Arts and Literature of Cuba

Arts and Literature of Cuba

CUBA

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

HAITI

PUERTO RICO (U.S.)

JAMAICA

Exploring Cuba Arts and Literature of Cuba

Cuba Under the Castros Cuba: Facts and Figures Cuban Music, Dance, and Celebrations The Culture and People of Cuba The Opening of Cuba, 2008-Present

Arts and Literature of Cuba

John Ziff

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Table of Contents 1: Poetry ......................................................................7 2: Fiction ....................................................................25 3: Painting and Sculpture ........................................43 4: Voices from Exile ..................................................61 Series Glossary of Key Terms....................................70 Further Reading ........................................................74 Internet Resources ....................................................77 Index ..........................................................................78 Photo Credits/About the Author..............................80

Words to understand: These words with their easy-to-understand definitions will increase the reader’s understanding of the text while building vocabulary skills.

Sidebars: This boxed material within the main text allows readers to build knowl- edge, gain insights, explore possibilities, and broaden their perspectives by weaving together additional information to provide realistic and holistic perspectives. Educational Videos: Readers can view videos by scanning our QR codes, providing them with additional educational content to supplement the text. Examples include news coverage, moments in history, speeches, iconic sports moments and much more!

Text-dependent questions: These questions send the reader back to the text for more careful attention to the evidence presented there.

Research projects: Readers are pointed toward areas of further inquiry connected to each chapter. Suggestions are provided for projects that encourage deeper research and analysis. Series glossary of key terms: This back-of-the-book glossary contains terminology used throughout this series. Words found here increase the reader’s ability to read and comprehend higher-level books and articles in this field.

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Statue of José Martí in the main square of Cienfuegos.

bestiary— a collection of moral fables containing depictions of real or imaginary animals. mulatto— a person of mixed white and black ancestry. political prisoner— a person imprisoned simply for criticizing a government or expressing political beliefs of which the government disapproves. Words to Understand in This Chapter

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Poetry C uba is not a large nation. But it has a rich artistic and literary heritage, which no single volume—much less a brief book like this one—can possibly cover in a comprehensive way. This book instead seeks to describe some key figures in several fields of creative endeavor, and to provide some context for their life and work. Only passing references are made to Cuba’s long colonial era. The book covers the peri- od from the late 1890s (when Cuba was fighting for indepen- dence from Spain) to the present. It’s hoped that readers will further investigate topics and figures that pique their interest. José Martí: Harbinger of “Modernismo” For his role in their country’s struggle to win independence, Cubans revere José Martí as a national hero. Martí was also

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one of the most important writers of his era. His essays and poetry in particular shaped modern Cuban literature—and were highly influential throughout Latin America. José Martí was born in Havana, the capital of what was then the Spanish colony of Cuba, in 1853. His parents were poor immigrants from Spain. Around the time Martí was beginning high school, Cuba’s first war for independence—known as the Ten Years’ War— broke out. Martí enthusiastically supported the cause and, at the age of 16, founded a newspaper devoted to promoting

Cuban revolutionaries wait in trenches for an attack by Spanish soldiers near Pinar del Río, 1890s.

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Cuban independence. He was soon arrested. His sentence was harsh—six years at hard labor—but he was released after serving only a few months and deported to Spain. While in Spain, Martí pub- lished political essays. He also obtained a law degree and a doctorate in philosophy and the humanities.

Educational Video

Scan here for a tour of the house where José Martí was born, now a museum:

After a yearlong teaching stint in Guatemala, Martí returned to Cuba in September 1878. The following year, how- ever, another rebellion against Spanish rule broke out. Martí— now married and with a young son—was accused of sedition against Spain and again deported. By 1881, he and his family had settled in New York City. There Martí would spend most of the remainder of his life. He supported himself through journalism, serving as a correspon- dent for several Latin American newspapers and writing pieces for U.S. publications. But his literary output was prodigious and wide ranging. He wrote fiction, poetry, essays, and literary criticism. He published a magazine for children. The cause to which Martí dedicated his life, however, was Cuban independence. In 1892, he helped unite a diverse group of Cuban exiles to found the Cuban Revolutionary Party. Over the next several years, he organized support for another war for independence among exile communities in the United States, the Caribbean, and Central America. He envisioned a

