In an interview on Cuba

Your next choice is Carlos Eire’s Learning to Die in Miami, which is the second part of his autobiography where he discusses coming to Miami.

He is best known for his earlier book, Waiting for Snow in Havana.

Which is all about him growing up in Havana.

Yes, and it is about his family’s experiences coming to the States. This book is much more fragmented. It also has an intersection, if I can use that term. It intersects with his becoming American and not knowing what to make of it. So there is this kind of controlled madness in the narrative. If you read between the lines of that book, you will feel more than what you are actually reading. A lot of it is about the adjustments the narrator had to make to this new, unexpected and perhaps reluctantly embraced life.

He was one of the 14,000 unaccompanied children who came across as refugees as part of Operation Peter Pan.

Yes, and what is nice about it is this intellectual mind shining through these simply told tales. Also, there is a lot of riffing in language which is interesting to me.

He is now a professor at Yale.

He teaches history and religious studies there. He really exemplifies someone who has found a deeper sense of self through his writing, and of course he deals with the dual subject matter of what it is to be a Cuban and an American.

Although he came across to the US in very different circumstances to you, do you see any parallels between him and yourself in terms of identity, and adjusting to life in the States?

No matter what the pay-off is of life in the US, for Cubans there is always this nagging wonderment, if I may coin the phrase, about what could have been. In the case of this book, I think Carlos is trying to look forward. But at the same time, it is also a report on culture shock. That is something I can definitely relate to. Though I grew up in a Cuban household, I have often wondered what would have happened to me if my parents had never left Cuba.

When you were little, after a trip to Cuba with your mother, you got ill and ended up in hospital for many months. During that time you forgot your Spanish. That incident must have had a huge impact on your identity.

I think it was very traumatic, and yet I wonder if I would have been destined to feel estranged from my roots anyway. Those are the kind of questions that I often ponder. Had my family been living in Cuba during the revolution, perhaps I would have shared Carlos’s experiences. In either case, whether as an exile or as someone who stayed there, I very much doubt that I would have turned out the same person as the Hijuelos who grew up in New York. You see, while I grew up knowing that I was Cuban, listening to my Cuban parents and feeling a strong sense and tie to that legacy, I also felt so outside of it. The only way that I really re-entered it was through the imaginative world of my writing, in which I could wear the mask of a writer without having values imposed on me by other people.