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Jimmy Santiago Baca

Ruth Behar

Lourdes Casal

Oscar Hijuelos

Great Lives from History: Latinos

Virgil Suárez

by Linda Rodriguez

Cuban-born poet, novelist, and writer

In poetry and prose focusing on his separation from his birthplace, Cuba, Suárez has become the voice of the exile in an America of anonymity and alienation. Through his spare and poignant poems, novels, and memoirs, he reinterpreted the life of the refugee whose lamented world is lost in the past.

Areas of achievement: Poetry; literature

Early Life

Virgil Suárez (VUR-jihl SWAHR-es) was born in Havana, Cuba, on January 29, 1962, to Virgilio Suárez and Oneida Rodríguez and spent his first years in Arroyo Naranja. A policeman under Cuban president Fulgencio Batista, his father worked as a pattern-cutter in a factory during Suárez’s early childhood. An outspoken opponent to the Fidel Castro regime, Suárez’s father was arrested several times in the mid-1960’s. After a long period of work in a slaughterhouse and the sugarcane fields, the father managed to take his wife and Suárez, then eight years old, from Havana to Madrid, Spain, in 1970. The family feared that Suárez would be drafted into the Cuban military and sent to die in Angola in a few years. Suárez wrote of this in his first memoir, Spared Angola: Memories from a Cuban American Childhood (1997). His emotionally fraught relationship with his father informed his work, especially his memoirs, Spared Angola and Infinite Refuge (2002); his novel The Cutter (1998); and his book of poetry, Banyan (2001).

The family lived in Spain before immigrating in 1974 to Los Angeles, where Suárez grew up among Chicanos and Mexicans. This time of isolation from the community of Cuban exiles would leave Suárez with a wider outlook and definition of Latino communidad than many Cuban writers. After graduating from high school in 1980, Suárez earned his B.A. from California State University at Long Beach and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Louisiana State University in 1987, studying with Vance Bourjaily after a year at the University of Houston under Sir Angus Wilson.

Life’s Work

By 2011, Suárez had published more than twenty books of prose, poetry, and major anthologies of Latino writers. He became a professor of creative writing at Florida State University, living in Tallahasee and Miami with his wife and daughters. Although he began his career publishing novels with Latin Jazz in 1989, by the early twenty-first century he had given up writing novels in favor of poetry. Suárez’s first poetry collection, You Come Singing, was published in 1998, but he had been writing poetry since 1978, and, as he has said, “the poems just keep coming.” He began editing anthologies in 1992 with Iguana Dreams: New Latino Fiction, the first of two anthologies he coedited with his wife, Delia Poey.

His four novels, Latin Jazz, The Cutter, Havana Thursdays (1995), Going Under (1996), and his collection of short stories, Welcome to the Oasis, and Other Stories (1992), set out the themes that he would return to over and over in his memoirs and poetry: paternal strength and obstinacy; the loneliness of exile; the need for connection and roots; obsessive nostalgia for a semimythical past; bridging the gulf between two cultures; and the dangers of losing one’s soul to the American Dream. Suárez turns directly to his past and his thematic obsessions in the memoirs, Spared and Infinite Refuge. His books of poetry, You Come Singing, Garabato Poems (l999), In the Republic of Longing (1999), Palm Crows (2001), Shakespeare in Havana (2001), Banyan, Guide to the Blue Tongue (2002), Greatest Hits,1983-2002 (2003), Landscapes and Dreams (2003), Ninety Miles: Selected and New Poems (2005), deal with all of his themes, especially displacement and exile. His anthologies, Iguana Dreams, Paper Dance: Fifty-five Latino Poets (1995; with Victor Hernández Cruz and Leroy Quintana), Little Havana Blues (with Poey, 1996), and the later ones coedited with Ryan Van Cleave, American Diaspora: Poetry of Displacement (2001), Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence in America (2002), Vespers: Contemporary American Poems of Religion and Spirituality (2003), and Red, White, and Blues: Poets on the Promise of America (2004), have all been acclaimed as valuable teaching tools.

Suárez has received many honors and awards, including Best American Poetry, the Book Expo America/Latino Literature Hall of Fame Poetry Prize, The Daily News/The Caribbean Writer/University of The Virgin Islands Poetry Prize, the Florida State Individual Artist Grant, a G. MacCarthur Poetry Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His work also has been published in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, England, France, India, Israel, Spain, Venezuela, and New Zealand.

Significance

One of the leading Latino writers of his time, Suárez has used his energy and his creative abundance to fuel an influential career, manifesting craftsmanship of the highest standards. His fiction has been praised for its tight, powerful narrative. His poetry mixes everyday language and vivid imagery to evoke the emotional displacements of the exile. In his impressive anthologies, he has brought Latino writers to the attention of the mainstream literary community. With his feet firmly planted in the United States, his memories back in Cuba, and his heart divided evenly between the two countries, he writes eloquently of the quintessentially American trait of always being from somewhere else.

Further Reading

1 

Álvarez-Borland, Isabel. Cuban-American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998. Suárez’ s work is discussed throughout, and one chapter focuses on his memoir-writing.

2 

Del Rio, Eduardo R. One Island, Many Voices: Conversations with Cuban American Writers. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008. In this collection of interviews with Cuban American writers,

3 

Suárez’s interview provides an intimate look into his creative process and personal history.

4 

Suárez, Virgil. “In Praise of Mentors or How I Became a Cuban American Writer.” MultiCultural Review 6, no. 1 (March, 1997): 30-37. Suárez writes of his path to becoming a writer and those who encouraged and helped him along the way.

5 

_______. Spared Angola: Memories from a Cuban American Childhood. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1997. Short essays and poems evoke the divide between Suárez’s two places of the heart, the Florida where he now lives and the Cuba he left behind.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Rodriguez, Linda. "Virgil Suárez." Great Lives from History: Latinos, edited by Carmen Tafolla & Martha P. Cotera, Salem Press, 2012. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLL_10013240059201001.
APA 7th
Rodriguez, L. (2012). Virgil Suárez. In C. Tafolla & M. P. Cotera (Eds.), Great Lives from History: Latinos. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Rodriguez, Linda. "Virgil Suárez." Edited by Carmen Tafolla & Martha P. Cotera. Great Lives from History: Latinos. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2012. Accessed October 22, 2025. online.salempress.com.