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Cuba that was not only independent politically but also free from the racial divisions that characterized the Spanish colony. There needn’t be any racial hatred, he wrote, “because there are no races. . . . The soul, equal and eternal, emanates from bodies that are diverse in form and color.” In early 1895, the war for independence that Martí had tirelessly promoted began. Martí landed in eastern Cuba in April to join the fighting. He served as an aide to the rebel gen- eral Máximo Gómez. On May 19, Martí was killed charging the Spanish lines at the Battle of Dos Ríos. He was 42 years old. José Martí wrote just three volumes of poetry: Ismaelillo (1882), Versos sencillos (1891; Simple Verses ), and Versos libres ( Free Verses ), published posthumously in 1913. The influence of his work, though, was profound. Martí helped usher in a Latin American literary movement called modernismo . Poets of the modernismo movement sought to reinvigorate Spanish-language poetry, which throughout much of the 19th century had been dominated by romanticism. Spanish romantic poets emphasized, above all, the unbridled expression of human emotion. By contrast, modernismo stressed restraint and the perfection of poetic form. Often its practitioners sought to imbue their verse with a musical quali- ty, and they made abundant use of symbols. Though the move- ment itself was largely over by 1920, modernismo would influ- ence Latin American poetry throughout the 20th century. José Martí’s poetic style was simple yet flowing. His poems often contain vivid images, and common themes include friendship, love, justice, freedom, and death. Cuba and its peo- ple and plight were also frequent subjects of Martí’s poetry. He

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Statue of José Martí in Havana’s Revolution Square.

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memorably expressed the pain he felt at Cuba’s subjugation by Spain in one of his most famous poems, “Dos patrias” (“Two Homelands”). The Nobel Prize–winning Mexican poet and critic Octavio Paz said that poem “condenses [the] whole move- ment [of modernismo ] and announces, too, the arrival of con- temporary poetry” (the excerpt here is translated by William Little of Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida):

I have two lands: Cuba and the night. Or are they only one? No sooner Does the long-veiled majestic sun set Holding a carnation in one hand than Does Cuba, like a widow, appear to me. I know what that blood-red carnation is That’s trembling in its hand. It is empty, My chest is destroyed, and empty too Where my heart used to be. It’s time To begin dying. The night is good For saying good-bye.

Nicolás Guillén: Champion of Afro-Cubanism

One of the foremost representatives of a literary and cultural movement known as Afrocubanismo , or Afro-Cubanism, Nicolás Guillén would come to be regarded as the national poet of Cuba. He ranks among Latin America’s most celebrated writers.

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Nicolás Guillén was born in Camagüey in 1902, the year Cuba officially became an independent republic. His parents were both mulattos of mixed Spanish and African ancestry. As he grew up, Guillén became fascinated by African folklore, leg- ends, and songs, elements of which he would later incorporate in his poetry. Guillén published his first volume of poems in 1930. It was titled Motivos de son (“Motifs of Son ”). In this case son (pro- nounced with a long “o”) refers to a style of music (and an associated dance) that combined Spanish and African influ-

Afro-Cuban slaves dance while accompanied by various percussion instruments in this illustration of island life during the Spanish colonial period.

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This Cuban stamp features a portrait of Nicolás Guillén. “Tengo lo que tenia que tener” is the last line of one of his best- known poems, “Tengo.” In English, this is translated as, “I have what I had to have.”

ences. The eight poems in the volume imitated the rhythms of son while focusing on themes related to the island’s poor black, or Afro-Cuban, people. The poems also employed speech pat- terns from that group. Cuba’s blacks were only two generations removed from the experience of slavery, which after more than three and a half centuries had finally been abolished on the island in 1886. Afro-Cubans and their culture were still widely looked down on, however. While Guillén was angered by the racism he saw and experienced, he wasn’t bitter. If Afrocubanismo for him involved honoring and elevating the black Cuban experience, it didn’t mean condemning Cuba’s whites. On the contrary, Guillén celebrated the interconnectedness of all his country’s people, whether they descended from African groups such as

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the Yoruba, whether their ancestors were Spanish, or—as was the case for many like himself—whether they were mulatto. “Son número 6” (“ Son Number 6”), is probably the most famous poem from Motivos de son (the translation here is by Salvador Ortiz-Carboneres of the University of Warwick):

I’m Yoruba, crying out Yoruba Lucumí. Since I’m Yoruba from Cuba, I want my lament of Yoruba to touch Cuba the joyful weeping Yoruba that comes out of me. . . . .

Listen my friends, to my ‘son’ which begins like this:

Here is the riddle of all my hopes:

what’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine; all the blood shaping a river. . . . . We’ve come together from far away, young ones and old, Blacks and Whites, moving together; one is a leader, the other a follower, all moving together; . . . . . . everyone pulling together!

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Sculpture of Nicolás Guillén on the exterior of the house where he was born in Camagüey.

Guillén followed up his acclaimed debut collection with Sóngoro Cosongo (1931). The poet again employed rhythmic patterns from son and explored themes related to Afro-Cuban life. But the book’s subtitle— Poemas mulatos (“Mulatto Poems”) signaled Guillén’s view that the essence of Cuba was to be found in the merging of black and white cultures. In West Indies Ltd. (1934), Guillén expanded his focus to poor people throughout the Caribbean. The volume marked a turn toward the political: the poet took foreign nations, and especially the United States, to task for economically exploiting the people of the Caribbean.

