Searing and sensual, earthly and elegiac, this novel tells the story of a young woman at sea in a land where the sterility of government dogma belies the verdancy of the vegetation - a tropical nada. Born in the year of Castro's Revolution, the daughter of a hero of the sugarcane harvest - Che Guevara himself draped a Cuban flag across her mother's pregnant belly - Yocandra embodies its promise and hope. But she grows up to see how the regime is turning her beautiful island into a wasteland of despair, 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 against El Comandante and his rule also express their fierce love for their country, a patriotism than can feel like a prison sentence. Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada has become an international phenomenon, establishing Cuban writer Zo Vald?'s as one of the most acclaimed new voices in world literature.

Zoé Valdés (born 1959) is a Cuban writer.[1][2]

She studied at the Instituto Superior Pedagógico Enrique José Varona, but did not graduate. From 1984 to 1988, she worked for the Delegación de Cuba at UNESCO in Paris and in the Oficina Cultural de la Misión de Cuba in Paris. From 1990 to 1995, she was an editor of the magazine Cine Cubano. She lives with her daughter in Paris. She has been married three times: with Cuban writer Manuel Pereira Quintero, with Cuban government official José Antonio González and Cuban independent filmmaker Ricardo Vega, whom she divorced in 2013.