In December 1995 I had everything ready to travel to San Diego. I had finally received the famous, or rather infamous, liberación—though I was just an English professor at the School of Dentistry, I was considered “medical personnel” and therefore needed the same exit permit as health professionals to leave the country. A rickety old computer, gifted to the woman in charge of issuing the aforementioned permit, solved the problem, but that’s another story for another day.

I also had the American visa, granted a few months earlier. It was a spouse visa, which was usually approved without much fuss. The consul (almost as young as I was, blond and handsome) asked what my plans were once I arrived in the United States.

“I’m going to write and publish my novels,” I answered, as cool as the proverbial cucumber.

He smiled and signed the paperwork. “Good luck.”

I never forgot his name because, as some of you know, I have an excellent memory, memoria de elefante, as Topeo would say, at least for certain things. Almost thirty years later, I looked up this gentleman online and found him. He had gone on to have a successful Foreign Service career. I emailed him, thanking him and saying that, with fourteen books published by then, I believed I had kept my promise. He replied, very kindly.

So that December of 1995, we celebrated Christmas at home for the first time (or at least the first time since I was born), with a little Christmas tree. My mother doesn’t remember where it came from, but I think we bought it at la shopping, the dollar-based stores accessible only if you had hard currency.

We had never had a Christmas tree at home before, though I remember fondly those on display in the Reina and El Carmen Catholic churches, with their beautiful, life-size Nativity scenes.

It was that same month when I had a strange experience (one of those esoteric occurrences that tend to happen to me) in La Manzana de Gómez building, where I had attended middle school. I documented the incident, with fictional additions, of course, in a short story, El día que volví a ayer (The Day I Went Back to Yesterday.) I will translate it someday.

Despite the written exorcism (all writing is, in a way, an exorcism) La Manzana wouldn’t leave me alone. It eventually became the inspiration for The Novel Detective, the sixth book in the Havana Mystery series, that will be published by Soho Crime in June 2026. I’ll be sharing the cover soon.

And here I am, in Hobbs, three decades after that picture taken in Havana. A lot of rain has fallen afterwards…and a lot of ink has flowed as well.

Life took me far from that December of 1995, but it never took me away from words.

So, as our friend Barbarito, el lector cubano, likes to say: here’s to many years, and many books! And Merry Christmas. ¡Feliz Navidad!