The Visit/4:

At age fourteen Pablo arrived in New York City from Cuba to attend school, where he studied English literature and by age seventeen wrote his first lines. By chance, he was taken to the home of famous writer Carson Mc Cullers, who recognized at once that these lines were poetry. "You are a poet," she told him after first serving him a potato salad whose illusive taste he has never forgotten. Pablo fled in tears. He felt misunderstood. His words, he insisted, were prose. How could this important writer with a play on Broadway call his work "poetry"? He felt that calling his work "poetry" was to disrespect it. Pablo went for comfort to his Cuban friend, Manila Hartman, then also living in New York City. "I've always told you, you were a poet, Pablo," she said. Finally, she convinced him and he accepted his literary fate. Manila believed in his talents and kept his first poems for over fifty years. In Cuba today Pablo Armando Fernandez is simply known as "El Poeta". The first chapter of Learning to Die is named for Manila, who is still a close friend and currently his Havana neighbor.

At the triumph of the 1959 revolution, Pablo, then 30 years of age, returned to Cuba with his wife, Maruja Gonzalez. He served as a diplomat in Europe and the Soviet Union for several years. Then he went on to receive his country's highest awards for his novel The Children Say Goodbye. There was a period of ten years when his works fell out of favor and were not officially published in Cuba. During this time the printers at the print shop of the Cuban Academy of Science, where he worked as a translator, printed his legendary, Suite for Maruja. This work was written partly at his wife's hospital bedside, when she suffered complications from the birth of their fourth child. During the nineties he published two more novels and served as editor of the Literary Journal at the Union of Cuban Writers (UNEAC).

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