Welcome to Miami, Dr. Leal
By René Vázquez DíazTranslated by Sandra Kingery
ISBN: 1891270524
Price: $17.00
Pages: 189
René Vázquez Díaz, one of the most gifted Cuban writers in exile, won the prestigious 2007 Juan Rulfo Prize for Short Narratives with Welcome to Miami, Dr. Leal. This endlessly engaging novel recounts the personal and political fortunes and misfortunes of Dr. Leal, a prestigious Cuban-American surgeon, who comes home to the Miami of his childhood to attend his brother's funeral. From the moment he enters the Miami airport, Dr. Leal is caught up in the complicated and suffocating realities of current U.S.-Cuban relationships, the personal politics of the exile community in Miami, his aging mother's startling revelations about the Leal family, and a mysterious young Colombian woman named Milena.
Slowly discovering that many things are not what they seem, Dr. Leal responds to the challenges confronting him with the help of Milena, a Cuban taxi driver, and his own good-natured optimism. René Vázquez Díaz's free-flowing and wide-ranging discourse is narrated with the brio and luminous vocabulary readers have already enjoyed in his The Island of Cundeamor. Suffused with boleros, Cuban pork rinds, and memories of pre-revolutionary Cuba, this novel combines the Miami heat with Cuban style and concludes with a sizzling burst of romance and on-going political intrigue.