CAMAGÜEY — Fui tu querer (I Was Your Desire) reached my hands by following an intimate, warm path, built more on affection than on protocol. Margarita Polo sent it to me through a cousin, as someone passes along a cherished secret, and that gesture closed a circle that had begun long before.

Back in 2022, I contacted her to request a text for the newspaper Adelante, the same outlet where she worked during her formative years and where I still work today. That bridge, cast across the distance, also carried the invisible weight of the diaspora.

Because this story—the story of a book crossing borders to return to the city where its author was born—is also a story of Cuban dispersion: of how affection, words, and memories keep traveling even when bodies settle far away; of how literature continues to be a way of belonging.

Margarita has lived outside Cuba for many years, but her work—whether the rigorous testimonial Mi amigo Nicolás (My Friend Nicolás) or the emotional intimacy of I Was Your Desire—preserves a Camagüey essence that exile does not erase: it transforms it. Her pages return the way roots do: quietly, yet with profound force.

In her response back then—a text in which she confessed that “I don’t think there are precise words to describe returning home”—she confirmed that symbolic return: a return to the press where she began, to the emotional memory of her first chronicles, to the place where Nicolás Guillén recognized her as a journalist and confidant.

In those lines, later published under the title Con la magia del tiempo (With the Magic of Time), she recounted an episode from the 1970s alongside the National Poet. She did not speak from monumentality but from human closeness: of the man who surprised her at the airport, who sought her out with complicity, who entrusted her with the manuscript of the poetry collection Por el mar de las Antillas anda un barco de papel (Across the Sea of the Antilles Sails a Paper Boat), as someone gives a treasure to a person in whom they believe.

That bond—built on professional respect, affection, and trust—reveals a facet of Margarita worth highlighting before entering her novel. It is especially insightful to read I Was Your Desire alongside My Friend Nicolás (2010), her testimonial and investigative book about the illness and death of Nicolás Guillén.

There, Polo demonstrated documentary rigor, archival discipline, and an affectionate respect for the poet, revealing the man behind the myth through cross-referenced sources and the lucidity of memory. If that book stands on precision and method, I Was Your Desire (2013) emerges from another territory: emotional imagination, subjective memory, and vulnerability turned into literature. Both works, however, share a common pulse: the desire to understand the human being, whether through reality or fiction.

This contrast highlights Margarita’s ability to move between genres and registers. I Was Your Desire is a text that breathes with the author: her life’s timing, her searches, her silences. Begun as a short story in 2002, when she still lived in Havana, and transformed over more than a decade, it is a work that carries the author’s own time—the time of maturity, introspection, and the freedom to explore feminine intimacy without imposed modesty.

The novel rests on the intimacy of the narrative voice and the confessional cadence of a personal diary that, with simplicity and honesty, unravels an unexpected love story. From the very first page, one senses a soft, deliberately emotional tone that embraces the best sense of melodrama: the exploration of extreme feeling as the engine of a profoundly human story.

Polo chooses a clean, direct prose, free of excessive rhetorical flourishes, in which everyday sensitivity—family duties, work routines, illness, nostalgia, and fatigue—becomes literary material. The protagonist, a mature married woman and mother, recounts an unexpected love born from a childhood memory. The author delicately navigates the contrast between the established life and the imagined one, between obligation and desire, opening a space where intimacy challenges social expectations without shouting.

The epistolary exchange provides structure and rhythm, introduces meaningful silences, and adds an air of “paused time,” as if the story were told from a refuge apart from the outside clamor. The occasional inclusion of poems reinforces this sentimental atmosphere; they function not as ornaments but as an inner breath of the text, almost like a subconscious monologue.

While romantic in tone, the story unfolds within a recognizable social setting: job scarcity, forced relocations, unfulfilled production goals, and migration anxieties. Polo hints—without making it a central theme—at the weight that Cuba’s social and political structures exert on private life. In that subtle intersection between the intimate and the collective lies one of the novel’s achievements: suggesting the biographical without declaring it, drawing connections to reality without overtaking the fiction.

The ending, which reshapes the entire sense of the love story, works without artifice or scandal. Rather than seeking shock, Polo seems interested in normalizing desire between mature women, mothers, and women marked by experience. Eroticism through tenderness. She treats female sexuality—its passion and vulnerability—as a natural part of her characters’ emotional journeys. This gives the novel an unexpected depth, distancing it from a simple romance novel and placing it in a more complex register.

In short, I Was Your Desire is a novel about desire that illuminates, about love that surprises, and about the emotional identity that emerges when one believes it is already defined. It is also the work of an author whose life path—between Cuba and the United States, between journalism and literature, between memory and fiction—has allowed her to write from the perspective of someone who belongs to two shores without fading in either.

Margarita Polo, born in Camagüey in 1947, confirms at this stage of her life and work that writing remains an act of truth for her. And this book, more than a love story, is a testament to that fidelity to herself.

Translated by Linet Acuña Quilez