When Eduardo Santiago’s first novel came out in 2006, everything seemed to be
going right. “I was very lucky that Tomorrow They Will Kiss was picked up
by Little, Brown almost as soon as I finished it,’ he says. The novel, which tells
the story of Cuban émigrés working at a New Jersey factory in the 1960s, earned
reviews comparing it to Mario Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
and Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.
Eduardo Santiago, author of Midnight Rumba and Tomorrow They Will Kiss
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And then Santiago ran into a familiar stumbling block: The editor who had shepherded
Tomorrow They Will Kiss
through the publishing process left, and Santiago was assigned to a new editor, who
was not interested in his next manuscript. “With traditional publishing, we’re
at the mercy of people we’ve never met,” Santiago says. “There’s
very rarely a dialogue.”
Santiago had a clear vision for his body of work, and when both his editor and his
agent suggested he set the manuscript aside, he knew the only way he would be able
to tell the story he wanted was by taking charge of the process. “I was inspired
to write it, and I was inspired to self-publish it,” he says of his new novel,
Midnight Rumba.
Midnight Rumba fits into Santiago’s elegantly simple literary vision:
“My plan for my writing life is to write a novel for every decade Cubans have
been in exile in the U.S.,” he says, adding that the novels will be linked
by topic and theme, though he does not see them as a series. After tackling the
1960s in his first novel, he turns to the 1950s in Midnight Rumba, which
is set in Cuba during the early years of Fidel Castro’s revolution. Kirkus
has given the book a starred review, calling it “a historically sound, sublimely
heartbreaking novel.”
“It’s so joyful to be somewhat in control of your writing life,”
Santiago says. He is particularly glad to have had complete control over Midnight
Rumba’s cover design. He worked with Allison Strauss, daughter of
his friend Janet Fitch (White Oleander), to produce an illustration in
the style of his first novel’s cover, drawing a clear visual connection between
the two books. “She did a fantastic job,” he says, showing off a cover
that reflects the seedy glamour of Midnight Rumba’s Havana nightclubs
while echoing the telenovela theme of Tomorrow They Will Kiss.
As for marketing, “I just show up wherever I’m invited,” Santiago
says. He has discussed Midnight Rumba on CBS News in Los Angeles, where
he lives, and has found book festivals a particularly effective form of promotion—the
book, he says, “has been received with such kindness.” This year he
has been to the Tucson Festival of Books, and he was at the Los Angeles Times Festival
of the Book, held last weekend.
Santiago also hopes to make use of his control over the novel’s subsidiary
rights. “I know a lot more now than I did in 2006,” he adds, pointing
out that although Tomorrow They Will Kiss was translated into Russian,
no Spanish translation was published. “I didn’t know that I really had
to push for it,” he acknowledges. Novelist Reyna Grande told him that she
had done her own translation of her work, and Santiago is now doing the same.
Offering a Spanish translation of his books about the Cuban-American diaspora gives
Santiago an opportunity to expand the literary calling he sees as something of a
mission. “I cannot escape my topic,” he says. Questions from his nieces
and nephews about family history have made him glad to be “leaving something
behind for generations that are not here now....It’s kind of nice that I’m
creating this legacy for them.”
“The eyes of the world are not on Cuba right now,” Santiago says, as
crises in other parts of the world are attracting more immediate attention. But
at the same time, he sees an ongoing fascination with the country, particularly
as the United States relaxes travel restrictions. “There is still a curiosity
about the little island prison where I was born,” he says, adding that there
is some interest in his books on the part of the cultural exchange programs that
allow Americans to visit Cuba.
With Midnight Rumba on its way in the literary world, Santiago has turned
to his next project, one that he has not decided whether to self-publish. The Weight
of My Shadow extends his exploration of the Cuban-American experience into
the 1970s. The book, Santiago says, is “about the moment the Cubans in exile
realized they were not going home.”
There are times, Santiago admits, when he asks himself why he does not write “something
supercommercial” instead of work that draws so heavily on his personal experience.
But he is satisfied with the responses he has gotten to both his traditionally published
debut and his self-published sophomore novel. “In order to do the kind of
work I do, that most writers do, you have to make yourself very vulnerable,”
he says. This opening of himself to professional vulnerability has brought its challenges
as he brings his work into the world, but it has also left with an appreciation
for the many different paths publishing success can take. “I kind of live
from miracle to miracle,” he says.
—Interview conducted by Sarah Rettger on 18 April 2014, and previously published
in Kirkus Reviews. Reprinted here by permissions of Ms. Rettger, and Kirkus
Reviews.
is a writer and bookseller in Massachusetts.