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Q:
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In your story, you head from Fidel’s landing point in southern Cuba to Santa Clara, where Che secured the rebels’ victory fifty years before. Did you stay the whole month you planned to? Had you been before?
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A:
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I’d never been before, and ended up staying a month or very close to it. I left in the middle of May and got back in the middle of June.
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Are you fluent in Spanish?
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I’m passable in Spanish. Most of the conversations in the story took place in Spanish. Some people spoke enough English and wanted to try theirs out on me, but most of the talking took place in Spanish.
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What got you interested in Cuba?
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I forget the moment when I decided to go. Over many, many years, it would come up as something I thought about doing. I was pissed off at the idea that I wasn’t supposed to go there. Who is our government to say that I can’t? Why are our two countries at such an impasse? It seemed ridiculous when I got older and looked into it.
So I wanted to go there to challenge the ideas that I had grown up with—of Cuba as this enemy, lurking off the coast. Most people I met didn’t know anything about Cuba. They didn’t know why we had this embargo. I wanted to go challenge the few common ideas we had and see what life was like there.
The U.S. lets journalists go without asking permission. However, if you show up in Cuba and say you’re a journalist, you can’t be there as a journalist without the authorities’ involvement. So I left the U.S. as a journalist and visited Cuba as a tourist. |
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What interested you in terms of a story? What did you feel you could do that hadn’t already been done?
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What I hadn’t seen much at all was reporting that took place outside the big cities or the capital. Something that went to areas that not too many people had written about before. I hadn’t seen a lot of reporting from the rural areas—the countryside and the mountains.
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The narrative arc seems akin to a classic travelogue, with little conflicts and resolutions along the way. Is that how you approached structuring the story?
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We decided that the structure should be linear, starting in the beginning and moving north until I was picking up hitchhikers before I left. I tried some different things that weren’t linear, but it kept coming back to the arc of the journey across the map.
I had talked with Ted [Genoways, editor of Virginia Quarterly Review] about it several months before I left. We realized the 50th anniversary of the revolution was coming up, and it seemed like one way to go through Cuba was to follow that route that way. Ted was in on this early in the process, and VQR actually commissioned the piece.
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Last year, we highlighted your “Ramadi Nights” piece about Iraq, which appeared in the same journal. Both of these pieces have an elegant style. Do you ever worry about being too stylized when writing narrative nonfiction?
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I do. It’s something that I have to be careful to rein in. I try to push myself whenever I write a story. And to do that, I often end up going way overboard and then pulling back in the editing process. Most of my writing is for National Geographic, but then I get to write for VQR, which falls on the opposite end of the journalistic spectrum. I get to do both kinds of writing.
But I worry about going overboard. I always tell my readers to let me know. It’s definitely liberating, but sometimes it can be risky. At VQR, there’s only me, Ted, and a proofreader. I know in the Cuba story, I went too far. When I look back at it now, there are things I would change, because I went a little too far.
There are scenes walking through the mountains that I might have reined in a little bit. But as I get older and do this more, a literary style is definitely more interesting to me than straight-up journalism.
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You interpret for the reader in a few places. When a lab technician and an older woman are saying they are free to talk politics, you say that “they are really asking each other.” Can you talk about taking on that kind of authoritative voice in writing?
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I think you have more freedom to do something like that with VQR. As we get into this type of situation, as journalists, we bring a lot to this. We bring our observational and analytical skills. I had picked up so many hitchhikers and had this same conversation. If there was more than one person in the car, it would get to this point in the conversation, but it wouldn’t go past that. Because none of the hitchhikers knew who the others were.
I got the sense that they liked to think they were free, but nobody was actually sure of it. The interpretation there was my sense of the mood that I’d encountered over the course of several hitchhikers. It was something they would give voice to in public, “Yes, we’re free.” But in private, they would say, “No, we aren’t.” It was what I observed over the course of my entire trip. Cubans always worry about who’s spying on who. The idea of freedom was very questionable.
I think that in this kind of nonfiction, you can do this, especially if you spend a lot of time with people. It’s one thing if you drop in and listen and really try to hear what they’re saying. And really try to get it right. I think this adds something to journalism that we don’t see very often.
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What are the risks of the authoritative voice?
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Sometimes you interpret too much. That risk is always there. There’s also the risk that well, maybe I just want it to be that way because it makes a better story. In my experience, I’ve had plenty of stories where you wish somebody had said something differently or someone who changed the nature of the reporting to make it a “perfect story.” You have to be aware of that. You can interpret, but you can’t change things. You can’t fuck with what people tell you.
I certainly met a lot of people who were pro-revolution and loved the idea that a socialist state could raise so many commoners up to a higher level—which is what the revolution did for many of the people in the countryside. It educated them and gave them health care. Especially the older generation who grew up in its aftermath. They were very proud of being able to rebuild their country and stand up to the U.S., though they were not necessarily pro-Fidel. The younger generation, however, is on a completely different page.
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