Even after death Oscar Hijuelos keeps returning to Cuba in his fiction. Born in New York to Cuban parents, Hijuelos published his first novel, Our House in the Last World, in 1983, a story of Cuban immigrants which, like many debut novels, drew from autobiographical elements (he would publish an autobiography, Thoughts without Cigarettes, in 2011). His second book, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) became a bestseller, earned him the Pulitzer Prize, was adapted as a major motion picture and catapulted him into fame and, much to his surprise, affluence. In that novel too the protagonists are Cuban immigrants. Yet Hijuelos, who died in 2013, was removed from the Cuban-American...
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