Writing After History:Essays on Post-Soviet Cuban Literature

By

JONATHAN C. DETTMANB.A. (Arizona State University) 2001

M.A.T. (Northern Arizona University) 2006

DISSERTATION

Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

in

Spanish

in the

OFFICE OF GRADUATE STUDIES

of the

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

DAVIS

Approved:

Emilio Bejel, Chair

Neil Larsen, Chair

Michael Lazzara

Committee in Charge

2012

i

Writing After History: Essays on Post-Soviet Cuban Literature

Abstract

The Post-Soviet period in Cuba has witnessed radical economic and social

change on the island, as well as many attempts by scholars to account for the

impact of this change in the period’s literature and arts. Most of the scholarly

work on Cuba’s post-Soviet literature concentrates on literary themes, which

tend to reflect the social problems that emerged during the economic crisis of the

1990s. Less attention has been paid to literary form and its connection to the

underlying social dynamic of the post-Soviet era. This dissertation analyzes

neglected formal aspects of several of the most important novels of the post-

Soviet period. A close attention to form reveals unexpected links between each

novel and the post-Soviet historical moment. These connections are unexpected

because the social dynamics that emerge from analysis are often absent from the

novels’ literal content and can only be made visible through a consideration of

aesthetic form.

Chapter One reveals a structural antagonism in Padura’s La novela de mi vida that

highlights a return to a culture-based nationalism and reveals a renewed

preoccupation with race in the post-Soviet era. Chapter Two explores the failures

of gender politics in Cuba through an engagement with Ena Lucía Portela’s

ii

Pájaro: pincel y tinta china. Chapter Three describes Abilio Estevez’s double

critique of both capitalist and socialist ideology in Inventario secreto de La Habana

and Los palacios distantes. Chapter Four demonstrates the presence of unease

about the status of the male worker as political subject in Jesús Díaz’s Siberiana

and José Manuel Prieto’s Livadia [Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire]. This

project is a contribution, not only to Cuban literary scholarship, but also towards

a materialist critical praxis.

iii

To Lisa, Anaïs, and Mireia.

To my parents, Donna and Ralph.

To student rebels and outside agitators everywhere:Everything for everyone.

iv

Acknowledgements

First, and foremost, I must acknowledge the contributions of my dissertation

committee members. I owe an unrepayable debt to Emilio Bejel, who has been an

inimitable mentor and friend throughout my time in Davis, and who has

provided important material and intellectual support at the times I needed them

the most. I’m equally fortunate to have worked with Neil Larsen, whose own

work has inspired me and whose courses and intellectual companionship have

made my doctoral program a truly transformative experience. Michael Lazzara is

a wonderful colleague and teacher who taught me a great deal, pushed me to do

better work, and made important and timely comments on my manuscript.

I must also thank Raúl Fernández of the UC–Cuba Academic Initiative for his

generous support of my research in Havana, and for his tireless work in bringing

together all the remarkable cubanólogos in the University of California system.

I am also grateful to the following people:

✦ Lewis Chere, for seeing the potential scholar in a young man from nowhere.

✦ Clarice Deal, for Portuguese.

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✦ David William Foster, for giving me confidence in my writing and for

understanding the challenges faced by a working student.

✦ Stephen Clark, for Cuba.

✦ Yuly Asención, Joseph Collentine, and Ed Hood, for mentorship during my

Master’s program and beyond.

✦ My fellow graduate students at Northern Arizona University and the

University of California, for the support and good memories.

✦ My family, for everything.

✦ Lisa and my daughters, for their love and patience for my quixotic missions, of

which the Ph.D. has been just one.

vi

Contents

! !

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

1. Racial Anxiety and Cultural Legitimation in Leonardo Padura’s La novela de mi vida 32

1.0. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

1.1. A “Special” Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

1.2. Cultural Nationalism and the Recuperation of Marginalized Writers . . . . . . . . . 37

1.3. Idealism and Historical Truth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

1.4. Del Monte Demonized . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

1.5. Cultural Legitimation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

1.6. Espejo de paciencia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

1.7. National Historiography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

1.8. Racial Inequality and National Unity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

2. Abilio Estévez: Writing Between the Bad Old Things and the Bad New Ones . . . . . . . 85

2.0. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

2.1. Inventario secreto de La Habana: Taking stock of a divided world . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

2.1.1. Havana’s Commercialization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

2.1.2. Museumification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

2.1.3. Cleavages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106

2.1.4. The Literary City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

2.2. Los palacios distantes: The Spleen of Havana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

2.2.1. Flâneurie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124

2.2.2. Post-Soviet Political Coordinants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

2.2.3. Victorio’s Total Refusal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

2.2.4. Literature and the Anti-Commodity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137

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3. El pájaro: pincel y tinta china: A political and aesthetic cul-de-sac in postmodern Cuba 145

3.0. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145

3.1. The Cuban Postmodern . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145

3.2. Los Novísimos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149

3.3. Portela . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156

3.4. El pájaro: pincel y tinta china . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157

3.5. The Form of Formlessness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

3.6. Aesthetic Failure, Political Failure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168

4. Love and Labour Lost: José Manuel Prieto and Jesús Díaz Confront the Crisis of Work 192

4.0. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192

4.1. José Manuel Prieto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195

4.2. Butterflies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197

4.3. Jesús Díaz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213

4.4. Siberiana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

5. Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243

viii

Writing After History:

Essays on Post-Soviet Cuban Literature

Jonathan Dettman

1

Introduction

! The Post-Soviet period in Cuba has witnessed radical economic and social

change on the island, as well as many attempts by scholars to account for the

impact of this change in the period’s literature and arts. Most of the scholarly

work on Cuba’s post-Soviet literature concentrates on literary themes, which

tend to reflect the social problems that emerged in the wake of economic crisis of

the 1990s. Much less attention has been paid to literary form and its connection

to the underlying social dynamic of the post-Soviet era, which Fidel Castro

himself dubbed the “Special Period.” This dissertation analyzes neglected formal

aspects of several of the most important novels of the post-Soviet period: Jesús

Díaz’s Siberiana, Abilio Estévez’s Inventario secreto de La Habana and Los palacios

distantes, Leonardo Padura’s La novela de mi vida, Ena Lucía Portela’s El pájaro:

pincel y tinta china, and José Manuel Prieto’s Livadia [Nocturnal Butterflies of the

Russian Empire]. A close attention to form reveals unexpected links between each

novel and the post-Soviet historical moment. These connections are unexpected

because the social dynamics that emerge from analysis are often absent from the

novels’ literal, or thematic, content. Only by considering aesthetic form is it

possible to see La novela de mi vida’s preoccupation with race in the post-Soviet

era, the failures of gender politics underlying Pájaro: pincel y tinta china, Abilio

2

Estevez’s double critique of both capitalist and socialist ideology, and the unease

about the status of the male worker as political subject present in Siberiana and

Livadia. This project is a contribution, not only to Cuban literary scholarship, but

also towards a materialist critical praxis.

