"My take on Cuba is partly memory-bound, partly melancholic. I read this interesting thing about the word "nostalgia," which is often used about my writing: that it comes from a term ship doctors used to describe a disease when sailors had been out to sea for a few years and were getting homesick. I've always had that, in terms of writing, this thing that is physical,that makes you homesick. For me it is a home that I never really knew and have always seen partly through literature and the great Cuban writers. My writing about Cuba [is] more like an act of creation. Whatever my Cuba is about, it's my own version. I'm not a cultural anthropologist."
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On how he writes about Cuban themes in âMambo in Double Time: The Beat Goes Onâ in AARP Magazine (Summer 2010)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Oscar_Hijuelos
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Oscar Hijuelos
Oscar Jerome Hijuelos (August 24, 1951 â October 12, 2013) was an American novelist of Cuban descent.
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