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By 1937 Guillén had joined Cuba’s Communist Party. That same year, he published two books of poetry. One dealt with the Spanish Civil War; the other, Cantos para soldados y sones para turistas (“Songs for Soldiers and Sons for Tourists”), decried the increasing military influence in Cuban society and the corrupting effects of unbridled tourism on Cuban culture. Guillén’s politics led Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista to deny him reentry into the country after an overseas trip in 1953. The poet returned to the island in 1959, after revolution- aries under the leadership of Fidel Castro overthrew the Batista regime. An indefatigable champion of the revolution, Guillén founded the Cuban Union of Writers and Artists—known by its Spanish acronym, UNEAC—in 1961, serving as its presi- dent into the late 1980s. UNEAC was supposed to harmonize the creative output of artists and intellectuals with a changing (that is to say, socialist) Cuban society. But over the years crit- ics would—for good reason—come to view the union as a gov- ernment-dominated organization for muzzling writers and artists who might oppose the Castro regime. For his part, though, Guillén unapologetically celebrated the achievements of the revolution, including the advances it made in decreasing poverty and racism in, and bringing social justice to, Cuba. That’s not to suggest that his post-revolution poetry consisted entirely of political advocacy. For example, he published a volume of love poems in 1964, and a humorous and ironic bestiary , El gran zoo (“The Great Zoo”), in 1967. In his old age, Guillén was asked which of his poems he

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liked best. “Those I still haven’t written,” he replied. He died in 1989 at the age of 87.

Dulce María Loynaz: Late-Arriving Acclaim

The literary career of Dulce María Loynaz followed an unusu- al trajectory. She was a relatively obscure, if not completely for- gotten, poet throughout most of her life. In her eighties—a cou- ple decades after she’d stopped writing poetry—she suddenly won fame and accolades. Born in Havana in 1902, Dulce María Loynaz grew up amid wealth and privilege. Her mother came from one of Cuba’s richest families. Her father was a famous general in Cuba’s war for independence from Spain. While her childhood could best be described as sheltered, Loynaz traveled widely from her early adult years. She also obtained a law degree—something that was unusual for a woman of her era. However, she practiced only sporadically. Loynaz had a passion for writing poetry, but she was an intensely private person and wasn’t interested in promoting her work. Some of her poems were published in literary jour- nals during her late teens and twenties. A volume of her col- lected works appeared in 1938. Loynaz’s style was formal and classical. Her major themes included desire, love, time, and loss. Her perspective, though, was often strikingly fresh. For example, the long poem “La novia de Lázaro” (“The Bride of Lazarus”)—which draws on the biblical story of the man raised from the dead by Jesus—is told from the point of view of Lazarus’s beloved. At the sight of

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him returned from his tomb, she experiences a flood of conflict- ing emotions, including anger born of her own grief and suffer- ing. She asks him reprovingly, “Tell me, Lazarus: could it have been harder to come back to life than it would have been to stay here, where my soul embraced yours, struggling with death until bled dry?” (This translation, and the one below, is by the American poet Judith Kerman.) In “Carta de Amor al Rey Tut-Ank-Amen” (“Love Letter to King Tutankhamen”), inspired by a visit to the tomb of Egypt’s famous boy-king, Loynaz expresses her passion for the long- dead pharaoh. “I would give my living eyes,” she declares, “to feel for a moment your gaze across three thousand nine hun- dred years.” In 1946, Loynaz married for the second time. Her husband, Spanish journalist Pablo Alvarez de Caña, promoted her work enthusiastically. At his urging, Loynaz published four books in the next dozen years. They included two volumes of poetry, a travel book, and a novel, Jardín (“Garden”). Published in 1951, it told the story of a strong and inquisitive woman confronting a male-dominated society. Cuban poets and intellectuals were familiar with Loynaz’s work, and she had a small following in Spain. But Loynaz was otherwise little known. After the Cuban Revolution, Loynaz faded into complete obscurity. Her personal style of poetry, and her feminine per- spective, were ill-suited to the prevailing artistic climate, in which art was expected to serve political goals and the struggle to secure the revolution was exalted as a manly pursuit. Disdain for explicitly feminine culture was apparent.

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By the late 1980s, however, Cuba had begun to open up a bit culturally. And the work of Dulce María Loynaz was dis- covered and widely embraced by Cubans for the first time. Young women, in particular, celebrated Loynaz as a sort of feminist icon in their male-dominated culture. In 1992 Loynaz won Spain’s prestigious Cervantes Prize, which is awarded each year to a Spanish-language writer for lifetime achievement. This touched off a rush to reissue her old books and to publish work she’d completed decades earlier but never published (she appears to have stopped writing poetry in 1959). By all appearances, Loynaz enjoyed her late-arriving acclaim. She called the Cervantes Prize “a secret door into heaven.” She died in 1997 at the age of 94. Heberto Padilla: Politics and Poetry “Where the paths of poetry and politics cross,” Heberto Padilla observed, “there is little room for reconciliation.” It was a les- son he learned through experience. Born in 1932 in the western province of Pinar del Río, Heberto Padilla would show an interest in poetry from early childhood. He published his first volume of verse at the age of 17. Padilla opposed the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, and during the 1950s he left Cuba to live in the United States. He returned to his native land after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. For a while, Padilla enthusiastically supported Castro. He was hopeful that the revolution would usher in a new era of