- - -

! “Writing After History” is, perhaps, an odd title for a dissertation. Not

immediately denotative of theoretical or thematic content, it requires an

explanation. But the title contains, in nuce, the three terms of a syllogism that

looms in the background of my project—History, Writing, and the “After,” which

in Cuba for the last two decades can only mean one thing, or multiple aspects of

that thing. The word “after” carries a good deal of weight here, linking up with

the “post-” in “post-Soviet,” a term that I prefer to the more euphemistic “Special

Period” to describe the time in question. It contributes to a manifold sense of

afterness that I explore throughout the dissertation, showing how Cuban

literature responds to this peculiar moment: post-Soviet, post-historical, and

post-revolutionary.

! The post-Soviet is easily explained; one simply points to a date—

December 8, 1991. The other “posts” require more clarification.

3

After Revolution

! “Post-revolutionary” is a term that may spark antipathy among Cuba’s

sympathizers and fellow travellers. It could be read as dismissive of the Cuban

Revolution or disrespectful to those who have given their lives to its cause. It

could be accused of ignoring the significant fact that Cuba retains its sovereignty

vis-à-vis the United States. On the contrary, it’s intended simply as a clear-eyed

appraisal of the current political and economic situation on the island and its

inevitable denoument—Cuba’s integration into the global (capitalist or post-

capitalist) economy, which may or may not include political rapprochement with

a still-intransigent United States, which increasingly represses its own dissidents

(thereby undermining its demands for “democratic reforms,” which it invokes as

a justification for continuing sanctions against the Cuban government). In this

sense, “post-revolutionary” refers to the end of a particular historical struggle

and the political forms it generated. Any politics that wishes to remain faithful to

the Cuban revolution’s social aims will have to discard what remains of the (now

institutionalized) revolution. To do otherwise is to fight a rearguard action to

preserve the vestiges of a movement whose historical course has reached its end.

Brecht’s maxim has never been more relevant: “Don’t start from the good old

things but the bad new ones.”

4

After History

! “Post-historical” is a reference to Francis Fukuyama’s bastardized

Hegelian thesis that the death of the Soviet Union—and the supposed death of

Marxism more generally—marks the “end of history,” the moment at which the

geopolitical Subject reaches its highest form—ta-da!—neoliberal capitalism with

its attendant, purportedly democratic state structures. The absurdity of

Fukuyama’s thesis has been addressed by virtually every academic and public

intellectual who identifies as a leftist, including Jacques Derrida, who rightly

describes Fukuyama’s “end of history” as a “new gospel” (Specters of Marx 70),

that is, as a triumphalist, mediatized, and messianic eschatology. However, I’d

like to provisionally rescue Fukuyama’s historical framework in order to describe

what “post-historical” means in the Cuban context.

! Fukuyama’s book provides a dichotomy that is useful for understanding

the trajectory of global political economy before and after the fall of the Soviet

Union, although not quite in the way he intended. Fukuyama sees the historical

“truths” of liberty and equality as having defeated their opposites. Liberal

democracy is the historical outcome of this struggle which, in its last phases,

consisted of the battle between Western capitalism and Soviet communism (aka

the Cold War). The post-1991 world, according to Fukuyama, is the best of all

possible political situations, because “liberal democracy remains the only

5

coherent political aspiration that spans different cultures and regions around the

globe” (quoted in Derrida 71-72). In light of recent events, one hardly needs to

refute Fukuyama’s statement—indeed, one might argue that an aspiration to

liberal democracy is itself incoherent, viz. irrational. But in terms of the history of

the 20th century, it’s true that the struggle between “capitalism” (Western liberal

democracy) and “socialism” (Soviet-style bureaucratic centralization) seemed to

shape world events. But, as an alternative to that “seemed” and as a placeholder

for my subsequent discussion of Cuba’s place in the world economic

conjuncture, let’s assume the opposite: that, in fact, the great ideological and

military struggle waged between economic “systems” was simply the form of

appearance of the underlying historical dynamic of Capital as it played out

across regions of the globe whose material presuppositions, i.e. economic

development, diverged widely and whose political responses subsequently took

very different paths.

History before its “After”

! Cuba’s immediate future is no great mystery. Political observers in the US

have wrung their hands for two decades, mostly fretting about whether

“democracy” will emerge on the island or whether, as Yoani Sánchez has

intimated, yet another Castro will perpetuate a dynasty similar to North Korea’s

6

(“Kim Jong Un”).1 But the last two decades—the post-Soviet period—tell us a

great deal about Cuba’s future. There’s a meteorological axiom which says that,

in the absence of clear indications to the contrary, one should predict that

tomorrow’s weather will be more or less the same as today’s. Cuba’s trajectory in

the immediate future will be more or less the same as that of the last two decades

—one of gradual and uneven economic and political liberalization.

! I’m sure of this because Cuba has no way to function in today’s global

economy other than to provide services. Absent a sizeable domestic market for

these services (whose very existence depends on growing inequality),2 Cuba

must market them to the exterior, which sooner or later requires operating on the

global capitalist playing field. So how did Cuba get to this point?

! It’s worth remembering that the Cuban revolution happened at a

particular historical moment, one that also saw successful anticolonialist

struggles in Algeria and Vietnam (and later in Mozambique and Angola). Given

the context of the Cold War and the fact that Western capitalist countries were

either the colonizers or their supporters, it’s unsurprising that these revolutions

adopted the Leninist concept of imperialism. Cuba was no exception, so what

began as a rebellion against brutality and corruption by idealist “ortodoxos” who

wanted a government worthy of Martí’s legacy became, under considerable

pressure from a bellicose United States, a communist movement (Fidel declared

7

himself a Marxist-Leninist in December 1961; the US had broken off diplomatic

relations and sponsored an invasion—the Bay of Pigs—earlier that year).

! What happened next is poorly understood in the United States, whose

public is familiar with the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis, but less informed

about the internal strife which characterized the decade of the 60s in Cuba.

! Banditry is absent from one of the most cited books on Cuban history,

Louis Pérez’s Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution. Pérez notes breezily that “the

exportation of counter-revolution foreclosed any possibility of a sustained and

extensive internal challenge to the revolution” (256). This omission is surprising,

given that much of Pérez’s work on the wars for independence focuses on the

role of bandits. In fact, the War Against Bandits in the Escambray involved more

troops, and a greater loss of life, than Castro’s revolution. It was a counter-

revolutionary insurgency which, like many such movements, counted on the

support of the CIA.

! Likewise, Pérez barely mentions the serious internal challenges posed by

rank-and-file workers to the Revolutionary government’s economic policies.

Cuba’s once-militant labor movement had, by the late 1960s, been demobilized

by “(1) ‘certain idealisms,’ i.e. the belief that the workers’ supposedly high level

of conciencia would replace the need for union representation; (2) the creation of

the Vanguard Workers Movement which led to the neglect of the working

8

masses; and (3) ‘a certain degree of identification between the Party and

administration that only served to make the situation even more complicated,’

which meant that the workers had to stand alone against two powerful

opponents” (Roca 96). Mostly though, workers were frustrated that their

herculean efforts in production were often stymied by the poor planning of the

bureaucrats. Workers engaged in slowdowns and sabotage, which contributed to

the Cuban economy’s precipitous decline during the 60s (Pérez 262).

