I consider myself a survivor thanks to my writing. I wouldn’t have survived certain situations and experiences in my life if I hadn’t had an impulse to write. You see, I was a child in Cuba during the 1959 Revolution, a historical event that greatly impacted our lives—the whole world, really. Led by two young lawyers, the Cuban Fidel Castro and the Argentine Ernesto Che Guevara, the Revolution did much good initially; for one, it kicked out the Americans, who had turned Havana into a playground for the wealthy U.S. elite and the mafia, neglecting the rest of the island and especially the peasants and farmers. Castro provided free health care, education, and food to everyone equally. And he instilled in Cubans (especially in Black people and folks like my grandparents, who were peasants) a sense of dignity and pride they’d never had before.

But then, without U.S. support, Castro had no choice but to turn to the Soviet Union for help, and thus Cuba became a military colony of the USSR. Suddenly, there were aliens in my provincial universe, larger-than-life white beings who spoke a bizarre language and seemed to be appearing everywhere. The Rusos! Scary creatures, invaders I tried to stay away from, those Russians.

Cuban society had always been machista and homophobic, and then machismo and homophobia were institutionalized after the Russians arrived. Young men who looked visibly gay, “mod,” fem, or like the Beatles were rounded up and taken to forced-labor camps where they would supposedly get “cured” and become “normal” citizens. In fact, one of Castro’s first big projects was the creation of what he called El Hombre Nuevo, the New Man: a model citizen who, as imagined by Fidel and Che Guevara, was a heterosexual, revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist macho soldier.

There had never been a place in my country for a boy like me, a chubby, artistic, introverted kid who wanted to spend his free time in his room drawing and writing, not playing ball or killing lizards. And now that boy was bullied and humiliated even more for not being able to fit the Hombre Nuevo mold. Thank goodness I had an impulse to write! Writing provided me with a home where I could escape the fear, the rejection. Oh, the stuff I wrote in those days! Trite little love poems (what did I know about romantic love?!) and melodramatic stories based on the Hollywood movies we watched on TV (Stella Dallas, Johnny Belinda, All About Eve, among other classics). These films were shown without subtitles, so we had to imagine the dialogue and try to make sense of the plots somehow. So, I wrote convoluted tales based on those classic flicks…

Long story short, my parents decided to leave the country, for, according to my father, Cuba had turned into a communist hell. And from the moment he applied for our visas until the day we were allowed to emigrate, life became a living hell for us indeed. We were now traitors of the Revolution, considered scum—escoria—and called gusanos, worms. Again, the only safe place for me through this ordeal was my writing. But the more I withdrew into that space, the more criticism and mockery I got from my peers.

We made it out of Cuba eventually, arriving in Los Angeles in 1969, and then came our immigrant phase here in California. More writing, as I struggled to learn English, so I could interpret for my folks and navigate high school. Many years later, I would attend the University of California, Irvine, where I earned a PhD in Latin American literature in 1984. While in grad school, I decided to write a novel about a family of Cuban refugees—my own family, essentially. I used the image of the cachumbambé, an Afro-Cuban word that means seesaw, as my guiding symbol and the title for the book, for there were many ups and downs in our lives during that time. I managed to publish that first novel the same year that I attained my doctoral degree. Then I accepted a teaching post at Wichita State University in Kansas.

I loved teaching, especially fiction. But by 1989, I was feeling stifled by the demands of academia and finding scant time for my creative writing. Coincidentally, the summer of that year, I was invited, with six other Latinx writers, to be part of a ten-day workshop led by the Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez (author of One Hundred Years of Solitude) at the Sundance Film Institute in Utah, sponsored by Robert Redford. During the course of that transformative experience, Márquez (or Gabo, as he liked to be called) and Redford (who was surprisingly down-to-earth) encouraged me to devote myself solely to writing. And that was all the encouragement I needed. I quit teaching and moved back to California to pursue my passion.
My career took off for real after that workshop, and still today, my creative work gives me a respite from the pain of exile. I can’t imagine—don’t really want to—what would’ve happened to me if I hadn’t been saved by my storytelling…