In the fall of 1994, I traveled to Guantánamo for The Miami Herald to report on the tent-city camps erected by the U.S. government to house and detain thousands of Cuban rafters rescued at sea.

The trip was unforgettable from the start. When our tiny Fandango Airlines plane took off from Fort Lauderdale, the door handle fell into my lap, a distraction to amuse fellow journalists and help hold my emotions at bay. It was my first trip to Cuban soil since I had been exiled at 10.

Hours later, as I was rushed through the camps by military escorts, many of the refugees begged me to help them contact relatives in South Florida. As I conducted interviews and took notes, the Cubans hastily scribbled names and phone numbers on pages I had torn from my reporter's notebook. Then they stuffed their SOS pleas into the pockets of my vest and jeans.

One man told me he didn't have family in Miami but pressed into my hand a tiny, sepia photo of a little girl, his daughter back in eastern rural Camagüey.

''She's the reason I'm here,'' he said. ``Take her with you. It might bring me luck.''

After I got home and had filed my news story, I spent the weekend calling the people listed on the crinkled slips of paper to tell them their loved ones were safe -- not lost at sea as so many had feared. Some wept when I read them the names, and I did too. I was embarrassed to read to a stranger the florid words of love -- ''I promised you that we would be together again'' -- that a young man had written to his wife in Hialeah, but she was ecstatic.

And in fact, behind many Cuban stories I've reported, no matter how political, how tragic, there has always been a love story waiting to be unveiled.

MAKING SENSE OF IT

The next morning, I woke up with the sun and went straight to my computer. At Guantánamo I had interviewed refugee children like I once was, women like my mother and grandmother, men like my father and uncles, and hearing of their losses resurrected the ghosts of my past and fueled a need to try to make sense of my experience.

But when I emerged from my writing trance well past noon, I realized that, instead of a true story, I had written the tale of my maternal grandmother's quixotic love life embellished with detailed descriptions of a land I loved but barely remembered, with dialogue I suspected but had never heard. I couldn't have known any of the story. I was separated from my beloved Abuela Ramona by exile, never to see her again. The characters who now populated my tale -- imperfect, sensual, loving, humorous -- flowed from a river of feelings, memory and imagination.

That day I discovered the freedom to explore history -- and its limitless what-ifs -- that a writer can only find in fiction. No matter how many newspaper stories I wrote, they simply couldn't tell all the stories I needed to tell. More than a decade later, the essence of what I had written that morning became the sixth chapter in Reclaiming Paris, a novel about the loves and losses -- personal and historical -- that define a family and are handed down through generations.

My book is a fictional story about contemporary Miami and the ties that bind this city to Cuba, but as the Nicaraguan novelist Sergio Ramírez once said to me, ``Sometimes you have to tell a big lie to tell a bigger truth.''

SECOND THOUGHTS

But I quickly learned that, for a journalist, the transition to fiction is complicated and overburdened with second thoughts. I'm more comfortable as the observer, the note-taker, the narrator of someone else's true story. I'm more comfortable writing with my blue-striped reporter's notebook by my side.

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