! This economic crisis, paired with a belligerent United States, meant that

Cuba was forced into the arms of the Soviets. It’s this partnership—always

fraught with its own tensions, since Cuba managed to be a “superclient” capable

of flouting the Kremlin’s foreign policy objectives—that allows us to speak of a

Soviet period in Cuba. Although relations between Cuba and the Soviet Union

were strong in the first years of the revolution (including military aid and a trade

agreement between 1964–69), the “sovietization” of Cuba is thought to have

begun between 1967–1972, a period marked by the death of Che Guevara,

Castro’s support for the USSR’s suppression of the Prague Spring, and Cuba’s

entry into COMECON.

! The peak of Soviet influence is thought to be the 1970s; by the late 80s

Cuba was beginning to take its distance from what Castro considered to be

dangerous reforms—perestroika. Cuba began its own “Rectification of Errors”

9

campaign, moving in the opposite direction of the Soviet Union towards a more

orthodox position that, however, made notable attempts to come to terms with

the revolution’s real mistakes, both in the realm of political economy and cultural

politics. Then, in 1991, disaster struck, and Cuba became a socialist island in a

post-Soviet sea of triumphalist capitalism.

! Although I use “Special Period” and “post-Soviet era” more or less

interchangeably to refer to the period from 1991–200(?) (there’s no consensus

regarding the period’s end), I prefer the term post-Soviet because it forces us to

think about Cuba in the context of global politics and economics, in particular the

momentous shifts after 1989 which brought the Cold War to a close.

! This, so far, sketches the historical framework that I use to situate the

novels in this study. There is, however, another, equally important frame:

political economy. Cuba’s Soviet period and subsequent transformations coincide

rather neatly with a very profound, very global economic denouement.

! This economic endgame is mapped by Giovanni Arrighi (and before him,

Fernand Braudel) as the latest and perhaps last in a series of capitalist

accumulation cycles whose last phase is always marked by the rise of finance—

Genoa (and the Iberian monarchs), Holland, the United Kingdom, and now the

United States have been the hegemonic cores of their respective cycles of

accumulation.3 Each, in its turn, has risen and fallen as capitalism’s economic

10

superpower. Each successive cycle has operated on a larger scale, reaching into

ever more remote sectors of the globe. The downward spiral of the latest cycle,

that of the US hegemon, has been marked by the global recession of the early 70s,

the OPEC crisis, the disintegration of Bretton Woods and the wholesale adoption

of floating currencies—seen in the conversion of the dollar into a so-called “fiat

currency”. The entropic plunge of value accumulation, seen in the fall of

industrial profits, has been masked by the surge of the finance sector, whose

products—derivative assets like credit default swaps—are simply variations on a

theme: fictitious capital, bets on future profits to be generated by future labor in

jobs that don’t yet (and likely never will) exist. The freefall of the asset bubble in

housing in 2008 set off a chain reaction in the global economic system that has yet

to be contained. As I write, the Euro—and the EU itself as a political project—is

on shaky ground indeed. Athens burns.

! Cuba, meanwhile, seems to have taken a separate path during the last

forty years, during its Soviet and post-Soviet periods. After early attempts to

industrialize failed, and after the failure of its voluntarist Ten Million Ton Sugar

Harvest, Cuba ceded to necessity and realigned itself with Soviet economic

policy. This meant that, during the 70s and 80s, Cuba was under COMECON’s

umbrella and was partially shielded from tremors on the global market.

11

! But the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. In retrospect, it had been suffering

from the same decline in industrial profits as the capitalist West, which forces us

to ask whether the socialist economy was somehow more akin to capitalism than

previously thought. Indeed, the controversial “Liberman reforms” of 1965 can be

seen as the Soviet planners’ capitulation to reality by adopting overtly capitalist

management practices and profit benchmarks in response to an economic

slowdown.

! One of the assumptions that undergirds my reading of Cuba’s post-Soviet

literature is that Cuba’s separate path wasn’t as widely divergent from the

trajectory of global capitalism as is often assumed. Cuba, the Soviet Union, and

even the liberal “welfare states” of the West were all variants of “state

interventionist capitalism.” To say that Cuba and the Soviet Union were capitalist

is, perhaps, counterintuitive. It may even seem perverse in light of the 50-year-

long military-ideological struggle known as the Cold War, which pitted

capitalism against “communism” and whose impact on foreign policy can still be

felt, as zombie cold warriors still shuffle through the halls of the Pentagon and

other seats of power. But the characterization of these states as capitalist is an

important point that I’m willing to defend. For the purposes of this introduction,

I’ll sketch the outlines of a theory of capitalism equally capable of encompassing

“state interventionist” and “liberal” varieties.

12

! I rely on a theoretical framework that can be defined broadly as a Hegelian

Marxist, “value-critical” approach to the critique of political economy. This

approach to Marx’s work often traces its origins to Isaac Illich Rubin’s Essays on

Marx’s Theory of Value (1924). The most important contemporary value theorist is

the historian Moishe Postone, whose fundamental work, Time, Labor, and Social

Domination (1993), centers on a critique of “abstract labor” but nonetheless falls

into the value-critical branch of Marxist theory. Postone’s criticism of what he

calls “traditional Marxism” rests on the argument that Marxists—including

“Western Marxists” like the Frankfurt School theorists he engages with most—

misapprehend Marx’s critique of political economy as a exposé of the

“contradiction between the forces and relations of production” (9). In other

words, most Marxists see the fundamental contradiction of capitalism as a class-

based tension between industrial workers and capitalists who control both the

means of production and the distributive apparatus—the market.

The Marxian contradiction between the forces and relations of

production, on the one hand, and private property and the market,

on the other, is grasped as a contradiction between the mode of

producing and the mode of distribution. Hence, the transition from

capitalism to socialism is seen as a transformation of the mode of

13

distribution (private property, the market), but not of production.

(Postone 9)

This explains why states like Cuba were able to abolish private property and

internal markets without ever moving beyond a fundamentally capitalist mode

of production based on the production of surplus value as a measurable quantity

of socially necessary labor time. It follows that the global fall in industrial

profitability in the 1970s affected “socialist” countries as well as capitalist ones.

Cuba, for instance, has never succeeded in establishing a large-scale, profitable

industrial sector. And while Cuba did manage to mechanize its sugar harvest,

sugar was only a viable source of income as long as the Soviet Union was buying

most of it at artificially supported prices or exchanging it for machinery and fuel.

! Industrial profitablity was declining in the socialist bloc, but it was

insulated from the oil shock of the 70s by the Soviet Union’s considerable

domestic fuel production, which eliminated the need for imported oil. Even so,

1973 inaugurated the Soviet economy’s “era of stagnation.” Unlike the Western

powers, the USSR did not have recourse to the twin tools of offshoring and

financialization which would have allowed it to maintain the appearance of

growth. Instead, under Andropov, it sought a solution in greater “discipline.”

These circumstances, combined with increased military spending as a

consequence of its Afghanistan adventure and the arms race with the United

14

States, led to a steady, irreversible decline. By the time Gorbachev initiated

wholesale reforms, it was far too late to preserve the state interventionist

economy. Cuba rode out the two-decade decline in style—the 80s were perhaps

its most prosperous decade ever—refusing to participate in perestroika,4 but the

end, when it came, brought the island to a grinding halt.

