García-Aguilera, Carolina

Person

García-Aguilera, Carolina

1949-

Carolina García-Aguilera (b. July 13, 1949) is a Cuban American fiction writer who was born in Havana, Cuba. She is the author of a seven-book series – featuring a Cuban-American female private investigator based in Miami – as well as three additional stand-alone novels, numerous short stories, and contributions to anthologies. García-Aguilera holds a B.A. in History and Political Science from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, a Master's degree in Language and Linguistics from Georgetown University, an MBA in Finance from the University of South Florida, and has continued studies for a PhD in Latin American Affairs from the University of Miami.

Shortly after Fidel Castro took power, when García-Aguilera was ten years old, her family left Cuba and moved to Palm Beach, Florida, and remained there for two years before moving to New York. She spent four years at Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut, before continuing on with further education. García-Aguilera then married and her and her husband traveled around the world, spending the majority of their time in Asia – first Hong Kong, then Tokyo, and finally Beijing from 1973 to 1981, where her first two daughters were born. Her marriage ended after eleven years, and García-Aguilera moved to Miami to be closer to her siblings. Since, she has remarried and had another daughter. In Miami, García-Aguilera worked at Jackson Memorial Hospital for a time, before interning with a private investigator (P.I.) company and subsequently becoming licensed herself in 1986; she ran her own successful P.I. business for a decade following this. Eventually, she fulfilled the original intention behind getting the P.I. job, which was to write a series of novels with a female protagonist who is a P.I. The “Lupe Solano” detective series touches upon many themes cradled within Cuban-American life – particularly in South Florida – such as exile, diaspora, feminism, religion, family, and the legacies of the revolution. The series was published in a fourteen-year period as follows: Bloody Waters (1996); Bloody Shame (1997); Bloody Secrets (1998); A Miracle in Paradise (1999); Havana Heat (2000); Bitter Sugar (2001); and Bloody Twist (2010). The collection deeply engages politics and history and, after the first three books, begins to explore varied perspectives of Cuba’s current government in contrast to Lupe’s perspective, who views Cuba as unfree. The series has been well-received, with most critics commenting on the richness with which García-Aguilera captures the Cuban American community.

García-Aguilera’s latest novel, Magnolia, was published in 2012. She currently resides in Miami Beach with her daughters.

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Biographical note written July 2020 by Laura Bass, UGrow Fellow for the Department of Manuscripts and Archives Management, 2019-2020, and updated by Amanda Moreno, September 2020.