My take on Cuba is partly memory-bound, partly melancholic. I read this interesting thing about the word "nostalgia," which is often used about my writing: that it comes from a term ship doctors used to describe a disease when sailors had been out to sea for a few years and were getting homesick. I've always had that, in terms of writing, this thing that is physical,that makes you homesick. For me it is a home that I never really knew and have always seen partly through literature and the great Cuban writers. My writing about Cuba [is] more like an act of creation. Whatever my Cuba is about, it's my own version. I'm not a cultural anthropologist.

Cuba is not a new-born country, peopled by wood-cutting, bear-righting, agricultural folks, who must be fresh and virtuous in order to exist. It is an old country, time worn, decayed, and debauched by thieving officials and fire and sword.

Exile was where I was able to complete the amended or mutilated spaces that I was still missing to understand Cuba’s history. My novels, riddled with ghosts, journeys in time, mythological reinterpretations, are how I try to give a coherent image so as to reconstruct that incomplete reality which I was shown.

Cuba is at the heart of my fiction, even when it’s just an echo, like in “Kimberle.” I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t remember in some conscious way that I’m Cuban. But my relationship with Cuba changes as time goes by, not just because of changes in Cuba but because of changes in my own life. When my son was born almost six years ago, it totally altered everything. For example, instead of going to Cuba, I spent a great deal more time in Miami, because that’s where my mom lived, and I really wanted my son and my mom to have a relationship…

I make reference in my writing to many of the Afro-Cuban deities and superstitions that migrated into Catholicism in the Caribbean from the West African religious practices of Yoruba. This resulted in a more fatalistic and mythological "brand" of Catholicism that holds a blurrier line between the living and the dead, between the "here" and the "after." This spiritual stance I think is reflected in many of my characters…

I was living in Miami. Some people would say, ‘You were very young when you came from Cuba. How did you know us?’ They think I’m portraying Cuba, I said, ‘No, I’m portraying Miami. I’m portraying what I saw in Miami.’

It would be difficult for me to go back [permanently] to Cuba because Miami is my city. . . That's where we have made our life. That's were I feel at home . . . But I would love to be, you know, whatever help I can be [post-Castro] to the people who will be leading themselves. I do think Cuba does have to find its leadership from within. They have a very different society from what we are used to. They are going to need certain things that a democracy might not provide right away. And I don't think it's going to be as quick a change. I think [Castro's] death will bring change, needless to say. But I think his brother [Raul] will try to save the specter of the revolution for quite a while. And maybe start doing some opening [to improve U.S.-Cuba relations]. That is what I feel will happen.

My own ancestors. I come from poor, landless peasants who left no records. And so I began to read the story of Puerto Rico, and the more I read the story the more I realized I would never find my own ancestors, but I could make my imaginary ancestors. And so the book emerges as a result of my trying to create them, to create the people that might have been.

This country ... abounds in that Cuba is a heaven in the spiritual sense of the word, and we prefer to die in heaven than serve in hell.

There was something magical about an island — the mere word suggested fantasy. You lost touch with the world — an island was a world of its own. A world, perhaps, from which you might never return.

More than anything I want to be able to go back to Cuba, to have a house to visit there, to know my roots. I lost my father as a little girl, and I want to be able to find him again in my heritage.

I like ghosts as a metaphor for the outsider. I wish they were real; that would be my preferred afterlife plan. I'd love to observe and haunt with little involvement—I guess that's what being a writer is.

You're from the isle of ghosts and, as you know, there are ghosts walking around all over the place over there. Loads of people have seen them, heard a voice or felt the cold temperature. I believe that they are between here and there, that they exist between the fourth and the fifth dimension and that they visit us frequently.

I often say that I am Jewish because I am Cuban. I feel gratitude toward Cuba because my four grandparents found refuge there in the years before WW II at a time when the door was closed to them in the United States. If not for the welcome they received in Cuba, I would not have been born. My family came to love Cuba. When we left in the 1960s, to start a new life again in the United States after the turn to communism, it was with great sorrow. My family lived through a double exodus, a double migration, from Europe to Cuba, and then from Cuba to the United States. If we had not been given refuge twice, we would not have survived. Knowing that my ancestors fled persecution and genocide, I believe we should be compassionate and humane toward immigrants and foster policies of welcome, kindness, and generosity of spirit.