! The aftermath of collapse can be read as the painful process of

reintegrating the socialist bloc into the global economy. In some places, like

Germany, it has taken the form of political unification. But parts of Eastern

Europe have never really recovered from the Soviet collapse. Memorabilia sales

mark a widespread nostalgia for the communist era, as capitalism has failed to

bring the prosperity that was promised. The Oder–Neisse line divides the

Eurozone from the second-tier EU member states to the east; the capitalist core

and its periphery remain nearly unchanged, despite the momentous political

changes after the Berlin Wall was dismantled.

! In Cuba, the collapse of the Soviet Union has also meant integration into

“globalized” capitalism, but, as always under the Castro government, the island

has negotiated this transition on its own terms, preferring to do business with

familiar partners like Spain and newer ones like the ALBA countries, rather than

capitulate to the demands of their belligerent neighbor to the north. Cuba’s

reforms, driven by necessity, have included legalizing the US dollar, allowing

15

foreign investment, promoting tourism, establishing for-profit health services

catered to foreigners, breaking up large, state-run farms and, more recently,

increasing opportunities for small-scale entrepreneurship (more licences for

paladares, casas particulares, taxis) and permitting the purchase and sale of

automobiles and houses. These incremental reforms, which have also included

greater access to internet and cell telephony, have failed to satisfy the entrenched

anti-Castro politicians in the United States, whose vision of capitalist reform in

Cuba no doubt includes Starbucks on the Malecón and a Monsanto monopoly on

seeds. Cuba’s economy stabilized by the early 2000s, but it’s unclear what this

will mean as the cycle of accumulation that Arrighi calls the “long twentieth

century” enters its terminal phase. Cuba’s long, difficult climb out of the abyss of

the Special Period, and its slow economic liberalization and global integration

may constitute a recovery into collapse.

On Method

! The chapters in this dissertation are not, primarily, thematic analyses of

the works in question. In this regard, my work differs considerably from existing

literary scholarship on Cuba’s post-Soviet period. Rather, I engage first with

form. I follow the work of Roberto Schwarz in attempting to account for literary

form, in an Adornian sense, as “sedimented [social] content” (Aesthetic Theory 5).

16

Schwarz describes form as “both the load-bearing framework of the novel and

the structural rendering of a social reality external to literature and internal to

history” (“Presuppositions”). This description, which Schwarz borrows from

Antonio Candido, defines form somewhat differently than traditional literary

scholarship, which employs a descriptive or classificatory approach. It also

differs from more contemporary post-structuralist approaches, whose

engagement with form avoids the particularity of a given work in favor of a

homogenized deconstruction, which consists in turning language against itself

and proving that everything means nothing. Form, according to Schwarz, is

neither a schematic or prescriptive classificatory scheme like genre, nor is it

concerned primarily with the structure (or deconstruction) of language as such.

Form, as Schwarz understands it, is a “deep synthesis of historical movement.”

“It’s the imitation of a historical structure by a literary one” (“Presuppositions”).

! This approach to form—the identification of the social form as a

constitutive principle of the work—poses certain problems. One problem

concerns method; another is a compositional difficulty: how to present, as a

unified dissertation, widely divergent analyses that emerge from the very

different formal characteristics of each respective novel.

! The first problem is the most difficult to surmount, because no established

method exists for identifying “the load-bearing framework” of a work, much less

17

for establishing links to a social process which, like in the case of Schwarz’s

“dialectic of roguery,” may have remained hidden from view. Schwarz himself

admits that

exploring the structural correspondences between literature and

social life must deal with obstacles much more real than those

typically associated with sociohistorical method. Such exploration

requires the kind of knowledge that can only come from the close

study of spheres distant from one another, together with an

intuition into the totality that then emerges—requirements

generally beyond the ken of the run-of-the-mill academic specialist.

(“National Adequation” 22)

Much of my research and writing has had to confront these obstacles, which

include the subjective difficulties of understanding a national literature and a

social dynamic which are not my own, difficulties which are further

compounded by the US government’s 50-year policy of diplomatic isolation and

economic embargo towards Cuba, which severely limits cultural exchange and

travel. Yet the most intractable problem remains that of method, or, more

precisely, its absence.

! Method itself is still eschewed by many as an instrumental and

constrictive set of procedures (Derrida “Letter” 4). Robin William’s character in

18

Dead Poets Society (1989) lampoons the fictional J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D., for his

procedural approach to graphing literary “value” on an X–Y axis. Pedagogical

experience has shown me that students usually adopt one of two “common-

sense” approaches to the problem of literary analysis. The first is to confront

literature as a code in need of interpretation, to search for the “underlying

meaning.” This often takes the form of decoding a text’s literal meaning, which

may not be easily understood, or of establishing allusions or references to the

author’s biography, the social context, etc. This is a valuable exercise for many

students, and certainly contributes to the depth of one’s reading, but this

procedure rarely succeeds in identifying necessary relationships between internal

and external realities or in establishing a given reading as better than another.

The most one can say is that a given work—Don Quixote, for instance—can be

read thus, and often is. This leads to the second common-sense approach: to

claim that literature is mostly (or even entirely) a matter of interpretation. That is,

meaning is wholly subjective, determined by a reader (monadic subject) or a

consensus of opinion (collective subject). Neither of these approaches resembles a

science (understood broadly not in the narrow sense of empirical observation but

in the older sense of “knowledge” of an object or field). In other words, these

approaches fail to meet Schwarz’s basic requirement of literary criticism, which is

that is “produces new knowledge” (“Presuppositions”). This is the basic task of

19

the critic who wishes to move beyond neo-romantic, irrationalist approaches to

literature or deconstruction’s disavowal of critical agency.5

! Unfortunately, there is very little writing on the subject of how, exactly, to

undertake the kind of analysis referred to by Schwarz. There are a few models

scattered about among Latin American literary criticism: Candido, Schwarz,

some of Angel Rama’s work. But only Schwarz has attempted to outline the

“presuppositions” of a formal, materialist criticism, in a few essays that provide

tantalizing hints about how to proceed, yet fall short of establishing a method.

The two most signal figures in Western Marxist literary and philosophical

thought, Theodor Adorno and Georg Lukács, who both provide masterful

examples of formal analysis, come to widely divergent conclusions and

conflicting judgments about many works and even entire literary movements.6

So we are left with models like—to cite just a couple of examples—Candido’s

malandro, which emerges from his observations on the form of Manuel Antonio

de Almeida’s Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant, and Schwarz’s parentela, which he

reveals to be the aesthetic formalization, in Dom Casmurro, of a particular set of

class relations that were dominant in Regency Era Brazil.

! These models all draw, implicitly or explicitly, on the Ur-text of Capital,

which first employed this particular method. In the Postface to the 2nd edition of

Capital, vol. 1, Marx offers an exceedingly brief, yet illuminating commentary:

20

Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that

of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to

analyse its different forms of development and to track down their

inner connection. Only after this work has been done can the real

movement be appropriately presented. If this is done successfully,

if the life of the subject-matter is now reflected back in the ideas,

then it may appear as if we have before us an a priori construction.

(102)

What is this if not the method described by Schwarz?

