Elias Miguel Muñoz

While not writing about Cuba and its revolution, per se, Elias Miguel Muñoz has been an eloquent chronicler of the children who have suffered separation from their families, dislocation from their place of birth and mother culture, immigration to foreign lands and, quite often, their resilience, but at times their victimization and defeat. Like various other writers included in this anthology, Muñoz has developed a dual career as writer, creating poetry, prose and theater in both English and Spanish, and seeing them published both at home in the United States and abroad—mostly Spain, in Muñoz’s case.

Born in 1954 in Cuba, Muñoz did not immigrate to the United States until 1969. His family settled in Southern California, and he attended both high school and college there. In 1984, he earned a Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of California-Irvine and embarked upon a career in academia, but by 1988 Muñoz gave it up definitively to dedicate himself to writing full-time. And Muñoz has been, indeed, very productive, publishing poetry and stories in magazines throughout the country and authoring a number of books: Los viajes de Orlando Cachumbambé (1984), Crazy Love (1988), En estas tierras/In This Land (1989) and The Greatest Performance (1991).

His most successful work to date, The Greatest Performance, is an intensely poetic novel of exile, which explores the personal struggles of two characters—almost mirror images in opposite sexual roles—for love and psychological integrity in their lives on the margins of family, country and sexual identity. Publishers Weekly considered the novel “sensitive, lyrical,” and Library Journal, “poetically evocative.” The following selection is the first chapter of The Greatest Performance.