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progress, justice, and social harmony in Cuba. That hopeful- ness came through in the pages of Padilla’s 1962 book, El justo tiempo humano (“The Just Times of Man”). Some critics con- sider it the best single volume of Cuban poetry ever written. Padilla’s next full-length book of poetry, Fuera del juego (“Out of the Game”), solidified his literary reputation. UNEAC awarded the book its annual prize for poetry in 1968. But the Castro regime was not at all pleased. In its view, Fuera del juego presented an “anti-revolutionary” perspective. Padilla had, in fact, become disillusioned with the authoritari- an tendencies of the Castro government. And he expressed some of that disillusionment in his poetry. For example, it was difficult to read the title poem of Fuera del juego as anything other than a criticism of the government’s insistence that writ- ers and artists promote the revolutionary agenda. An English translation of the poem begins:

The poet! Kick him out! He has no business here. He doesn’t play the game.

He never gets excited Or speaks out clearly. He never even sees the miracles.

For several years, Padilla was closely monitored. Then, in March 1971, Cuba’s secret police arrested him. He was taken to Villa Marista, a notorious prison in Havana where political prisoners were incarcerated. After a month of harsh interroga- tion, Padilla released a long public statement in which he

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confessed to “counterrevolutionary activity,” pleaded for a chance to make amends for his “gross errors,” and denounced other critics of the Castro regime, including his friend Guillermo Cabrera Infante, whom he accused of being an agent of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. From the tone of the statement, as well as its assorted ludicrous claims, those who knew Padilla recognized that his confession had been coerced. Intellectuals across the world were outraged. Many who had previously supported Cuba’s socialist revolution turned against the Castro regime. More than 60 famous writers signed a letter to Castro decrying Padilla’s mistreatment. Though the poet was released from prison, the government blocked him from publishing any more of his work in Cuba. Padilla sought to emigrate but was repeatedly denied per- mission. Finally, in 1980, he was allowed to move to the United States. There he taught at various universities. He also pub- lished poetry, several novels, and, in 1989, a memoir of his troubles in Cuba. It was called La mala memoria , which in Spanish means “the bad memory.” The English translation appeared under the title Self-Portrait of the Other . That was also the title of a poem in which Padilla—in his usual spare style and with hints of humor—alluded to his ordeal in Cuba and described his need to continue expressing himself:

Is it anxiety, nausea, raptures? Or is it just wanting sometimes to shout out?

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I don’t know. I come back onstage. I walk toward the footlights as if toward yesterday swifter than a squirrel with my child’s drool and a tricolor flag on my breast

According to Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Padilla never recovered from his time in Villa Marista, or from the shame he felt in making his sham confession. Heberto Padilla died in 2000.

Text-Dependent Questions

1. How did José Martí die? 2. Name the person who was considered Cuba’s national poet. 3. What did Dulce María Loynaz call “a secret door into heaven”?

Research Project Find a translation of a poem by a Cuban poet (one covered in this chapter or someone else). Read the poem closely, looking up any words you don’t know. Then write a brief explanation of what you think the poem means.

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Exterior of a book store in Havana. Cuba has a strong tradition of literature.

Words to Understand in This Chapter

ethnography— the study and systematic recording of human cultures; a descrip- tive work produced from such research. ethnologist— a scientist engaged in the analytical or comparative study of human cultures. magical realism— a narrative style or genre, associated especially with Latin American fiction, in which fantastical elements are presented matter-of-factly in an otherwise realistic story.

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Fiction C uba has produced many outstanding novelists and short-story writers. This chapter profiles a handful and provides brief excerpts of their work. The writers are known for exploring different genres or for developing dis- tinctive styles. Lydia Cabrera: Elucidating Myths The life’s work of Lydia Cabrera, observed the Cuban scholar Mariela A. Gutiérrez, was to “elucidate the myths of her peo- ple” and chronicle “the spiritual make-up of the Cuban nation.” An ethnologist , Cabrera wrote scholarly works dealing with various aspects of Afro-Cuban religion and culture. But she also wrote finely crafted short stories about the same

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subjects, and those stories place her among the major fiction writers of 20th-century Cuba. The youngest of eight sib- lings, Lydia Cabrera was born into a prominent Havana fami- ly in 1900. Her father was a famous lawyer, historian, and patriot. As a child, she was intrigued by Afro-Cuban folk- tales that she heard from the servants in her parents’ home. She was educated mainly by private tutors. Cabrera went to Paris in 1927 to study art. She would remain in France for more than a decade. It was there that Cabrera began writing her short stories. Her first collec- tion, Cuentos negros de Cuba

Lydia Cabrera did extensive research into Afro-Cuban culture, and wrote more than 100 books during her lifetime.

