Alicia Maldonado: A Mother Lost 

Dr. Ardain Isma is a Haitian-born writer, well-versed in the mystery and wonder of many diverse cultures. He’s an educator with the Broward County school board in South Florida, and also teaches at Nova Southeastern University and Broward Community College. He’s written several published articles on multiculturalism, holds a Ph.D. in Education, and lives with his wife and three children in Plantation, Florida.

Alicia Maldonado is the tumultuous and tormented story of a beautiful, aristocratic and universally enchanting white woman born in Cuba in 1943 to a well-to-do land owning family. She arrives in Haiti with her parents after they flee Cuba following the Batista regime’s political turmoil. The family settles in Les Cayes, on the exotic Caribbean coast, where the young lady blossoms within a tropical paradise. She grows up to marry Richard Laveaux, the son of a wealthy mulatto family, despite her mother’s protests.

Following the sudden death of her alcoholic husband, the young woman, her mother, and her two children move to Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, where she meets and marries Georges Duplan, a young officer of the Haitian army. But after discovering her husband cheating on her with the vibrant and exciting Rosita, she becomes severely depressed. What is her life about, why do such things always spoil her happiness?

Unable to cope with her problems, Alicia leaves Haiti and vanishes without a trace. For twelve long years no one knows her exact whereabouts, until one day in 1984, on a rainy Tuesday morning, in a crowded Miami Laundromat.