That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.

My mother had been educated at a convent, and she had been converted to communism by my father during Stalin's most rampant period, at the beginning of the 1930s. So she had two gods, God in heaven and god on earth.

There were influences in my life that were more important than journalism, such as comic strips and radio.

But I do not have the reader in mind when I write. No true writer does that

I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels

I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself

So I do not consider myself a chronicler of my fatherland or even a chronicler of Havana