The Prize and the Passion : Cuban-American Author of Pulsating ‘Mambo Kings’ Treasures His Roots and a Pulitzer

NEW YORK —  When Oscar Hijuelos wants to remember the past, he looks out his living room window. There, stretching north over the rooftops of Manhattan’s Upper Westside, are the graying tenements and gritty streets of his childhood, his adolescence and the world of his creative imagination.

In one corner, Hijuelos can make out the hospital where he was born to Cuban immigrant parents in 1951. In another corner, are the avenues where he first heard the sounds of Latin music booming from bodegas. And if he looks hard enough, he can see Amsterdam Avenue, where the characters came to life in his acclaimed novel, “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.”

“I live in the neighborhood where I grew up as a kid, and for a writer that provides some interesting opportunities,” says Hijuelos. “I’ve always had a hunger for my roots. . . . I’ve wanted some recognition for the world in which I grew up.”

Last week, he got all that--and more. At 38, Hijuelos became the first American-born Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It capped a period in which his earthy, electrifying novel about Cuban musicians in New York during the ‘40s and ‘50s won nearly unanimous praise and focused new attention on an author who had written his first book only six years before.

In raw, funky language, Hijuelos tells the story of two brothers who achieve fleeting fame around 1950 when the mambo craze sweeps America. Packed with images of hot, pulsating bands, platefuls of pork chops and black beans and a generous helping of sex, the book reaches its peak when the Castillo brothers perform with Desi Arnaz’s band on the “I Love Lucy Show.” Stretching over 30 years and 407 pages, it is a powerful, unforgettable read.

But it is hard, at first, to believe that Hijuelos (pronounced Ee-Hway-Los) wrote it. A short, somewhat paunchy man with blond hair, the author does not look particularly Cuban, or even Latino. Lighting a cigarette in his modest, one-bedroom apartment, he leans back in a chair and jokes that this is because of some “unknown Irish blood” on his father’s side of the family.

Yet, when his thoughts turn inward, there is no doubting that he is the son of immigrants. Like many first-generation Cubans, Hijuelos says he fits into the Old World and the New--and has struggled all his life to reconcile the two.

“I can tap into both cultures,” he says. “I’m very Americanized, but I grew up around the Cuban people and this formed me. I’ve always had questions about identity and fitting in. It’s given me a lot of material.”

Hijuelos’ parents came to New York from Cuba in 1943 seeking economic betterment and worked hard to make a living. Jose Hijuelos had been a country gentleman in Cuba with a small inheritance, but the realities of life in America forced him to work as a hotel dishwasher and cook. He died in 1969 when Hijuelos was 17. His mother showed early potential as a poet, but the demands of family life kept her busy and that promise was never fulfilled.

Somehow, Hijuelos broke free of a neighborhood which was riddled with gang violence and decided to became a writer, with the help of such patrons as Donald Barthelme and Susan Sontag at City College of New York. After years of false starts, his first novel, “Our House in the Last World,” won favorable reviews in 1983 and stamped him as a promising young writer.

“The Mambo Kings,” his second book, got a strong publicity boost from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and the author had been recuperating from an exhausting book tour last week in a friend’s Upstate New York home, when the phone rang late in the afternoon.

To his amazement, Hijuelos learned that he had won the Pulitzer Prize. It was especially satisfying, he says, because his novel had been a finalist in competition for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award but had lost both times. He was a bridesmaid no more.

“When I picked up the phone, it was Donald Straus, my publisher, telling me that I had won, and he did it in a very blunt fashion,” Hijuelos recalls. “He said, ‘You did it, kid, you won the big one, we’re all really happy for you.’ And when the boss tells you that kind of news, it’s pretty amazing.”

At first, the author was proud for himself, his 77-year-old mother and his friends. But he has since come to believe that the award signifies much more.

In recent years, Hijuelos says, several writers have enriched American fiction by drawing deeply on their ethnic experiences, well outside the mainstream of American culture. The works of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris with American Indians, Mary Gordon with the Irish and Amy Tan with the Chinese have won plaudits; now “The Mambo Kings” has done the same.

The 1990 award was a recognition of this trend, he says, adding that, “I’m the first Hispanic American to have won it . . . and it’s long past due. There are many wonderful Hispanic writers in this country, but most of them are published by small presses, university presses and they just don’t get the kind of play necessary to get the right kind of attention.

“I think (the members of the Pulitzer Board) are tipping their hat and saying, ‘Yes, we want more of this.’ It’s a whole new take on America. I think novels are the last holdout in this culture for a really detailed examination of our lives and what’s going on.”

