In this moving account of the Cuban Revolution and its aftermath, eleven women who lived through it as children or young adults recall the events of the last forty years. In Torres's words, "This book, which began in Miami, looking toward the island, ends on the island as it gazes toward the exile community."These poets, artists and scholars represent each post-revolution exile generation. Some left Cuba in the Peter Pan airlift, some left afterward, some never left at all. Others—like the editor—left as children only to return and leave again, disillusioned with both the exile community and with Castro's island. Together they testify to the powerful intersections of memory, politics, nation, and exile.

What does it mean to be instantly transformed into the most hated person in your community? After meeting Fidel Castro at a Havana reception in 1994, Cuban-born Magda Montiel Davis, founder of one of the largest immigration law firms in South Florida, soon found out. The reception—attended by hundreds of other Cuban émigrés—was videotaped for historical archives. In a seconds-long clip, Fidel pecks the traditional protocol kiss on Montiel Davis’s cheek as she thanks him for the social benefits conferred upon the Cuban people. The video, however, was mysteriously sold to U.S. reporters and aired incessantly throughout South Florida. Soon the encounter was an international cause célèbre.

Life as she knew it was over for Montiel Davis and her family, including a father who worked with the CIA to topple Fidel, a nohablo-inglés mother who lived with the family, her five children, and her Jewish Brooklyn-born attorney husband. Kissing Fidel shares the sometimes dismal, sometimes comical realities of an ordinary citizen being thrown into a world of death threats, mob attacks, and terrorism.