After working for Time Magazine as a researcher, reporter, and Miami bureau chief, García turned to writing fiction. Her first novel, Dreaming in Cuban (1992), received critical acclaim and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has since published her novels The Agüero Sisters (1997) and Monkey Hunting (2003), and has edited books of Cuban and other Latin American literature. Her fourth novel, A Handbook to Luck, was released in hardcover in 2007 and came out in paperback in April 2008.
Santería was traditionally an unacknowledged and underappreciated aspect of what it meant to be Cuban. Yet the syncretism between the Yoruban religion that the slaves brought to the island and the Catholicism of their masters is, in my opinion, the underpinning of Cuban culture. Every artistic realm--music, theater, literature, etc. --owes a huge debt to santería and the slaves who practiced it and passed it on, largely secretively, for generations.
The war that killed my grandfather and great-uncles and thousands of other blacks is only a footnote in our history books.
For me, the sea was a great comfort, Pilar. But it made my children restless. It exists now so we can call and wave from opposite shores.
We speak in Spanish when we make love. English seems an impossible language for intimacy.
For many years in Cuba, nobody spoke of the problem between blacks and whites. It was considered too disagreeable to discuss. But my father spoke to me clearly so that I would understand what happened to his father and his uncles during the Little War of 1912, so that I would know how our men were hunted down day and night like animals, and finally hung by their genitals from the lampposts in Guáimaro. The war that killed my grandfather and great-uncles and thousands of other blacks is only a footnote in our history books. Why, then, should I trust anything I read? I trust only what I see, what I know with my heart, nothing more.
Frustrated, El Líder went home, rested his pitching arm, and started a revolution in the mountains.
