AARP - Segunda Juventud - Love in Exile

Love in Exile
No matter how Sex-and-the-City the book’s cover may appear, don’t mistake “Reclaiming Paris” for chick lit. Although it’s certainly sensually seductive, the book’s origins were anything but, as author Fabiola Santiago tells us.

By Carlos J. Queirós
September 2009

Author Q & A's:

José E. Agualusa
Ana Castillo
Sandra Cisneros
Junot Díaz
Cristina García
Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza
Ángeles Mastretta
Alberto Ríos

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Fabiola Santiago—whose debut novel Reclaiming Paris was just translated into Spanish—is vacationing on Sanibel Island, off the coast of southwest Florida, where she and her large family are celebrating her parents’ 54th wedding anniversary. Santiago’s on a weeklong furlough from The Miami Herald where, since 1980, she’s had a fast-paced career covering historically significant events of the Cuban American experience.

Little did she know that her beat would serve as the rich backdrop for her debut novel. Protagonist Marisol, a 45-year-old Cuban exile, poet, and historical archivist, is determined to break with confining traditions and confront complex issues of identity through a series of globetrotting romantic entanglements.

In a conversation often punctuated by a carefree laugh, Santiago talks about the nostalgia of Cuban exiles like herself; why she didn’t translate the novel herself; and her next book, inspired by her work in Guantanamo.

Q.	*How would you describe Siempre París?*
A.	It’s a portrait of contemporary Cuban Miami and its historical ties to Cuba, told through the very sensual voice of a woman. It’s an intimate story. Some people want to call it chick lit, but it’s a whole lot more than that because there’s a lot of cultural nuance in what it’s like to be a Cuban in Miami and an exile. Not that the story is gloom and doom, but it reflects the nostalgia that runs through Miami like a wound. Cubans laugh, even in times of trouble and sadness. If you go to a Cuban funeral, everybody’s laughing and telling stories, and I wanted to capture something like that while making it exuberant.
Q.	What sparked the idea for this novel?
A.	It’s really hard for me to pinpoint exactly what did it, but it had something to do with feelings that arose in two key moments in my life. The first moment was when I went to Guantanamo to cover the Cuban refugees being held there in the tent cities during the Clinton administration. It was a very emotionally charged assignment, especially because I had never been back to Cuba since I left when I was ten. As I was walking through the tent city with a military escort and my notebook, I began interviewing refugees, and they kept asking for me to tell their relatives they were okay. I tore pieces from my notebook and handed out extra pens. Remember, these people were incommunicado; their relatives in Miami didn’t know if they were dead or alive. They stuffed my jeans pockets with these notes, and when I got back to Miami I spent the weekend calling all these people—and you can imagine what those conversations were like. Then I took one of the notes from my back pocket, and this man had written a love letter to his wife. When I called her, I wanted to put it in the mail for her, but she asked that I read it to her over the phone. It was at that moment that I thought, “Behind all of Cuban history, every historical moment, there is always a hell of a love story.” And then the next day, I got up at six with the intention to write about my experience in Guantanamo and, lo and behold, when I woke up out of that trance—because I don’t know what else to call it—I had written my grandmother’s story. My grandmother had exiled her cheating husband not only from her own life but from all of [the Cuban province of] Matanzas to Havana. I made up the dialogue and what happened using the story I had grown up hearing. When I finished, I was scared because I had experienced something very special, but I left it alone and went on with my life as a reporter. The journalism was always sort of making me quash the novelist that had been born, but what I wrote that day in November of 1994 became—with some additions and a lot of rewriting and editing—chapter six in Reclaiming Paris.
Q.	What’s the source of the title?
A.	It’s a reference to the 1940s and 50s, when Havana was known as “the Paris of the Caribbean” because the city thrived on a backdrop of grand architecture, cultural events, and elegant fashions. Writers, artists, and other intellectuals from the United States and Europe—icons such as Ernest Hemingway, Walker Evans, André Breton—gathered with their Cuban counterparts at outdoor cafés, quaint watering holes, and art exhibits, and the city thrived with the energy of modernism. But one has to finish reading the novel to fully grasp the layers of meaning of the title because the Paris reference is also a metaphor for the universal search for Utopian love.
Q.	Can you describe the historical and political background against which Marisol’s life is set?
A.	I borrowed the chronology of my life because I was born into history in 1959, three months after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Our lives were basically held hostage to that historic event and then [to] life in Miami after exile, [leaving on a] Freedom Flight in 1969. Cubans in Miami were impacted by those historical events in a very personal way, and that’s why my character has a place in that history, just as I did covering it for The Miami Herald. I wanted my Marisol to also have that history, so I could explain it to readers from a different perspective. That’s why she’s a volunteer during the [1980] Mariel Boatlift, helping place refugees in that period of turmoil. At the same time, there are her travels, because I wanted to show how our Latin American community in Miami is very well traveled. It also has tidbits of Miami politics. The greatest compliment is when people say this novel is so real that it must be autobiographical, because that says I created a believable fictional world.
Q.	What kind of research did creating this level of authenticity require?
A.	The first paragraph about the Miami River came from when I first heard about the Spanish influence in Florida—and all that happened before the American version of history—from a professor when I was a student at the University of Florida. I went back to my college notes and books on Florida’s history. I spent a lot of time asking questions and carrying around my legal pad. But I also did fun research. Once I decided there was a club in this story, I spent many, many nights at a beautiful little club in Miami that was small, dark, and crowded with nostalgic Cubans, just as I described in the novel. I surrounded myself with books about Cuba and Havana. Luckily, many subjects I had already written about as a reporter. When I actually sat down to write, however, I had this emptiness. As a reporter, I’m used to writing with notes and research materials, and here I was faced with a blank screen.

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