Thoughts Without Cigarettes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my brother, José-Pascual, for his input about the chronology regarding my mother and father’s lives in the 1940s, as well as for the rooftop photograph that graces the cover of this book. And to my cousin Natasha Bermudez, upon whose research I have largely based my references to the Hijuelos family line.

Thanks should also go to Lori Marie Carlson, for her translation of my mother’s poem featured in this book, as well to the Free Press, in whose publication, Burnt Sugar, an anthology of Cuban poetry, “This Is My Book” first appeared. Further thanks go to the teachers who influenced my development as a writer: the late Susan Sontag and Donald Barthelme, and Frederic Tuten, who is, I am happy to say, still writing away. At Gotham, my thanks go out to William Shinker, who first encouraged this work, and to Lauren Marino and Cara Bedick. My gratitude also goes out to Jennifer Lyons, Karen Levinson, Lorna Owen and José Miguel Oviedo, whose inputs were invaluable. As for the others, from Richard Muller-Thym, a lifelong friend, to those who have always mattered to me, I also give thanks.

Finally, I thank all the wonderful Latinos — misunderstood as we may sometimes be — who have supported and shown me affection in the past.