King of Cuba takes place partially in Cuba and partially in the United States (primarily Florida and New York). Tell us a little about your personal connection to these two places.
Although I grew up in New York City, both Cuba and Florida loomed large in my imagination because they were home to family on either side of the political divide. My maternal grandmother was a diehard Communist while her daughter—my mother—was as capitalist as they come. As an adult, I traveled extensively to both places and saw firsthand how radically similar the people and places were in spite of their dramatic, tragic rifts. I became fascinated with what I considered the common bedrock to their wildly divergent surfaces and set out to explore them.
Your character El Comandante is clearly based on Fidel Castro. What kind of research did you have to do to write his character?
I went on a Fidel Castro immersion program, bizarre as that sounds. I read everything I could get my hands on, saw lots of old footage, listened to his speeches, watched documentaries. It was important for me to get his gestures right, the way he caressed a microphone when he paused during his signature tirades, for example. I also read a lot of great fiction about Latin American strongmen by such masters as García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, and Miguel Ángel Asturias. In the end, I shelved all the facts about Castro and tried to create as fully fledged and human a tyrant as I could.
Footnotes featuring the voices of a diverse cast of Cuban characters are woven throughout this novel. What inspired you to include this chorus?
These voices came to me late during the writing. For a long time, I was alternating exclusively between the perspectives of El Comandante and his exile nemesis, Goyo Herrera. However, I felt that I wanted to open up the narrative to include other viewpoints and assessments of the current situation in Cuba. This chorus of voices, then, serves to contest, skewer, even ridicule the “official” and often rigid histories that these two men represent. As a novelist, I’m devoted to writing about Cubans and Cuban Americans in all their complexity, not simply repeating the same old black-and-white bromides.
Cuba itself becomes almost a third main character in the book. When was the last time you went to Cuba? What do you love about the country?
I was last in Cuba in the spring of 2011 for a couple of weeks after a ten-year absence. It was invaluable for me to hear Cuban voices again—their complaints and expressions and their stories, stories, stories. Most of the chorus emerged from people I met in Havana, Trinidad, and Matanzas. Their voices went hand-in-hand with my own impressions and the daily barrage of sensory details. So much changes in Cuba from year to year and yet so much remains the same. To me, it is endlessly fascinating.
El Comandante and Goyo Herrera share a surprising number of similarities despite their stark political differences. Do you consider them to be alike even as enemies?
The parallelism between Goyo and El Comandante—their synchronicity, narcissism, and attitudes toward women—was something I wanted to underscore, though not too heavy-handedly. What I was hoping to show, ultimately, is the false dichotomy between the two, their deep, incestuous, codependence. To my mind, they are flip sides of the same Cuban coin.
What does authenticity mean to you in the context of this story? Do you consider King of Cuba to be historical fiction?
Yes and no. I consider the novel authentic in that it captures, I hope, a kind of emotional and spiritual essence of the postrevolutionary Cuban condition, as portrayed through these problematic, priapic men. But it is in no way a biography of the real El Comandante nor of any particular octogenarian in the Miami Cuban exile community. They are specific fictional distortions that purport to shed light on aspects of both Cubas.
Questions of mortality and legacy plague both men throughout the novel. Is this a product of their age? Their obsession with Cuba? How do their concerns mirror your own?
Their obsessions became my obsessions during the years I was writing King of Cuba, and even to this day. I consider it a gift and a privilege to have inhabited characters who, at the end of their lives, are taking stock, assessing their triumphs and despairs, and trying to rectify through action, delusion, or revisionism their remaining days on earth. The process of writing them radicalized my own sense of fully embracing every day. I don’t want to get to my own end and wallow in regrets.
For all the tragedy that has transpired in both your characters’ lives, the novel remains a dark comedy, a satire even, of a divided Cuba. Why did you take this humorous approach?
Humor is the saving grace of Cubans on both sides of the Straits of Florida, and beyond. It is what has helped us survive the travails we’ve suffered. It enables us to laugh at ourselves and at others, to keep moving forward. For me, humor is a nonnegotiable. Sometimes I force absurdity onto the bleakest of subjects and watch what results. The juxtapositions can salvage even the most untenable of situations.
You’ve written a lot about Cuban women in your past work. Yet the women in both El Comandante and Goyo’s lives are relatively marginalized, as they are in the book overall. Why?
It was not my intention to marginalize Cuban women but El Comandante and Goyo just sucked up all the oxygen in the room. Remember, we’re dealing with men of another generation, who grew up in a culture of sexism—and a certain chivalry as well—so ingrained that they never deeply questioned it, even when their own daughters rebelled against them or criticized their actions. That’s not to say that sexism isn’t alive and well in Havana and Miami, only that these two characters are definitely a dying breed.
Without giving it away, the ending came as such a surprise. How did you go about constructing the ending? Or did it happen organically?
I must have written and rewritten the ending a hundred times, no exaggeration. For me, the novel’s end had to reflect the Aristotelian ideal of being both “surprising yet inevitable.” This is much easier said than done. Surprising isn’t that hard, and inevitable is boring. But to create something that not only surprises readers but makes them feel as though no other conclusion could work as well—now, that’s a killer ending.