Florida journalist Carlos Frias journeys to Cuba in Take Me With You

Trust me on this: The hardest thing to write about is your family.

Journalists talk to strangers and tell their stories. Novelists get to make up stuff.

But writing about your father and then looking him in the eye and saying, "I wrote this about you. Read it." — now that's tough.

Somehow Carlos Frias found the emotional courage to do that and the result is his magnificent new book, Take Me With You (Atria, $25). Although it's about Frias's trip to Cuba, the country that begat and also imprisoned his father, don't get the idea that the book is some political polemic or that it's something of interest only to Latin readers. That wasn't the audience Frias had in mind.

"I was writing for the reader in Iowa," Frias says. "For some people, Cuba is a leftist republic. For other people, it's this little island country where that boy Elian came from. It's this weird caricature for people. I wanted to say, 'This is what I'm all about. This is what every kid like me is all about. This is what an entire generation of people is all about.'"

Like any fine journalist — and Frias is one of those, for the Palm Beach Post — he tells stories to explain larger problems. Frias uses himself and his family as the window for us to see Cuba, this exotic and infuriating island 90 miles from Key West. It has vexed us, haunted us and fascinated us since the revolution a half-century ago. We've fallen in love with the music and the food and the culture.

But few of us have been there. When Fidel Castro fell ill in 2006, the Palm Beach Post assigned Frias, then a sportswriter, to go take a look at the place. He was the most fluent Spanish speaker on the staff, so the assignment made sense.

The first person he told was his father. Fernando Frias left Cuba nearly 40 years ago. He'd been jailed, then forced from the country. He arrived in Florida with nothing, built a business, married and had a family. Growing up in the concrete world of Miramar, Carlos Frias heard his father's stories of the paradise he had fled. He also heard his father vow to not return until the country was free. Then came the assignment and the phone call to the father. When he blurted out that he was going to Cuba, there was a long silence. Finally, his father said, "Take me with you."

He couldn't, of course. But he did. In Cuba, Carlos Frias found the part of his father that had been left behind. In a way, he fulfilled every child's dream. He came as close as anyone could to time travel, to seeing his father as a young man. In this world that has not changed in a half century, he walked in his father's footsteps and felt what his father felt. "I inhabited my father," he said.

"There were several moments of enlightenment and transcendence," Frias says of his two weeks in Cuba, as he walked the streets his father had walked. "I went up the steps of the house where he lived and I looked down at my feet and thought, 'He was here, in this place so long ago.' The experience left me completely drained."

Take Me With You is more than travelogue or memoir. It's an inside-the-heart examination of a family. Fernando Frias had been a stern, sometimes angry father when Carlos was young. When Carlos married and became a father, he wondered who this jovial grandfather, this abuelo, was, the one rolling around on the floor with his children. Where was that joy when he was young? The journey to Cuba, back into his father's past, explained the man to his son.

And so this is where the reader in Iowa comes in. You don't have to be Cuban to appreciate and understand this book. The real subject of the story is family, and we all have those, whether we like it or not. Rarely do our lives measure up to the Father Knows Best television ideal. A real family is a complicated organism, and Frias digs deep in communal memory to understand his father. It's a journey we can all understand.

So it wouldn't matter if Frias was Irish or Italian or Martian. This is a compelling story about family. In its way, it's reminiscent of Rick Bragg's book about his mother, All Over but the Shoutin'. Like that book, it's a great story, well told. Frias's writing is elegant.

Is it in the DNA of all Latin writers, this lyricism? I ask him if he's influenced by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but he shakes his head. "I write the way I write because I think in Spanish," he says. "When I translate that, to write in English, I have to try harder than most people, because I have to try to find the right English word." He also credits his mother and his upbringing for his graceful style. "If it was picture day at school, my mother always wanted me to wear a suit. So I grew up believing that I always had to be presentable. Maybe my writing is a result of that — I always want to feel put together."

Frias gives his father props as well. "My father had an enormous amount to do with the rhythm of my language. He had no formal education past sixth grade, yet he came from a place of self-taught poets. They say that a child before the age of three gets hard-wired as to the structure of language. My dad, with his stories, with the rhythms of his songs, helped wire me that way. I was lucky enough to be wired by the right person." He pauses, considering again his family. "It's an incredible honor to have those people as parents."

It was just going to be a newspaper series, but the second person Frias called after learning about the assignment was his wife, Christine. "This is your book," she told him. She became his muse, his purveyor of tough love, the one who told him to stop whining and write, the one who encouraged him when things didn't go well. The book is dedicated to her, and to their three daughters.

As I said, it's a book about family.

This article appears in Nov 12-18, 2008.