I am a Cuban writer: this is my cross. Every being on earth carries a personal and un-transferable cross, with the same share of love and agony, since the time God or the Big Bang made us.

I do not inhabit Cuba: Cuba inhabits me.

And I love my island with the same rage that makes me suffer. I love her diversity and I suffer from her blindness. I love Benny Moré and Celia Cruz, Fernando Ortiz and Moreno Fraginals, Lezama Lima and Eugenio Florit, Carpentier and Cabrera Infante, Enrique Arredondo and Guillermo Álvarez Guédez; and I suffer from the absurd reasoning that tries to negate who they are: the heritage of all Cubans, whatever their creed, affiliation, prejudice or extremism.

It is from that Cuba I write. Searching to free my words from the confinement imposed on them by what Virgilio Piñera called that “cursed circumstance of water all around.”

My characters gravitate over that Cuba like ghosts. Like Cuba, they also inhabit, seduce and enslave me; they dictate the stories that other insane persons enjoy or endure in my books.

In a world without dialogue, believing in freedom of speech is for the insane. I confess that I am stubbornly insane.

The freedom of the insane is one of the most beautiful things that still exists in the world today. Translating this freedom into my stories, my characters, is a dream that constantly wins me over.

I think this planet of ours lacks a little of that beautiful and free insanity.

This is why I write.