On the plane of reality, where the writer finds practical life,

knowledge and bibliography, form, although intuited, might not

exist in a modality available to literature. In such a case, the critic

must construct the social process in theory, contemplating the

creation of the generality capable of unifying the novelistic

universe under consideration, a generality that the novelist has

already perceived and transformed into a principle of artistic

construction.” (“Presuppositions”)

Moishe Postone calls this method “immanent critique,” a method that

does not judge critically what is from a conceptual position outside

its object. . . . Instead, it must be able to locate that [position] as a

21

dimension of its own context, a possibility immanent to the existent

society. Such a critique must also be immanent in the sense it must

be able to reflexively grasp itself and ground the possibility of its

own existence the nature of its social context. That is, if it is to be

internally consistent, it must be able to ground its own standpoint

in the social categories with which it grasps its object, and not

simply posit or assume that standpoint. The existent, in other

words, must be grasped in its own terms in a way that

encompasses the possibility of its own critique: the critique must be

able to show that the nature of its social context is such that this

context generates the possibility of a critical stance towards itself.

(87-88)

Immanent critique of an aesthetic object, then, entails locating a dimension

internal to the work itself, rather than adopting a critical stance based on the

critic’s own artistic sensibilities, political views, declarations of solidarity with

the oppressed, or adoption of a “subject-position” (her own, another’s, or the

Other’s). It may well be that such aesthetic and ethical concerns arise as the

analysis unfolds, and it’s certain that undertaking this kind of immanent critique

is to work within an explicitly materialist and Marxist critical tradition with its

own political implications, but the conceptual position that grounds this sort of

22

critique, vis-à-vis a particular object, must emerge from within that object itself.

The task of the critic, then is to locate the dimension of the text—which must be a

formal property, related to its making, its constructions, its factura—and show the

social process which it formalizes by establishing links between this process and

the form in question. In Schwarz’s words,

The form poses the question that the critic’s research and

knowledge in a variety of domains help to expound and interpret.

The finer and more complex the grasp of form, the more interesting

its formulation and explanation will be, if successful. According to

this view, which places emphatic (but not exclusive) value on the

cognitive dimension of fiction, a good novel is in fact a theoretical

event. (“Presuppositions”)

This description of method, still embryonic and more gnomic than

programmatic, nonetheless has the advantage of fusing extrinsic and intrinsic

approaches to literary analysis, to employ Wellek and Warren’s timeworn

distinction. It bespeaks a critical intention to bridge these domains, to locate the

formal nexus that internalizes the social dynamic and allows the critic to work

outward from that nexus to discover the social process it reveals. Schwarz admits

that this fusion of internal and external readings—his version of the Marxist

23

program of establishing the dialectic of literary form and social form—is difficult

to carry out. This dissertation is my attempt to do this.

! Attention to form means that each work must be approached anew, with

fresh eyes and a willingness to discover the “real nexus whose logic becomes a

structuring element of the novel.” During the planning and proposal stages of

this dissertation, I felt torn between the desire to impose a conceptual framework

on the novels and the necessity of remaining attentive to each work’s formal

particularities. I felt that a conceptual framework would provide a unity to the

dissertation. But the novels themselves resisted; I found it impossible to account

for them strictly in terms of my sociohistorical understanding of the post-Soviet

period in Cuba. I eventually relinquished my desire for unity in favor of the more

immanent approach outlined above. As one might expect, this heterogenous

group of novels, whose formal dimensions differ substantially, led me, in each

case, to aspects of Cuban society and culture that I had not previously

considered, or had not considered in great depth. Each chapter or chapter section

is, then, in many ways an independent essay which attempts (assays) to account

for a single novel. I have attempted to narrativize the dissertation as much as

possible, though, and to establish connections between the chapters and sections.

24

! Chapter One analyzes Leonardo Padura’s La novela de mi vida. The

chapter’s major themes are the return of a cultural nationalism to Cuba and the

re-emergence of race-based class formations in the post-Soviet period. I locate a

discrepancy in Padura’s treatment of historical figures in the novel. Padura is

generally very careful about his historical research and his portrayal of historical

figures. An important part of his realist aesthetics, seen particularly in his

detective novels, is that he distances himself from the previously dominant

portrayal of villains and heroes alike as ideological stereotypes. Most Cuban

detective novels in the 70s and 80s feature CIA-backed bad guys motivated by

greed (often described in terms borrowed from the most vicious traditions of

anti-Semitism) and “collective” heroes who triumph because of their

commitment to socialist principles and Party institutions. Padura undermines

these antecedents by employing a hard-boiled aesthetic, borrowing heavily from

authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Padura’s creation, Mario

Conde, is a typical protagonist within this tradition—a pathetic, vice-ridden,

womanizer who scrupulously avoids police discipline and procedures—and

precisely for this reason avoids being a proxy for a cold war struggle waged

through the official stereotype of the New Man. Likewise, Padura humanizes his

villains as themselves victims of a broader social situation which compels them

to act. In most cases, what would have been portrayed as naked greed by older

25

writers is shown to be rooted in self-preservation, disillusionment or simply part

of an endemic culture of corruption within Cuban bureaucracy. When Padura

creates a one-sided character or treats a historical figure with a lack of nuance, it

violates the general tenor of his oeuvre. I argue that his unequal treatment of José

María Heredia and Domingo del Monte in La novela de mi vida reveals a deeply

rooted preoccupation with race at a historical moment in which culture displaces

politics as the foundation of Cuban national ideology.

! Chapter Two incorporates material from an earlier essay I published on

Abilio Estévez’s novel, Los palacios distantes, into a broader consideration of his

aesthetic and its relationship to Havana’s urban spaces, monuments, and

museums. I examine Los palacios distantes and another work, Inventario secreto de

La Habana, to show how Estévez’s narratives position themselves against both

official revolutionary discourse and against the incursions of market logic. I

argue that, although much of Estévez’s writing can be read as a critique of the

philistinism of offical culture, it transcends this critique to become something

even more critical of the damaged life itself.

! Chapter Three deals with Ena Lucía Portela’s Pájaro: pincel y tinta china. I

write about how her novel participates in a critique of gender roles and norms

that is equally critical of the Cuban variety of second-wave feminism. The novel

could be thought of as a third-wave feminist or queer-theoretical critique of

26

gender binaries and hierarchies in the Cuban literary scene. I read the novel as an

attempt to substitute a kind of literary solidarity for a political solidarity whose

absence can be felt throughout the text despite Portela’s anti-Utopianism and

notoriously reactionary attitude toward the Revolution.

! Chapter Four continues linking aesthetic form with social form, but

broadens the notion of social form to global economic shifts in the post-Soviet

world. This final chapter synthesizes many of the themes that have emerged in

previous chapters—race, gender, space, etc.—in an analysis that focuses on

another category: labor.

! The two novels examined—Jesús Díaz’s Siberiana and José Manuel Prieto’s

Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire—are very different stories by authors

with widely divergent styles. The novels, published about a year apart, are both

about love affairs between a Cuban man and a Siberian woman. This oddity is

probably coincidental, but nevertheless allows one to surmise that something

about the relationship between Cuba and the Soviet Union becomes visible, at

least as an aesthetic problem, only after the dissolution of the socialism project

that both countries once shared.