Hijuelos pauses for a moment and laughs at the sweeping statement he has just made. Despite the award, the phone calls from journalists around the world and the bouquets of flowers streaming into his disheveled apartment, he maintains a healthy sense of humor.

Apologizing for the books and musical instruments strewn throughout the room, he rushes off to put a load of clothes into the laundry and begins re-arranging books on a table.

From the next room, a scratchy tape recording of mambos and boleros keeps up a steady beat. Every now and then, Hijuelos picks up a nylon string guitar and starts strumming along, humming to himself. He wears a blue striped shirt, faded jeans and work boots, and pauses every so often to pour a glass of seltzer.

“Not what you’d expect from the Pulitzer Prize winner, huh?” he says. “Well, I don’t believe it either.”

It’s good for another laugh. But then Hijuelos starts talking about his childhood and sounds more pensive. It is difficult to appreciate his novel without understanding his own story, he says, and Hijuelos is nothing if not a good storyteller. Especially when the tales of his past blend into the colorful world of his fiction.

One of Hijuelos’ earliest memories are of the year he spent at age of 4 in a Connecticut Hospital recovering from nephritis, a serious kidney disease. For much of the time, he was away from his family.

“I remember a very surrealistic quality to the place and an intense solitude,” Hijuelos says. “I sort of felt isolated from my family, not in terms of love. . . . But I always felt a little on the outside. You see kids who are away from their parents for 10 minutes and they freak. Well, I was away from them for a year.”

The most striking consequence was that Hijuelos, who spoke only Spanish when he checked into the hospital, spoke mostly English when he returned home. To this day, he cannot recall how or why that took place. But a long process of assimilation into the larger American culture had begun.

As a young boy, Hijuelos grew up in an ethnically mixed neighborhood where Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Irish, Jews and blacks lived near each other. They didn’t always get along, and there were periodic outbreaks of gang warfare. Coming from a poor family, Hijuelos says he felt a pent-up sense of anger at the world that took him years to shake off.

“I had so much tension in me as a kid that you’d have to kill me to get me down,” he says. “If you’re raised in a certain way, you’re used to public clinics and feelings of second-classness. You don’t have money, you always shop at sales and you always get irregular clothes.”

The only outlet that Hijuelos could find for the pressures within came from music. A child of the ‘60s, he was influenced by the Beatles but learned to appreciate other sounds as well, including blues, soul, jazz and the psychedelic riffs screeching from amplifiers at nearby Columbia University.

Hijuelos also had been raised on the rumbas, mambos and boleros of Cuban musicians who streamed through New York in the ‘30s and ‘40s. He remembers hearing the tinny sounds of famous band leaders like Tito Puente on his father’s transistor radio during outings to Coney Island. It then seemed, he says, like music from the Old Country--a world that immigrant parents would remember and that their children might forget.

Eventually, Hijuelos joined a series of rock bands and played for spare change in clubs and schools across New York. But he tired of the long hours and began concentrating on his studies. After graduating from high school, he enrolled in City College, a school that offers free education and has nourished the intellects of thousands of immigrant children over the years.

“In my family, we didn’t know about the outside world,” he says. “There was no great push to become a doctor or a lawyer or a writer. But I felt that school was a way to break out, even though I didn’t know what I was looking for.”

Beyond a handful of short stories written in elementary school, there were no indications that Hijuelos would ever become a writer. The transformation began when a girlfriend handed him a book by author Barthelme. He was impressed, especially when he learned that Barthelme taught at the college.

“One day, I went up into the offices looking for him,” Hijuelos recalls. “I looked into one room and there’s a scholarly looking guy by a typewriter, and I asked him if he was Donald Barthelme. He said no, he was William Burroughs. I walked down the hall and asked another man if he was Barthelme, and he said his name was Joseph Heller. Finally I found the man.”

Encouraged by Barthelme and Sontag to write short stories, Hijuelos’ career began to take shape. Unlike other writers who might search years for their subject matter, his inspiration lay right outside his door.

“I suddenly wanted contact back with the roots because I had been out there, in the mainstream world, long enough to feel the chill,” he says. “American culture was just so anonymous, it rarely gets into depth, it’s a very surface thing. But I realized that I could get on a freedom train and write about Cuba.”

His first efforts were rough and unpolished, Hijuelos says, and teachers had to be patient with him. Like any novice writer, he had to take a full-time job and worked for eight years in a transit advertising agency. But when he published his first novel, a semi-autobiographical book about Cuban immigrants coming to America, Hijuelos quit the 9-to-5 world for good.