(“Black Stories of Cuba”), was translated into French and pub- lished in 1936. The Spanish version would appear four years later. Cabrera returned to her native Cuba in 1938. She wrote more short stories for a collection titled ¿Por Qué? (“Why?”), which was published in 1948. She also collected Afro-Cuban folktales; published a scholarly work about Santeria, an Afro- Cuban religion based on the traditional beliefs of the Yoruba

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people of West Africa, along with elements of Roman Catholicism; and produced a study of the Yoruba dialect of Lucumí. In 1960, after Fidel Castro came to power, Cabrera left Cuba. She eventually settled in Florida. There she continued her ethnological studies and produced two more volumes of short stories: Ayapa: cuentos de Jicotea (1971) and Cuentos para adultos, niños y retrasados mentales (1983; “Stories for Adults, Children and the Mentally Retarded,” 1983). Cabrera died in 1991 at the age of 91. Cabrera’s short stories—written in her crisp, direct prose style—in many cases treat the theme of the eternal battle between good and evil. Drawing heavily on Afro-Cuban myths and folklore, the stories are often populated by anthropomor- phic animals such as Jicotea the turtle and Mayimbe the buz- zard. Spirits and Yoruba deities also make frequent appear- ances, and the supernatural routinely intrudes into the world of humans. “The Hill of Mambiala” is a typical example. At the Did You Know? T he Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Premio de Literatura en Lengua Castellana Miguel de Cervantes) is a major literary honor. It is award- ed annually by Spain’s Ministry of Culture, and recognizes the lifetime achievement of an outstanding writer in the Spanish language. Writers from any Spanish-speaking country are eligible. Since the award was creat- ed in 1976, three Cubans have received the Miguel de Cervantes Prize: novelist Alejo Carpentier (1977), poet Dulce María Loynaz (1992), and novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1997).

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top of the hill, an Afro-Cuban man comes upon a magic staff that, he believes, will bring him good fortune. But it ultimately beats to death the people in his village, including the man’s family. He wanders through the night before throwing himself and the staff into a well. “This is the Well of Yaguajay,” Cabrera writes (the translation is by Lisa Wyant). The black women knew the story. They told it to their children who, enchanted by fear, went to throw stones into the silence at the bottom. . . . A deaf splashing that dissolved the fallen stars, and the Drowned One came back whole, two open and desperate hands climbing up on the smell of mint leaves. . . . Too late to save them- selves, too late for their cries to be heard, alone in their dream at the well, the hands that appeared over the edge seized them, cold and hard like stone, and plunged them to the terrifying bottom of unspeakable secrets. Alejo Carpentier: Magical Realist “For what is the history of Latin America,” Alejo Carpentier wrote, “but a chronicle of magical realism ?” That memorable question provided the label for a narrative style that would become popular during the “Boom,” a flourishing of Latin American fiction during the 1960s and 1970s. Carpentier was both a practitioner of magical realism and a major influence on the Boom generation, which included such celebrated writers as the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, and the Argentine Julio Cortázar. A towering figure of Cuban letters, Alejo Carpentier was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1904. His father was French and his mother Russian, but they moved to Havana when their

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son was an infant, and Carpentier always identified as a Cuban. He received a first- rate education in private schools and graduated from the University of Havana. Carpentier would spend most of the rest of his life over- seas. In 1928, after being jailed for his opposition to the dicta- torship of Gerardo Machado, Carpentier fled to France. He spent more than a decade in Paris before moving back to Havana in 1939. He lived in

Alejo Carpentier had a strong influence on the literature of Latin America during the 20th century.

Venezuela from 1945 until 1959, when the Cuban Revolution— of which he was an enthusiastic supporter—swept away the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. And, from 1966 until his death in 1980, Carpentier again lived in Paris, serving Fidel Castro’s government as Cuba’s ambassador to France. Carpentier was a man of great intellect and wide interests. He was fascinated by Afro-Cuban culture, which he incorporat- ed into opera librettos and ballet pieces he created. He wrote plays, essays, and literary criticism. His meticulous study of Cuban music, La música en Cuba (1946), is considered a mas- terpiece of musical scholarship. But Carpentier is best known for his works of fiction, which deal with themes like violence and revolution; history, time, and the nature of reality; and modern versus traditional worldviews.

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Did You Know? A merican author Ernest Hemingway maintained a home in Cuba from the late 1930s until his death in 1961. He felt strongly about the island—in a speech accepting the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature, he dedicated the award to the “people of Cuba”—and Cubans con- tinue to hold Hemingway in high esteem. Hemingway worked on some of his most famous novels at this desk on his Cuban farm, Finca Vigia, including For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).

