Mi niñera de la KGB
Laura Ramos
NONFICTION | 2025 | 256 pages
The life of the ruthless and legendary Soviet spy África de Las Heras, and a fresco of the social, political, and cultural history of the 20th century through the eyes of the girl she occasionally nannied for who learned the true identity of her nanny and embarked on a hallucinatory journey to reconstruct her biography and her own life 50 years later.
The Spanish woman África de las Heras was recruited by the Soviet secret services in 1937. From then on, and for the rest of her life, she operated as an elite international agent. During World War II, she parachuted into German rearguard troops in Ukraine; she participated in the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico; during the Cold War she managed to marry the writer Felisberto Hernández in Paris in order to obtain Uruguayan citizenship and establish a KGB center in Montevideo.
It is during her long stay there that her path crossed with the author’s—the daughter of Argentine Trotskyist politicians and intellectuals. To the young Laura Ramos, África de las Heras was María Luisa, the “seamstress” and a kind, approachable, generous woman from Spain who cared for and pampered children without asking for anything in return. More than half a century after “María Luisa” was her nanny, Ramos discovered her true identity. From that point on, she embarks on a mind-bending journey through Africa, stopping in Ceuta, Barcelona, Mexico City, Havana, Cambridge, and Montevideo, eventually finding the family the spy had co-opted for the Soviets. Unexpctedly, her investigation ends up uncovering two unsolved police cases in Uruguay: an alleged assassination attempt on Che Guevara and the murder of the seamstress’s last husband, an Italian spy.
This journey—and this book—simultaneously becomes an intimate exploration of the author’s own history and identity. It is in that act and all of the intricacies that make it up that one of her most unique discoveries lies.
RIGHTS: spanish LUMEN
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