Publishers wanted him to follow up with another work in the same vein, yet Hijuelos says he was determined to stretch his legs. He won a literary fellowship that enabled him to work in Italy and began writing. A brash new novel began taking shape in his head.

The idea for “Mambo Kings” grew out of Hijuelos’ childhood fascination with basements, boiler rooms and cement back yards. At first, he thought of writing a book about a Cuban building superintendent as the captain of his ship, a man who made the neighborhood hum. The idea was promising, but the character he had in mind was in his late 50s. What had he done before running an elevator and fixing leaky faucets?

Hijuelos thought about family members who had been musicians and singers in Cuba. He recalled an uncle who had played with Xavier Cugat in the ‘30s. Closer to home, he was intrigued to learn that the man who ran the elevator in his building had been a singer in the Dominican Republic years before.

“The music began taking over,” Hijuelos says. “I became fascinated by the lives of people who had this great talent, but then took different directions when they bumped into tougher realities here in America.”

Quickly, the character of a superintendent named Cesar blossomed into a man who had once led a New York mambo band. Good-hearted but arrogant, he loved fancy clothes and had a prodigious sexual appetite. In time, the character became even more complex and took on a life of his own.

“It’s true what they say about writing,” Hijuelos notes. “One day, this character just walked over to a park and picked up a horn. These characters take walks on you. You try to keep them in bed and they go to the park. They’re supposed to be in church, and they wind up following a blonde or brunette down the street.”

Soon, music all but dominated the book. Looking back, Hijuelos says he tried to capture the dreams and aspirations of two ordinary men who happen to be immigrants but whose tortured experiences with love are universal and go beyond the world of Cuban-American culture.

The characters, Cesar and Nestor Castillo, could not be more different.

In one steamy, hyper-phallic scene after another, Cesar seduces women, revels in their bodies and stubbornly refuses to establish a lasting, intimate relationship. The language is hot, juicy and unrestrained. Asked why he recounted Cesar’s sexual exploits in such detail, Hijuelos chuckles.

“He’s an Adonis, a sexual Hercules, and I loved writing about him this way. To me, when you’re in love, in lust, it’s like vacationing in the south of France, except that you’re in bed. For me, the sex in the book was like a horn riff coming over and over again, like a wild saxophone.”

Nestor Castillo, by contrast, is a gloomy introvert, a heartbroken dreamer who cannot get over a love affair that ended years before in Cuba. He writes a mournful song to Maria, the woman who abandoned him, and rewrites it 22 times before the book ends. He is possessed by the past, unable to shake free and love a women who offers him everything.

“As a character, he’s about memory and the past, every beautiful moment that passes in time and you can’t retrieve it,” says Hijuelos. “Somebody said, rightly I think, that Maria comes to symbolize Cuba itself. She’s so beautiful, and you’ll never get over it.”

Although the book’s relentless macho sex can grate, it is more than balanced by the portrayal of Cuban women, who are stronger emotionally than the men. Even as their husbands and lovers disappoint them, they raise families, work long hours and have bold dreams of their own.

Ultimately, the novel turns into an elegy for the past, a loving tribute to memory. In an episode that repeats itself many times, the Castillo brothers get their big break by performing Nestor’s song on the “I Love Lucy Show.” In a flickering television moment that neither brother forgets, Cuban bandleader Arnaz sings with them at the Tropicana Nightclub and the future seems bright.

The memory persists--playing over and over in the mind-even as both brothers fall on hard times. When the book ends, two enormous satin hearts are seen flying toward heaven.

Hijuelos says he wrote “The Mambo Kings” because he’s a fan of the music and the culture that spawned it. More important, he wanted the novel to reflect the lives of the people he has known.

“As a writer, you can find ideas anywhere in this town,” Hijuelos says, looking out his living room window. “There’s a Puerto Rican woman a few blocks up who raised four boys by herself, and they all became lawyers.

“Another guy is a fireman and he moonlights as a radio personality. His wife works in a candy store. Around the corner, you’ve got crack city. This area is very, very rich.”

His next novel, Hijuelos says, will be about a family with 14 sisters. Having focused on the men in Cuban culture, he is now turning to the women. The success of “The Mambo Kings” probably ensures him a healthy advance for future work, and time to reflect on the last few months.

“I’ve had wonderful reactions from lots of people, and this new recognition brings with it respect,” he says softly.

“But maybe the best thing is when I get letters from all over, and people just say thanks. They say, thank you for letting me into this world.”