‘Mambo’ Author Returns to His Muse
By Damien Cave
Published New York Times: July 2, 2010

MIAMI — Oscar Hijuelos stopped abruptly on Calle Ocho at a mural of Latino celebrities. “Wow,” he said, pointing to colorful portraits of people he knew: Celia Cruz, Cuba’s queen of salsa, and Tito Puente, the drummer extraordinaire.

Author photo by Oscar Hidalgo for The New York Times

“They used to send me Christmas cards,” Mr. Hijuelos said. He chuckled at the thought, his eyes bright as a child’s, his pale, bald forehead wet with sweat. Even without a camera, he had come to resemble what he admits he is here in Miami: a tourist.

That may sound strange for a son of Cuban immigrants who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,” a melancholy, sex-soaked novel about two Cuban brothers trying to make music in Havana and New York before the Castro revolution. But Mr. Hijuelos has never felt entirely comfortable here in the city of “Scarface” and Elían González, nor is he the kind of Cuban who talks politics or demands attention for his own family’s post-Castro losses.

 

His art instead reflects his bebop personality — one moment humble, the next riffing passionately on love and literature. His newest book, “Beautiful Maria of My Soul,” published last month by Hyperion, shows once again that he is a careful, distant observer, whose Cubanía, or Cubanness, comes from sitting in the audience, not performing center stage.
His vantage point has shifted this time, but only slightly. María García y Cifuentes was the heart of “Mambo Kings,” the lost love of Nestor Castillo, the quiet, virile hero of the book who wrote a bolero in her honor. This ballad is now the name of the sequel, which follows Maria, who has now lost the accent on her name, from the moment she leaves her small village as a teenager through years as a dancer in Havana and a retiree in Miami.

Mr. Hijuelos, 58, said he returned to Maria in his eighth novel because she was never fully explored. In “Mambo Kings” she was mostly a sensual vision of unsatisfied desire. Now given her own narrative voice, she is still sexy — with escapades described in graphic detail — but she is also hard as a stiletto, giving up Nestor for a richer man (with a cold pragmatism that Mr. Hijuelos’s wife connects with his mother).

Reviewers have described the novel as a stylistic counterpoint to “Mambo Kings,” but it also explores a contrast in geography and identity: what it means to be Cuban in Miami, and what it means anywhere else.
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