The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes - 30

Books have been a lifelong passion of mine. I cannot remember a time when I didn’t love to read and there’s no question that I’m a writer because of my love of reading. Like Pilar, books have been a source of solace for me as I’ve navigated some of the most difficult moments in my life.

The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes is, at its core, my love letter to the power of books and the impact they leave on our lives. As I developed the various themes in the novel, that was one I continued to return to, the heart of the story I longed to write. Eva’s fictional book became the thread connecting the three timelines as I explored the legacy of her words and the impact on those who came across A Time for Forgetting.

As I began exploring the circumstances in which Eva would write the novel, I was drawn to the early twentieth century and the transformative moment it occupied in history. I first came across mention of the Cuban Summer School when I was researching The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba years ago. At the time, I was struck by what a momentous undertaking it must have been, particularly at such a pivotal time in Cuban-American relations. Like Eva, I moved abroad to study at a young age, and I found that experience to be one of the most formative of my life.

As a Cuban-American writer, I love researching these moments in history and marrying them with fictional characters and storylines, reading about these interactions between my two identities and wondering where my ancestors would have been in these moments and what they would have thought of them. I also was drawn to the way Eva’s fictional storyline connected to the history I’d researched in The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba, and it was special to me to revisit this time period that I spent so much time studying years earlier.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Cuban Summer School, the Cuba Studies Program, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University maintains an incredible, comprehensive site on the endeavor at theharvardcubans.com, conceived, designed, researched, and created by Marial Iglesias Utset and Danny González Lucena.

As I envisioned Eva’s story, I began to consider who might need her book, and the moment in which they might need it most. While I’ve written other books and short stories— When We Left Cuba , Our Last Days in Barcelona , and A Night at the Tropicana —set in exile during the 1960s, this was the first time I’d written a heroine living in Cuba in the 1960s. Here I was drawn to revisiting the stories I’d heard growing up about life in postrevolutionary Cuba and the challenges so many faced. Pilar’s strength and courage came to me immediately, and I knew that in both her personal and professional life, she would find comfort as so many do in the power of literature to move and inspire.

I also began to imagine the woman who would be searching for this book, and for Margo’s storyline I found inspiration in the years I spent living and studying in London. One of the courses I took while I studied there touched on issues of art theft, seizure, and questions of provenance, and given my Cuban ancestry, I knew that I wanted to explore the topic further through the lens of the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution.

In the eight historical fiction books—and one short story—that I’ve published to date, I’ve been able to travel back in time with my characters, learning more about my heritage and these pivotal moments in Cuban-American history. Thank you so much for coming along on this journey with me.