The roots of the story “Las Hermanas Cubanas”—The Cuban Sisters—go back several years. In 2014, after retiring from my “real” job, my wife and I sold everything and left our home in Oregon for the beautiful colonial city of Cuenca, Ecuador.
The first Ecuadorian that we interacted with was Emilio Morocho. Emilio owned a taxi, and we had hired him online to take us from the airport in Guayaquil to our new home—a four-hour journey from sea level to 8500 feet elevation in the Andes Mountains. The journey showcased some of the most jaw-droppingly spectacular scenery you will ever witness, but in all honesty, I was most impressed by our driver. Emilio, like many Ecuadorian males of his age—mid-thirties—had spent several years in the United States, so his English was quite good. If the Ecuadorian people had hand-picked an ambassador to welcome us to our adopted country, they couldn’t have chosen a better one. He had an intimate knowledge of the history of the country as well as the current political and economic climate.
Emilio left Cuenca for Minneapolis around 2005 and had just recently returned. It struck me as we talked how terrifying it must have been for him at the age of twenty-five to relocate to a city 3,500 miles away where he barely spoke the language. Conversely, what must it have been like returning almost ten years later, with all the changes that his hometown had undergone.
I am a writer of mysteries and so I’m always looking for new characters. I knew that I had found one. Fortunately for Emilio and his family, but unfortunately for me, he was the personification of a hard-working family man. So, I loaded him up with a raft of insecurities and a drinking problem and sent him out onto the streets of Cuenca as Wilson Salinas, Investigador Privado.
I needed characters for Wilson to interact with. Over the next couple of years as I refined Wilson, I created a cast of supporting characters, most of them based loosely on Ecuadorians I had met or observed in my daily life. A couple of those characters figure prominently in this story:
Javier (Javi) Morales, another friend from childhood who had become a transit cop but used his knowledge of the inner workings of Cuenca’s myriad bureaucracies to augment his income.
Capitán Ernesto Guillén, a corrupt detective with Ecuador’s policía nacional. Wilson and Guillén meet in my first mystery published in AHMM—“The Karaoke Singers”—March / April 2018; https://tinyurl.com/Karaoke-Singers
Guillén quickly became a favorite of mine to the point that I started another series of Ecuadorian mysteries featuring him. I made him a bit less corrupt and more competent as a detective, rather than just a foil for Wilson.
But, back to the story at hand. I have over the years begun stories where Wilson and Guillén might interact not as comrades but as reluctant co-conspirators. Most of them fell by the wayside, but I think this one hits the mark.
“The Cuban Sisters” grew out of a day trip my wife and I took to Azogues, a colorful city of 75,000 souls about twenty miles northeast of Cuenca. I was struck by the number of likenesses of Ernesto “Che” Guevarra that we saw around town—on walls, lampposts and on the front of a small restaurant aptly named Café Che. The story came to me like most of them do, as an imaginary scene inspired by an actual setting.
I originally envisioned this story as a vehicle to highlight the character, Javi Morales. Although Javi appears in many Wilson Salinas mysteries, this is the first time that he plays a major role.
I soon realized that this might be the story where Wilson must work with Guillén, his sworn enemy. Guillén needs Wilson’s help to locate Javi, whom he suspects of murdering his brother-in-law. Wilson agrees to help him, in the hopes of at least derailing the investigation into his friend, or at best, proving his innocence.
I enjoy writing—and reading—character-driven versus plot-driven stories. I enjoy crafting interesting but believable characters. The most challenging aspect of writing for me—and paradoxically the most satisfying—is creating situations to put the characters into and finding unusual but realistic ways to get them out.
As a side note, I have to say that writing about Ecuador has made this aspect much easier. Frequently over the course of the six years we spent in Cuenca I heard expats and visitors proclaiming, “Ecuador is like the U.S. was in the fifties and sixties.” I will let others debate if that is a good or a bad thing. But from my view as a writer, the relative “technological innocence” of the Ecuadorian people as well as the lack of network connectivity between bureaucracies allows me to emphasize the characters rather than the “CSI” aspect. In my opinion a story such as this one would not work if set in the modern-day U.S.
BTW: The characters of Virginia and Carla are based (very loosely) on two elderly Cuban sisters I met on a visit to an old sugar mill that had been run by their father.
Trace Evidence 