Havana Is Waiting and Other Plays: Contemporary Asian American Plays

“The existential pain of exile, the confusion of sexual identity and the complex legacies of the Cuban revolution are predominant in Mr. Machado’s writing.” –New York Times

“The Cook is a sizzling concoction…a smashing success.” –Seattle Weekly

“Vivid, epic, beguiling…Eduardo Machado puts a beautifully drawn human face on the Cuban revolution." –Backstage.com

“In Havana is Waiting, Mr. Machado is taking on not only the paradoxes of his autobiographical hero’s cultural identity, he is also delving, with equal parts wistfulness and anger, into the knotty confusions of the political relations between Cuba and the United States; communism and capitalism as bedfellows in Cuban ideology; and the tortured ties between those who fled that island country and those who stayed behind.” –New York Times

With his trademark humor and compassion, Eduardo Machado continues his exploration of the intersection of the personal and the political on a generation of immigrants. This collection includes Havana Is Waiting (a writer returns to Cuba after thirty years), Kissing Fidel (a comedy set in Miami funeral parlor), The Cook (chronicling Cuban history), and Crocodile Eyes(inspired by Federico García Lorca).


Eduardo Machado was born in Cuba and came to the United States when he was nine, growing up in Los Angeles. He is the author of more than forty plays, including In the Eye of the Hurricane, Once Removed and Stevie Wants to Play the Blues. Machado has taught playwriting at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, and New York University. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a Rockefeller grant.