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Carpentier first won acclaim for his 1950 novel, El reino de este mundo , or The Kingdom of This World. It was in the prologue to that book—a historical novel set during the Haitian Revolution—that the author made his famous observation about Latin American history and magical realism. Carpentier believed that Latin America couldn’t be adequately represented in solely rational terms, because for the peoples of the region— most of whom had indigenous or African ancestry—magic, myth, and supernatural happenings were absolutely real. Lo maravilloso real —the marvelous in the real—pervaded Carpentier’s fiction. Time and logic were often fractured, and fantastical events presented in a matter-of-fact manner. Thus, for example, in The Kingdom of This World , Mackandal—a leader of the slave uprising in Haiti—is burned at the stake but, witnesses believe, escapes death by transfiguring into an insect. Or, in Carpentier’s short story “Viaje a la semilla” (English title: “Journey Back to the Source”), time flows backward. The main character, a dissipated Cuban aristocrat named Don Marcial, travels from death back to the womb. “His hands caressed delectable forms,” Carpentier writes toward the end of the story. He was a purely sensory and tactile being. The universe penetrat- ed him through his pores. Then he shut his eyes—they saw noth- ing but nebulous giants—and entered a warm, damp body full of shadows: a dying body. Clothed in this body’s substance, he slipped toward life. “Journey Back to the Source” appeared in a critically acclaimed 1958 collection of short stories titled Guerra del tiempo ( War of Time ).

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In addition to The Kingdom of This World, Carpentier’s most famous novels include 1953’s Los pasos perdidos ( The Lost Steps ), in which the protagonist, a musician, returns to his South American homeland after living in New York. He trav- els into the jungle, where he finds inspiration in a remote vil- lage whose inhabitants are seemingly untouched by history. El siglo de las luces (1962), published in English as Explosion in a Cathedral , deals with the French Revolution and its effects on the nations of the Caribbean. La consagración de la primavera (1978; The Consecration of Spring ), is an epic, time-shifting treatment of the Cuban Revolution. El arpa y la sombra (1979; The Harp and the Shadow ) imagines a love affair between Christopher Columbus and Spain’s Queen Isabella. Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Putting the Sonic in the “Boom” A part of the Latin American “Boom” generation, Guillermo Cabrera Infante is best known for his innovative use of lan- guage. His writings are explosions of sound and wordplay, full of alliteration, onomatopoeia, and colorful slang, with one allu- sion begetting another and a seemingly endless stream of puns. The following excerpt, from the novel Infante’s Inferno , gives an idea of Cabrera Infante’s unique style: Her laughter tinkled among the prowling panthers and still flamin- goes. Flaming. Goes. All green shall perish. Perish the thinker. Perishcope. I looked at her with my only eye. She sat back again: to look at me: see me better. Gradiva, what green eyes you’ve got! Proud she was. Maria Marga meeting a most lazar-like Lazarus near San Lazaro: have faith and ye shall rise again! Lazy Daisy kiss- ing leopards. Lepers. Mist metaphors.

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Guillermo Cabrera Infante was born in Gibara, a town in eastern Cuba, in 1929. When he was 12, his family moved to Havana. He briefly studied journalism at the University of Havana and embarked on a career as a writer. In 1952, during the Batista dictatorship, Cabrera Infante received a stiff fine and a jail sentence for using profanity in a short story. Thereafter, he wrote under various pseudo- nyms. As “Caín,” he was the longtime film critic for the weekly magazine Carteles . Movies were one of his abiding passions. After Fidel Castro came to

Guillermo Cabrera Infante was one of Cuba’s most influential fiction writers.

power, Cabrera Infante served as the founding editor of Lunes de Revolución , the weekly literary supplement to the official daily newspaper of the revolution. And in 1960, he published his first major collection of short stories, Así en la paz como en la guerra ( In Peace as in War ). But Cabrera Infante’s writing career would soon run up against the Castro government’s censorship. In 1960, the gov- ernment shut down Carteles . The following year, Cabrera Infante became embroiled in a controversy over the regime’s

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refusal to permit the release of a documentary film made by his brother. As a result, Lunes was closed down and Cabrera Infante barred from publishing in Cuba. With few options, he accepted a post at Cuba’s embassy in Brussels, Belgium, in 1962. He eventually went into exile, settling in London. In 1967 Cabrera Infante published his masterpiece, Tres tristes tigres . The title, a Spanish language tongue-twister, liter- ally means “three sad tigers,” but the English translation appeared as Three Trapped Tigers . The novel, an evocation of pre-revolutionary Havana nightlife, has multiple narrators but little plot. It’s rich in witty dialogue and dazzling wordplay.

The famous Tropicana nightclub in Havana is featured in Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s novel Tres tristes tigres , about 1950s nightlife in Cuba.

