Never before has distant Cuba been so close. You hold it in your hands, sniff it, taste it and realize that you have been deceived. Those millions of beautiful beach photographs that you happened to look through, those T-shirts with the imperturbable Che, those snatches of phrases from history textbooks - all this is not true. More precisely, it’s true, but to such an extent that it’s hard to believe. “Everybody’s Leaving” by Wendy Guerra is a book of revelation, a diary from which you can’t tear out the pages. It begins with an eight-year-old girl, Nieve, a girl whose childhood was stolen from her, and at the end we see a twenty-year-old girl who never grew up. She talks very sincerely and truthfully about what she actually sees on the island of freedom. Her Cuba is not a paradise beach and golden sun. Her Cuba is poverty, injustice, violence and pain. Her Cuba is a parting, a life where everyone leaves, and you continue to live, still hoping for happiness. The novel by the Cuban writer Wendy Guerra “Everyone is Leaving” received the award of the Spanish publishing house “Bruguera”, the prize “Carbet des Lycéens” in Martinique, and critics of one of the most influential newspapers in Spain, El PaÍs, named it the best Spanish-language novel of 2006. This work was published with the support of the General Directorate of Books, Archives and Libraries of the Spanish Ministry of Culture.