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.

There are white people who know how to act politely to blacks, but deep down you know they're uncomfortable. They're worse, more dangerous than those who speak their minds, because they don't know what they're capable of.

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.

I resent the hell out of the politicians and generals who force events on us that structure our lives, that dictate the memories we'll have when we're old.

Frustrated, El Líder went home, rested his pitching arm, and started a revolution in the mountains.

In Cuba, everything seemed temporal, distorted by the sun.

The war that killed my grandfather and great-uncles and thousands of other blacks is only a footnote in our history books.