! The first part of this chapter considers Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian

Empire by José Manuel Prieto. Like Siberiana it features a Siberian woman and a

Cuban man, never explicitly identified as Cuban but more or less identifiable as

27

the author’s alter ego. The Cuban protagonist is a smuggler who moves through

post-Soviet Eastern Europe taking advantage of currency fluctuations and porous

borders to make profits. I will explain how his obsessions with money,

masculinity and, most of all, the art of letterwriting (the novel is structured as a

series of reflections on letters he receives from the Siberian woman) combine to

create a narrative subject-form that reflects a historical moment in which concrete

labor (i.e. the physical production of commodities) no longer predominates. The

novel ends, rather predictably, with a kind of metamorphosis in which the

narrator/protagonist, having recognized his failings, emerges transformed from

an out-of-body experience. The novel seems to hint that this is some kind of

victory, an act of self-mastery. I argue, rather, that instead of transcending the

social forces which have operated on him, making him both a misogynist and a

tool of speculative capital, he simply succumbs to them.

! My analysis continues with Siberiana, whose plot, in which an Afro-Cuban

reporter falls in love with a woman in Siberia, is justified by the construction of

the Baikal-Amur Mainline, a branch of the Trans-Siberian railroad called the

“project of the century” by Soviet leaders. My argument is that the protagonists’

actions (especially those of Nadiezdha, the title character) and their ultimately

tragic end can only be understood as a response to a kind of guilty conscience

about the sacrifices made by the railroad workers, who were often political

28

prisoners. The construction of the railroad is never directly described in the

novel; it exists mostly as a historical and geographical setting for the story. I

argue that, regardless of what Díaz’s allegorical intentions may have been at a

moment when he had distanced himself from the Cuban revolution (or at least

from its leadership), the motivations of Nadiezdha betray a persistant reverence

for labor grounded in the Guevarian conception of the New Man. In the post-

Soviet world in which the novel was written, this desire to redeem labor no

longer has an outlet and Díaz, the consummate realist, therefore reverts to a

Romantic position in which the hero strives nobly but unsuccessfully against the

failure of socialism as a kind of fatum.

29

1 Strangely absent from Sánchez’s horror story is any discussion of the Díaz-

Balart political dynasty, which has managed to perpetuate itself in free and

democratic South Florida.

30

2 André Gorz, in Critique of Economic Reason, points out that the externalization of

domestic labor, that is, the outsourcing of household work such as cooking,

cleaning, sewing, shopping, etc. as “service labor” only becomes “possible in a

context of growing social inequality, in which one part of the population monopolizes the

well-paid activities and forces the other part into the role of servants. . . . The

professionalization of domestic tasks is therefore the very antithesis of a

liberation. It relieves a privileged minority of all or part of their work-for-

themselves and makes that work the sole source of livelihood for a new class of

underpaid servants, who are forced to take on other peoples’ domestic tasks alongside

their own” (156).

3 See Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century, and Braudel’s The Perspective of the

World, the third volume of his monumental work Civilization and Capitalism.

4 Jorge Pérez-López argued in a conference paper (“Coveting Beijing”) that

Cuba’s economic reforms in the Special Period were “perestroika-like,” and

predicted that they would fail to help Cuba recover. Subsequent events have

proven him wrong. Cuba’s recovery, though, may be ephemeral, as the global

economy is now mired in a period of crisis.

31

5 Derrida: “It must also be made clear that deconstruction is not even an act or an

operation. Not only because there is something ‘patient’ or ‘passive’ about it (as

Blanchot says, more passive than passivity, than the passivity that is opposed to

activity). Not only because it does not return to an (individual or collective)

subject who would take the initiative and apply it to an object, a text, a theme,

and so on” (“Letter” 4). Contrast this with Schwarz, who insists on the creative,

revelatory role of critical agency.

6 I owe this observation, and many others, to Neil Larsen’s unpublished work on

theory and method, provisionally titled “Principles of Immanent Critique.”

Chapter One

Racial Anxiety and Cultural Legitimation in Leonardo Padura’s La novela de mi vida

1.0 - Introduction

! Leonardo Padura Fuentes (Mantilla, 1955– ) belongs to the first generation

of Cubans to spend their formative years and to be educated under the

revolutionary regime. Unlike many other successful Cuban authors, he remains

on the island, where he began his writing career as an investigative journalist. In

addition to the works of fiction for which he is best known, he has written

extensively on literary matters such as Alejo Carpentier and “lo real maravilloso”

and on historical topics like Cuban baseball, salsa musicians, and Cuba’s Chinese

community. He also writes opinion pieces and film criticism for several

newspapers. A glance at his bibliography reveals him to be an accomplished

scholar who displays an astonishing range of interests. Nevertheless, Padura is

most famous for his detective novels featuring Mario Conde, which have enjoyed

massive international success. As of this writing, Tusquets, Padura’s Spanish

publisher, has sold translation rights for Adiós, Hemingway (2001) in fourteen

countries.

! The detective novels belong to a wave of crime fiction in Latin America

that Padura himself has labeled “el neopolicial iberoamericano.” In addition to

32

his neo-noir detective fiction, Padura has authored two historical novels: La

novela de mi vida (2002) chronicles the life and legacy of the Romantic poet José

María Heredia, while El hombre que amaba a los perros (2009) narrates the lives and

intertwined destinies of Leon Trotsky and his eventual assassin, Ramón

Mercader.

! Padura’s fiction tends toward an unvarnished realism lacking in

belletristric pretension. In this regard, he stands as a transitional figure between

the mostly documentary and social-realist literature that Cuba produced from

roughly 1970–85 and the emerging postmodern literature that the novísimos

would begin to produce in the 1990s. My analysis, however, does not depend on

a strict periodization of Padura’s work. These comments are intended only to

establish a general chronology among the authors studied in this dissertation.

Although Padura might seem to fit into a simple periodization scheme, authors

like Jesús Díaz and Abilio Estévez, who will be considered further on, defy

attempts to periodize their aesthetic.

! Padura’s crime fiction thematizes a certain generational experience, one

marked by the apparent death of the revolutionary socialist project in Cuba.

Padura’s generation, the first to be educated in the educational system created by

the Revolution, has witnessed, during the last two decades, the crisis of

traditional Marxism’s historical model. A political, economic, and social

33

conjuncture known as the “Special Period” has thrown the failure of the

revolutionary historical model into stark relief, since the island, instead of

approaching the Utopian telos of socialism, seems to be drifting away from

socialism and sinking into a dystopia in which the discrepancy between

revolutionary rhetoric and the incipient reality of neoliberalism has reached

almost surrealist extremes. Padura’s generation has always had to exercise

enormous patience: waiting for the achievement of Utopia, waiting its turn at the

helm of the Revolution and, now, waiting for the literal and figurative death of a

governmental bureaucracy still dominated at the highest levels by the previous

generation (embodied by, but not limited to, the Castro brothers). In a sense, this

generation of Cubans feels that history has come to a halt and is waiting for it to

resume its course. This phenomenon of historical stagnation has been widely

commented upon (though not always theorized) in both literature and criticism.

