Two different novelists
emerge from one history


By Judy Taylor Cramer
Managing editor, Florida State Times

Roberto Fernandez and Virgil Suarez share a bond

that's stronger than the hyphen between "Cuban" and "American."

It's a bond forged from a love of language and a desire to give voice

to the Cuban-American immigrant experience.

Both started at the same place - Cuba,

and ended up at the same place - Florida State University.

And both are successful novelists

who write about their similar experiences in very different styles.

Roberto Fernandez

Ask Roberto Fernandez when he switched from writing in Spanish to English, and he deadpans, "I switched when Gloria Estafan switched."

Humor peppers Fernandez's conversations and his writings. He calls his first novel in English, "Raining Backwards," a tragic comedy with the emphasis on comedy, and his latest book, "Holy Radishes!", a tragic comedy with emphasis on tragedy.

"'Raining Backwards' is like a happy funeral, a New Orleans-style funeral about a culture," he says. "Not a culture being assimilated but a culture turning into something totally different."

"Holy Radishes!" is described by Fernandez's publisher, Arte Publico Press, as "a parable of the Cuban immigrant community with an ingenious, inventive and often insane cast of characters pursuing the dream of recreating their former lives in a microcosm of paradise lost and hope everlasting."

Fernandez's translation: "I thought Cubans were taking themselves too seriously. People should learn to laugh about themselves."

Both novels reflect the author's own feelings of exile - from his native Cuba, which he left in 1961, and from his second home, Miami, which he says is losing its Cuban identity as more and more Cuban-Americans like himself move away.

A professor of Hispanic-American literature at FSU, where he earned his Ph.D., Fernandez already has a title for his next book, but he's not telling - at least not until he starts writing it.

He hints that it may be about Cuban-Americans in the year 2000, but there may not be very many of them in the book.

"This country has such an ability to absorb people," Fernandez says. "One generation and their identity is gone."

Virgil Suarez

On one of his family's many cross-country trips from Los Angeles to Miami, Virgil Suarez remembers having his picture taken in front of the "Havana" sign on I-10 outside Tallahassee.

It was the closest his family had come to Havana since they left Cuba in 1974, when Suarez was 12.
Now an assistant professor in the Creative Writing Program at FSU, Suarez practices what he teaches: "I tell my students that there are so many wonderful people out there. If you just take the time to listen to their stories, you'll have a book to write."

Another lesson he has learned and now lectures: "The best stories are about our own lives, our own families, our own roots." His latest novel, "Havana Thursdays," was inspired by members of his wife Delia Poey's family. "I'm involved with a family so interesting, so lively that the material is already there."

Suarez is the author of two other novels, "Latin Jazz" and "The Cutter," and he's already at work on novel No. 4, "Going Under," subtitled "A Cuban-American Fable."

"This book captures what it means to be bicultural," he says. "Cubans are becoming an extinct species. The first generation is very much grounded in the culture. The second and third generations are going into the flow of the mainstream...The generation caught between their parents and their children feel ambivalent. That's what I'm writing about."

Suarez already has ideas for future novels. One would be set during the Vietnamese War when Cuba was sending military advisors to North Vietnam and the U.S. military was sending Cuban-American soldiers to South Vietnam.

Another idea comes from his hobby, breeding canaries. "The only time Cuban men don't talk about Castro or politics is when they talk about birds," says Suarez, who has about 30 pairs of canaries. "I'm sure there's a book there."