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Over the next four decades, Cabrera published a wide range of writing, including volumes of essays, short-story collections, and novels. In the last category, a couple are espe- cially noteworthy. Vista del amanecer en el trópico (1974), published in English as A View of Dawn in the Tropics , is an experimental novel consisting of a series of vignettes that retell Cuban history from the perspective of the defeated rather than the victors. La Habana para un infante difunto (1979), published in English as Infante’s Inferno —the author assisted in the translation and provided the droll title—is a semiautobiographical coming-of-age novel. It, like much of Cabrera Infante’s other work, contains laugh-out-loud humor. But, again like much of his other work, there’s also a certain wistfulness, even melancholy. Cabrera Infante didn’t like life in exile. However, he swore that he would return to his native Cuba only after Fidel Castro was gone. He never got the chance. He died in 2005—11 years before the dictator he despised. Miguel Barnet: Pioneer of “Testimonio” A newspaper story caught Miguel Barnet’s eye. It was about an Afro-Cuban man who’d reached his 103rd birthday. The man, named Esteban Montejo, had been a cimarrón —a fugitive slave—and had later fought for Cuba’s independence from Spain. The year was 1963, and Barnet—born in Havana in 1940—was a rising poet and a recent university graduate with a degree in sociology. He tracked Montejo to a home for veter- ans and paid him a visit. He asked the old man to tell him about his experiences, tape recording their discussion. That first

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View over Manaca Iznaga, a large sugar plantation near Trinidad. During the Spanish colonial era, slave labor was an important part of Cuba’s agricultural economy.

interview led to another, and then another, and then another still. Gradually, Barnet teased out Montejo’s life story. In 1966 Barnet published Biografría de un cimarrón ( Biography of a Runaway Slave ). It was a pioneering work in a literary genre that would be dubbed testimonio . Now popular throughout Latin America, testimonio , or testimonial narrative, seeks to tell the stories of voiceless or marginalized members of society. As Barnet did with Esteban Montejo, the author of a testi- monial narrative typically starts by carefully gathering the

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details of the subject’s story—ideally, through face-to-face interviews. Though they may occupy a gray area between non- fiction and fiction, testimonial narratives are generally consid- ered novels, because the writer organizes, shapes, and polishes the subject’s story. A good testimonial narrative will be faithful to the essence of the story while not necessarily transcribing every detail as it happened. Biography of a Runaway Slave was so good partly because Barnet was able to capture the voice of the book’s humble, une- ducated subject. But in addition, as a poet Barnet managed to convey the mythic quality of Montejo’s remarkable story. This

Miguel Barnet (left) sits with Cuban president Raúl Castro at the closing of the Eighth Congress of Cuba’s National Union of Writers and Artists.

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Leonardo Padura participates in a media event at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

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excerpt (translated by W. Nick Hill) reveals some of Montejo’s superstitions: In the forest I got used to living with the trees. They also have their sounds because the leaves whistle in the wind. There is a tree with a big white leaf. At night it seems like a bird. In my opinion, that tree spoke. . . . Trees have shadows too. The shadows don’t do harm, though at night you shouldn’t walk on them. I think the shadows of trees are like a man’s spirit. The spirit is a reflection of the soul. You can see that. Biography of a Runaway Slave was a huge success, and Barnet followed up with several other testimonio novels. In 1969’s Canción de Rachel ( Rachel’s Song ), the protagonist—a Havana nightclub singer during the 1920s and 1930s—was a composite of several real-life people. Barnet used printed sources to gather their stories. Gallego (1981) used the same method to depict the life of an immigrant to Cuba from the impoverished Spanish region of Galicia during the early part of the 20th century. La vida real ( Real Life ), published in 1986, chronicled the lives of Cuban workers in the United States in the years before the Cuban Revolution. In addition to his testimonial literature, Barnet has also published 10 volumes of poetry and several volumes of essays and ethnographic studies. He’s also been a professor of ethnog- raphy at the University of Havana. Leonardo Padura Fuentes: Of Crime and Cuba Outside of Cuba, Leonardo Padura Fuentes might be the island’s best-known living writer. His crime novels have been translated into more than 20 languages. He’s won a prestigious

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Spanish literary prize, the Premio Princesa de Asturias. Padura is also extremely popular in his home country. He’s managed to walk a fine line: his fiction highlights many ugly aspects of Cuban society, and sometimes even expresses disenchantment with the revo- lution, but in a sufficiently circumspect manner to avoid

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government censorship. Born in 1955 in Havana, Padura majored in literature at college. After graduating, he worked for many years as a reviewer and journalist for government publications. He wrote fiction in his spare time. His first novel, a love story titled Fiebre de caballos (“Horse Fever”), was published in 1988. But Padura found his niche with 1991’s Pasado perfecto (lit- erally, “past perfect”; the English translation would be pub- lished in 2007 as Havana Blue ). The novel introduced the char- acter of Mario Conde, a disillusioned police lieutenant (and, later, private detective) with a drinking problem and lowlife friends. Padura said he envisioned the character as “a reflec- tion of the problems and the frustrations of my generation,” and he wanted his fiction to deal with “the biggest problems of [Cuban] society: corruption, repression, hypocrisy, ideological erosion, opportunism, poverty.” That resonated with Cuban readers, and Padura has published a succession of crime titles featuring Mario Conde.