1.1 - A “Special” Time

! Cuba is often viewed as an anachronism. Havana, with its centuries-old

fortifications, decrepit baroque façades, and vintage automobiles, appears as a

place where time is out of joint. Various eras seem to coexist, but almost none of

them constitutes the present. Rather, the present exists in small pockets—in the

beaches and hotels frequented by tourists who expect conveniences like air

34

conditioning and Internet, and in the state-of-the-art medical clinics where

foreigners come for cures and surgeries either unavailable or too expensive in

their home countries (these days, such services are paid for in euros). The

majority of Cubans do not have access to these places, which, if not reserved

exclusively for tourists, are at any rate much too costly. Outside of these zones,

Habaneros go about their lives amid a crumbling built environment that recalls

the colonial, republican, and revolutionary pasts, but offers few clues about the

future.

! Politically, too, Cuba seems to belong to another era. Its policies and

slogans evoke the days of centralized command economies and Cold War anti-

imperialism, even as the country’s economy is forced to make concessions to the

current global reality of neoliberal globalization. After the collapse of the Soviet

Union, Cuba has been seen as a “museum of socialism.” The implication is that

Cuba is one of the last remaining examples of a political model that reached its

expiration date in 1989. A technical description of Cuba’s political-economic

anachronism might read as follows: a strong, single-party government has

successfully exploited the United States’s hardline anti-communist policies and

economic blockade to mobilize Cubans in support of maintaining the one-party

state’s nearly exclusive control over the economy, the media, and the mobility of

citizens; after 1990, economic crises and the loss of Soviet subsidies have forced

35

the Cuban government to loosen economic controls in certain sectors, making a

slow and incremental, yet perceptible shift towards the global economic standard

of tertiarization and free markets; this shift can be described as the very belated

transition from a Fordist economic model to a post-Fordist one.1 Cuba’s

government is following a very cautious strategy of asymmetrical liberalization

and economic restructuring, which, as Laura Enríquez has shown in her article

“The Cuban Alternative to Neoliberalism,” has relied on reorienting the economy

toward the service/tourist sector while shifting manufacturing to meet the needs

of that sector. In sum, Cuba is not as static as it appears, but the glacial pace of its

economic reforms leaves it very far behind the world trend towards market

liberalization and deregulation.

! Lately, there has been a very slight shift in rhetoric as well. Raúl Castro has

allowed cell phones and limited Internet access to citizens, and he seems more

open to a possible rapprochement with the United States. During the period we

are concerned with, however, there was very little easing of anti-capitalist

rhetoric. In fact, Cuba’s initial response to Gorbachev’s reforms in the late 1980s

was to denounce them, preferring to face the crisis and eventual demise of the

Soviet bloc by doubling down on socialism, using its “Rectification of Errors”

campaign to strengthen prohibitions of private enterprise and to attempt to

recapture the initial spirit of the revolution.

36

! During the decade of the 1990s, though, the Cuban government was

forced to soften its stance on economic matters, and its rhetoric shifted as well.

Fidel Castro notably pronounced the crisis to be a “Special Period in Times of

Peace,” a stroke of rhetorical genius that allowed for a temporary pause, or

recess, in the inexorable march toward socialism.

1.2 - Cultural Nationalism and the Recuperation of Marginalized Writers

! At this moment of crisis and (supposedly temporary) abandonment of the

collective, socialist project project, the Cuban community had to be redefined in

terms of cultural nationalism in order to maintain its unity. As Ariana

Hernández-Reguant explains, “Early twentieth-century cultural nationalists like

Jorge Mañach and Fernando Ortíz were recuperated despite their conservative

political leanings, and their writings on cultural nationalism were reprinted and

widely read” (”Multicubanidad” 72).

! This national redefinition becomes visible in two countervailing

tendencies in Padura’s work. On one hand, there is a retreat from the hackneyed

archetype of the New Man. No longer does the figure of the “cuadro

revolucionario” act as a placeholder for the Cuban subject. Figures like Padura’s

famous detective, Mario Conde, assert their individuality and non-conformism

in the face of the restrictions imposed by revolutionary dogma. On the other

37

hand, a new universalization takes place. This movement is seen in La novela de

mi vida, as the parallelism that Padura creates between the lives of José María

Heredia and Fernando Terry, a researcher in search of the poet’s lost manuscript,

begins to blur the distinctions between their respective epochs. This causes

experiences like self-censorship (213), despotism, and exile to appear as universal

characteristics of lo cubano, thereby robbing them of whatever historical

specificity pertains to them in different eras (the colony, the Batista years, the

Castro regime). In part, this movement mirrors the State’s rhetorical strategy

during the Special Period. But a further ambiguity emerges: by so closely

aligning the stories of Heredia and Terry, and by problematizing the notion of

culpability and victimhood, Padura undermines the saintly status of Heredia,

rendering him more human and comprehensible. Here, Fernando Terry’s friend,

Tomás, destroys the former’s notion of victimhood, while comparing him to

Heredia.

—¿Tú sabes lo que te pasa a ti? Pues que eres un trágico y te gusta

tenerte lástima. Te encanta ver la mierda de los demás y no hueles

la tuya. . . . Mira, nunca te lo he dicho, pero yo hablé con Enrique y

él me dijo que tú lo acusaste de maricón. ¿O se te olvidó eso? Ya, ya

sé que se te descojonó la vida y toda esa historia, pero si hubieras

sido un poco más inteligente y menos trágico te hubiera ido mejor.

38

¿Qué hice yo desde el principio? Cogerlo todo como venía y no

complicarme la vida. Uno ya está bastante viejo para creer que los

muertos salen, que la poesía sirve para algo, que Heredia no era un

comemierda que se metió en camisa de once varas y después se

pasó la vida lamentándose, igualito que tú. (266)

The net effect of these contradictory movements in Padura’s work is to reinstate

cultural nationalism without the epic pretensions of the State. Lo cubano in

Padura is tragic, whereas for the State it still has triumphalist, world-historical

pretensions. The State insists on mythologizing Martí, Varela, and a host of other

figures newly re-assimilated to the national narrative.

! Much of Padura’s valorization of past writers depends on whether or not

they have been forgotten, forced into exile, or injustly demonized. These authors

include Piñera (represented by Alberto Marqués in Máscaras), José María Heredia

(once considered a traitor for what was perceived as an attempted

rapprochement with Spanish colonial authorities), Lino Novás Calvo, and his

protagonists themselves, Terry and Conde. Padura’s shortlist of best Cuban

novels, published in The Guardian, is comprised mostly of writers who were

exiled or otherwise repressed for at least a portion of their careers.2 Another such

writer is Eugenio Florit, who appears, somewhat curiously and tangentially, in La

novela de mi vida. According to Padura’s acknowledgements which preface the

39

novel, the episode involving Florit is a second-hand one related to Padura by

Eliseo Alberto. The anecdote’s inclusion, however gratuitous it may seem, makes

a certain sense if one relates it to Padura’s preference for recuperating historical

figures in a positive light without thereby mythologizing them.

