murdered by a former husband, she attempted to soldier on in silence. By the late 1970s, many Cubans had become weary of the scarcities of socialism amidst a US boycott. But Mary was becoming increasingly judgmental and politically rigid. When a second adolescent son she had raised alone became troubled, she sent him to live with his Cuban relatives and submerged herself in translation assignments.

 
Mary's work as a translator highlights Cuba's little-known efforts in the Non-Aligned Movement, complicating Castro's US reputation as a Soviet puppet. Beginning with 1970's trips to Angola and Nicaragua, Mary translated for Non-Aligned meetings in Botswana, Iran, North Korea, Ghana, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe, her last Non-Aligned Meeting being in Indonesia in 2002.  Asked increasingly to take on translation projects in Havana, Mary became one of Cuba's foremost English translators, writing subtitles for Cuban films and translating countless articles and over 20 books by Cuban Scholars. 

 
Through meticulous research and personal insights, An American Woman in Cuba offers an intimate portrayal of Mary Todd, an American woman whose successes and tragedies occurred amidst Cuba's triumphs and defeats. Remaining loyal to the Cuban revolution, her death in 2016 coinciding with Fidel Castro's.

 

 

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