Wings of the Morning: The Flights of Orestes Lorenzo

Flying a six-seat Cessna, Lorenzo, a former Cuban Air Force pilot who had defected to the U.S., swooped down on a busy Florida Keys highway in late December 1992 after rescuing the wife and two sons he had left behind two years earlier. This remarkable autobiography describes his gradual disillusionment with communism and culminates in his heroic mission to retrieve his family after appeals by President George Bush, Coretta Scott King and other notables had failed to persuade Castro to allow them to emigrate. The son of a fervent Communist Party leader, Lorenzo, who now lives with his family in Florida, learned of Stalin's crimes while receiving flight training in glasnost -era Russia in the late 1980s. A moving testament, his narrative provides an insider's look at the Castro regime's personality cult, its indoctrination of children and surveillance of ordinary Cubans. 150,000 first printing; TV rights to Hearst Entertainment; author tour. (Jan.)