Fata Morgana: Reinaldo Arenas, Writers in Exile, and a Visit to the Havana of 1987 (The Paris Review)

Late on a warm night in 1987, I left Miami for Havana to report on contemporary Cuban writing and see Arenas's environment firsthand. I'd met Arenas in 1983, when I interviewed him for my comparative literature thesis one fall afternoon at Princeton. The thesis included my translations of some of his work, one of which, a novella entitled “Old Rosa,” was later published in Old Rosa: A Novel in Two Stories.