More than half of my life has been lived in translation. I moved to America when I was eighteen, and although my mother tongue is Spanish, I am so fluent in English that I talk like a native speaker. When you live between languages, the conversion of meaning is an arithmetic in loss. The transference of what I want to say pours from one container into an incompatible receptacle. Inevitably, something is lost. I am used to thinking of something in Spanish, for example, which then comes out strangely in English, or cannot be said in English at all, not in the same way. I am used to being understood sufficiently, rather than fully.

I wrote my first novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, while I was working as a freelance translator and interpreter. I translated articles, wrote captions for documentaries, but the work I liked doing the most was simultaneous interpretation. That’s when two people (or one person and a roomful of people) who don’t speak the same language want to communicate and an interpreter does a real-time, live, continuous translation of what is being said without interrupting. There was a sparkling brain feeling that came with the labor of listening to someone speak in Spanish, then having my mouth open and speak English—like I was a spirit medium at the crossroads of language. I was always impressed that my brain could perform such a task, that I could listen and immediately translate, and then, while still speaking, tune out my own voice and listen again, translate again, continue to speak, following the speaker’s thoughts.

Simultaneous interpretation was just work to me—it didn’t have a role in my creative writing—until my sister got very sick.

Hers is not my story to tell, not really, so I will just say that at the time, we didn’t know if she would live. She was at an inpatient program for women with eating disorders. I slept on the floor of her apartment, which had been empty for many months, and Mami and Papi slept in her bed. The center provided an interpreter for Mami. There were speeches about girls who had survived that needed to be translated, there were meetings with doctors and nurses and psychiatrists. But everything was getting lost in translation.

My sister was sick because of PTSD and trauma, but these words did not mean anything to my mother, who believed her daughter was sick because of witchcraft. Mami was a seer from a line of faith healers. In this ancestry, physical ailments were tied to spiritual, psychic, and emotional ailments. PTSD, trauma, eating disorders—those were white people words. Our people did not get sick in this way, or if they did, we had never needed another word for what was wrong other than “suffering.” We had our own solutions. We dealt with suffering by making offerings, relying on our community. We defied suffering with joy. My sister was not interested in those cures. I did not blame her. No matter how much we danced, what we offered, how passionately we insisted on celebration, suffering always returned.

So even though the interpreter spoke with speed and diligence to Mami, telling her what was being said, it didn’t matter. As my mother tried to engage with an unfamiliar system of medicine in a language she couldn’t understand, I became acutely aware of translation’s failures.

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Joe Russell and Ernest Hemingway with a marlin, Havana Harbor, 1932 (young man at left not identified). Photograph in the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston. Public domain.

On March 4, 1960, the French freighter La Coubre, delivering Belgian arms to Havana Harbor, exploded, killing 101 people. Fidel Castro immediately denounced the United States for “sabotage.” To protest the “heinous act,” commanders Che Guevara, Ramiro Valdés, Camilo Cienfuegos, William Morgan, Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado (who would remain the president of Cuba until 1976), and Fidel Castro walked arm in arm down Calle Neptuno, forming a dramatic contrast between the street’s garish neon signs and the plain green of their uniforms—and the sobriety of their mission.

In a photo taken on March 5, 1960, by Alberto Korda at a ceremony for the victims of the tragedy, Che appears full of sorrow, anger, and determination. That image would become ubiquitous across the world, a trademark, appearing on T-shirts and countless other commodities. Che transcended his personhood and became a symbol for both the struggle against tyranny and of tyranny itself. His spirit seemed to impress even nihilist philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre, who, with Simone de Beauvoir, was there that mournful day when Che’s picture was taken.

One of Che’s first questions in taking over as president of the Banco Nacional de Cuba in November was where Cuba had deposited its gold reserves and dollars. When he was told Fort Knox, he said that the gold would have to be sold and converted into currency in Canadian and Swiss accounts. During a speaking engagement at the bank two months later, Che apologized “because my talk has been much more fiery than you would expect for the post I occupy; I ask once more for forgiveness, but I am still much more of a guerrilla than President of the National Bank.” As if to prove it, he signed banknotes with his nom de guerre: “Che.” The agenda was the struggle, and so it would remain, and La Coubre only confirmed the necessity of his resolve and commitment to the bitter end. Read More