Raining over Teresa: From Mother to Hero

Teresa Piñeiro knew no fear. In 1960, pregnant, thirty-one-year-old Teresa Piñeiro, along with a group of men, appears in the local newspaper after she is arrested for trying to hijack an airplane to Miami. The daughter of a retired first lieutenant and professor of the Army and the granddaughter of one of the trailblazing Spanish families who established the town of La Palma in western Cuba, Teresa finds herself in a maximum-security prison where she confronts the Comandante en Jefe, Fidel Castro.

Now, four generations of Teresa’s family—her mother, her blind grandmother, her ten-year-old daughter, and eventually, Teresa’s newborn son—find themselves entangled in a hurricane of ideologies where those in charge hold all the cards. The future of Teresa’s family depends on her resiliency during trying times which drove some women like her insane.

Teresa is a woman too advanced for her time. On her third marriage at the time of her imprisonment, Teresa has lived a fascinating life full of adventure that has allowed her to rub shoulders with the most prestigious families of the island. Now her past has come to haunt her, and only she will be able to save herself from what awaits.
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Beginning with her first book, Waiting on Zapote Street, Mrs. Viamontes documented the terrors, losses, and triumphs of Cuban families. These are not stories of Cold War intrigue. Instead, they are the tales of common people caught up in the delusions of a monster. Most poignantly, they tell of aged grandparents hugging children that they would never see again.
Most of Mrs. Viamontes’ writing deals with the struggles of poor and middle-class families caught up in a social hurricane. The newest book, Raining Over Teresa, however, breaks new ground. It follows the life of the headstrong daughter of prominent planters who married into wealth.

In a single day, she went from a world of privilege to the barbarity of a death prison.

This true story gives readers a rare glimpse into a communist prison, headed by the legendary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. It also introduces us to Fidel Castro, not as a political leader, but as an arrogant interrogator, demanding summary executions.

Raining Over Teresa, however, is much more than a prison memoir. Astonishingly, Teresa María Piñeiro did not die beside that lonely road where she was dumped. Instead, she began to walk. As I write this, she is 94 years old, retired from a successful career in the United States. Her large family lives throughout the world. Now thanks to the work of Betty Viamontes, a new generation will know how she survived.

Raining Over Teresa is essential reading in America in the 2020s. In our “land of the free,” college students declare “Free Expression” as reactionary. Speakers with opposing views are shouted off campus. Opposition politicians are indicted and their followers imprisoned. Violent mobs riot in our streets before elections. There has never been a better time to study the lives of Teresa and her thousands of compatriots before we lose our own precious freedoms. Betty Viamontes gives us a window into their world.

Allen A. Witt PhD
Lead Author of America’s Community College: The First Century