An Interview with Leslie Blanco (Fiction ’07)
Leslie Blanco, a 2007 fiction alum, was recently interviewed by the Southern Humanities Review. Read an excerpt below:
An Interview with Leslie Blanco
Caitlin Rae Taylor: Your short story “A Sane Person Doesn’t Do Something Like That” examines the strain in the marriage of Yvelis and Hector during the Cuban Revolution. How did you decide when and where Hector and Yvelis’s story would take place, and why did you construct it to coincide with this critical point in Cuba’s history?
Leslie Blanco: My father was born in Cuba in the 40s, and he was sent away by his parents in 1962, under the auspices of the Peter Pan Project, a joint venture of the CIA and the Catholic Church. These unlikely bedfellows worked together to airlift the children of political dissidents and those in disfavor with the Communist government to safety in the United States. My father was not reunited with his family for seven years, and the reunion happened “in exile.” All of this transpired well before I was born, but for the Cuban family that raised me, the Cuban revolution was, and in many ways continues to be, the central tragedy. It was the definitive point of our before and after. It was the measure against which our lives gained or lost purpose, meaning and happiness, all in a strangely predetermined dance of fate and destiny maddeningly beyond our control and inextricable from the joys and tragedies of life beyond politics.
“A Sane Person Doesn’t Do Something Like That,” came out of a discarded section of my first attempt at a novel. The novel was set before and during Fidel Castro’s revolution of 1959. Though magically realist, full of historical coincidence and highly fictionalized, the novel was set in my father’s hometown of Guanajay, Cuba. In my head, all the invented characters of the novel had a real-life corollary. Yvelis was a version of my grandmother, who loved to gamble, secretly, with funds my straitlaced grandfather never knew about. When she died, we found several thousand dollars in cash hidden under her bed. Surely gambling winnings, lottery winnings, dog race winnings. I suspect that in my grandmother’s day, she and her sisters may have placed great faith in Clavelito, even while making fun of those who believed in Clavelito’s miracles. In a way, all my stories set within the framework of Cuban history are an attempt to understand a family, a history and a culture dramatically different than the one that surrounds me as a hyphenated American. And even though I did not experience it, the Cuban revolution of 1959 is and always will be the moment of my before and after, and accordingly, it haunts my writing, cropping up again and again.
Read the rest of this story here: http://www.southernhumanitiesreview.com/interview-leslie-blanco.html