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Havana, seedy and decaying, usually figures prominently in the novels. Padura’s is a hard-boiled yet literary style reminis- cent of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, two American writers he’s said he admires. In 2005’s Adios Hemingway , Padura describes Conde’s sense of alienation thus- ly: “He was a . . . private detective in a country with neither detectives nor private people; he felt like a bad metaphor for a strange reality.” In addition to his detective fiction, Padura’s other impor- tant work includes the 2009 novel El hombre que amaba a los perros ( The Man Who Loved Dogs ). It’s a sweeping account of the 1940 murder of Leon Trotsky, a communist who’d fallen out with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Text-Dependent Questions

1. Which novelist is also known for his masterful study of Cuban music? 2. Who wrote Three Trapped Tigers ? 3. Name the book that launched the testimonial narrative genre.

Research Project Interview a grandparent, parent, or other older adult you know about a spe- cific period in their life. Then write a two-page testimonio , in which you try to tell, in the adult’s voice, his or her story.

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A little boy wearing a Revolutionary’s outfit pops out of a modern scupture by Rita Longa titled Forma, espacio y luz (Form, Space and Light).

avant-garde— relating to new or experimental concepts in the arts; a group of intellectuals who develop new artistic ideas. cubism— an art movement, dating to the early 20th century, that in painting made use of simple geometric shapes and sought to depict subjects from multiple perspectives at the same time. modernism— a movement in art that rejected the styles of the past and instead emphasized experimentation and innovation. primitivism— a Western art movement that borrowed from non-Western (and typically less technologically advanced) cultures. surrealism— an artistic and literary movement that sought to explore dreams and the unconscious mind. vanguard— a group of people leading the way. Words to Understand in This Chapter

3

Painting and Sculpture U p until the first decades of the 20th century, Cuban painting was dominated by the conventions of aca- demic art. Cuba had its own national academy of fine arts—the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, known popularly as Academia San Alejandro. Founded in 1818 by a French painter, San Alejandro drew inspiration from the venerable national arts academies of Europe. Like those institutions, San Alejandro sought to instruct the most promising students in the techniques of drawing and painting. And, like Europe’s national arts academies, it effectively functioned as an arbiter of what constituted the best art, and who was considered a serious artist. The highest art was assumed to be academic art—that is, art that followed the conventions taught at the academy.

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Modernist artwork outside Havana’s Palacio del Centro Asturiano (Palace of the Asturian Center), built in 1927 by the architect Manuel Bustos.

Academic art was representational. In other words, the subject of a painting should be clearly recognizable, rather than abstract. The treatment was supposed to be at least generally realistic. For example, the artist had to apply linear perspective, by which objects in the background of the scene become small- er in relation to their distance from the foreground. The colors, too, had to resemble what the human eye would see. A pine tree, for instance, would be green. Even when bright colors might be true to life—as, perhaps, with clothing—academic art dictated that the artist use them sparingly. Nor did bold brush-

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Cuban painter Armando Menocal stud- ied in Spain, then returned to Cuba to fight in the island’s war for independ- ence. He later served as director of the Academy of San Alejandro. This paint- ing by Menocal is a portrait of a woman named Elena Herrera.

work have any place in aca- demic art. The surface of a painting was supposed to look smooth and be free of obvious brushstrokes. Cuban painters of the late 1800s and early 1900s hewed

closely to the conventions of academic art. Popular subject mat- ter included scenes of daily life, often a bit idealized; portraits; still lifes; and, especially, rural landscapes. Two masters of landscape painting from this period were Miguel Arias Bardou (1841–1915) and Armando Menocal (1863–1942). The “Vanguardia” In Europe painters had begun casting aside the strictures of academic art, and exploring dramatically different styles, by the last quarter of the 19th century. Change came more slowly to Cuba. By the 1920s, though, the island had entered a period

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of artistic ferment, thanks to a group of artists known collec- tively as the Vanguardia (“ vanguard ”). They were champions of modernism . Most of the early members of the Vanguardia had attended San Alejandro. But most had also lived or studied in Europe, particularly Paris. There they were exposed to various avant- garde art movements. When they returned to Cuba, they brought influences from those movements—especially cubism , surrealism , and modernist primitivism —with them. The Vanguardia included dozens of painters, and their work was quite diverse, both in style and in subject matter. Broadly speaking, however, the Vanguardia artists sought to marry modern art with Cuban themes. In a real sense, they were also exploring what it meant to be Cuban—a fascinating question, given that Cuba had been independent only for a few decades, after having been a Spanish colony for four centuries. Many members of the Vanguardia were concerned about social inequality, specifically the treatment of Cuba’s black or mixed- race people. There was also discontent with the country’s polit- ical development: the Vanguardia arrived during the corrupt dictatorship of Gerardo Machado, and even after his departure in 1933, Cuba would continue to suffer under terrible leaders. Some of the Vanguardia painters connected their artistic renunciation of the past with a larger project of modernizing and reforming Cuba as a whole. They took to heart the words of the radical critic Martí Casanovas, who in writing approv- ingly of the Vanguardia declared, “An artist must not turn his back on his society or on the problems and aspirations of his day.”

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