! Padura’s depiction of Eugenio Florit is unlikely to mystify the poet at the

expense of the man. The legendary lyric poet, whose verses sang about bright

expanses of sky and sea, is seen reduced, in exile, to the narrow, chilly confines of

his air-conditioned home library. He becomes a pathetic figure, far removed from

any pretention to literary or historical greatness. Ironically, by placing him in this

library, Padura achieves an effect quite distinct from Cintio Vitier’s attempts to

ensconce Florit in the Cuban canon. Francisco Morán describes an interview with

Vitier in which the eminent critic and origenista “mummifies” Florit by calling

him “the poet of serenity,” thereby reducing him to a simple label, a contentless

name that can be found “registered” in Vitier’s critical magnum opus, Lo cubano

en la poesía. Morán, like Padura, prefers a canon that admits authors as human

beings, rather than faceless aesthetic or historical markers: “Como decía Virgilio

Piñera [...] es abominable ‘esa pureza que mancha de blanco hasta dejar sin rostro

alguno al poeta’” (”Homenaje”). Antonio José Ponte, in his essay collection El

libro perdido de los Origenistas, takes issue with Cintio Vitier’s political

instrumentalization of the aesthetic of the Orígenes group. Ponte’s dispute with

40

Vitier concerns the manner in which the latter co-opted Cuban culture into the

official revolutionary project. But by vindicating culture over politics, Ponte

provides a perfect example of how both the Castro regime and its opponents

now promote cultural nationalism.

! In some ways Ponte is typical of exiled dissident intellectuals in the

broader Cuban diaspora (beyond south Florida). In an essay called “Dilemmas of

the Cuban Transition,” Rafael Rojas exhibits a similar preoccupation with the

discursive strategy of the Castro regime.

This readjustment of the regime’s symbolic structure underlines the

exceptional nature of the Cuban case in the context of democratic

transitions from totalitarian regimes, such as those in the Soviet

Union and Central and Eastern Europe, or authoritarian regimes

like the Latin American dictatorships. In the last fifteen years, Cuba

has remained outside of the ‘third wave’ of democratic transitions,

but it has also, temporarily at least, begun to incorporate certain

elements of those transitions, such as substituting a Marxist-

Leninist state ideology with a nationalist revolutionary regime

doctrine, within a very effective strategy of symbolic reproduction

of power. . . . The transformation of the Cuban regime in the twelve

years of the post-communist period (1992-2004) can be observed in

41

at least three areas: ideological policy, educational policy, and

cultural policy. These three policies, while relatively autonomous,

particularly in terms of language and agency, function as part of a

discursive legitimization that originates from the center of power.

(142-43)

While what Rojas says is true, one might question the univocality of this

discourse. Certainly there is a shift toward cultural nationalism and away from

Marxist-Leninism, but the state is not its only source. Popular literature like

Padura’s also instates this discourse, albeit with differences. Rojas, too, forms

part of this trend, as much of his work seeks to revalorize republican intellectuals

like Ortiz and Mañach. Rojas does this from a traditional liberal position, having

more in common with Cuba’s domestic opposition and its attempts to promote

“civil society” than with either the regime and its supporters or the more

radically ideological opposition in exile. Nonetheless, Rojas does his part to

promote his own brand of cultural nationalism, one emphasizing “republican

values.” The point here is that this “symbolic adjustment” is not merely the

Castro regime’s strategy to maintain its legitimacy, but forms part of a broader

social trend, rooted in Cuba’s peculiar position in the world economic system.

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1.3 - Idealism and Historical Truth

! This trend, of course, has to do with both geopolitical shifts and

fundamental transformations in the global economy. Cuba’s dilemma, caught as

it is between the collapse of socialism and the contradictions of global, financial

capitalism, is both obvious and well documented. On one hand, the failure of the

socialist project is evident; on the other, what comes after the “end of history” is

far from clear. This represents a real moral and psychological dilemma, especially

for those Cubans (Padura’s generation) educated during the most fervent years

of revolutionary idealism.

! Some dispute the importance of these subjective attitudes, or question

their existence. James Buckwalter-Arias, for example, claims the New Man was

always more literary and idealist than a materialist hypothesis.3 That is, the New

Man never materialized as an actually existing form of subjectivity. I think this

claim is partially true, given that it never materialized fully in practice, a

development which, according to Guevara, would have ushered in a new form of

social life. However, I do share the opinion of Sonia Behar and Ana Serra,4 whose

work is underpinned by the idea that the New Man was at least partially realized

as a behavioral model or an epistemology. The incredible persistence of Cubans’

loyalty to the regime says something about the extent to which they identified

and adopted the revolutionary project as their own.

43

! Buckwalter-Arias is correct, at least in one sense, about Guevara’s

idealism. The theory of communization outlined in Guevara’s El socialismo y el

hombre en Cuba relies on the notion that moral incentives will, ultimately,

transform the nature of labor and therefore of society. For Guevara, replacing

material incentives with the ideal of voluntary labor was the key to building

socialism. The attempts to transform Cubans’ consciousness certainly failed to

transform Cuban society in the way Guevara had hoped. But it would be an error

to assume that the Cuban government’s systematic efforts to give schoolchildren

a socialist education and to inculcate revolutionary values left no trace in the

consciousness of Padura’s generation. There is a pervasive and persistent

idealism among many of these Cubans that also appears in Padura’s literary

works.

! This idealism, I assert, is rooted in the education of a generation which

was intended to embody the New Man. “Historicamente hablando, se trata,

pues, de una subjetividad única e irrepetible, aquella subjetividad que mejor

encarna el sueño o la pesadilla del «hombre nuevo»” (Rojas El estante vacío 165).

The young people of Padura’s generation were inculcated with the ideals of

socialism. These were to be the famous “new men,” whose ideological purity

would permit them to work for moral incentives, rather than monetary ones,

thereby creating the cooperative spirit necessary for socialist production.

44

! Irrespective of the practical failure of Guevara’s attempt at social

engineering, it seems incontrovertible that, even if only as a purely ideological

phenomenon, “socialist” ideals such as cooperation, selflessness and, above all,

fidelity to a historical mission rooted in the “truth” of the proletariat as the

subject of that history were major factors in the consciousness of this generation.

Even after witnessing the betrayal of these ideals and confronting the hard

evidence (the privations of the Special Period) that what seemed like progress

was simply a mirage, this generation of true believers holds on to them. As Ana

Serra writes, Conde exemplifies what remains of the New Man in Padura’s

generation and that “the spirit of social justice of Socialism, in an abstract sense,

is . . . not lost in Padura’s novels” (170). Elsewhere, I’ve written about the

contrast between Conde’s idealism and the economic reality of the post-Soviet

period (see my article, “Utopía y heterotopía en La neblina del ayer de Leonardo

Padura”).

! There is an implication of “historical truth” at work in Padura’s works.

Conde, the detective must doggedly pursue this truth through Havana’s ruins

and the accumulated detritus of history itself as it makes its narrative appearance

in the interrupted lives and failed dreams of the city’s fictional inhabitants.

Fernando Terry must confront the truth about his betrayal. The preoccupation

with historical truth is the primary motivation for Padura’s protagonists. Indeed,

45

foils sometimes appear to challenge the wisdom of their obsessions. Thus, in the

previously cited passage of La novela de mi vida, Fernando’s friend Tomás objects

vehemently to what he sees as Fernando’s inability to let bygones be bygones.

Similarly, in one of the novel’s earlier historical layers, Carlos Manuel Cernuda

castigates Cristóbal Aquino for involving himself in the affairs of the deceased

poet José María Heredia: “lo mejor es no mezclarse, vivir al margen, y si uno

tiene la fortuna de hacerlo decentemente, defender su decisión. . . . [E]sos papeles

de Heredia no tienen que ver con los Junco, los Del Monte o los Cernuda, sino

con algo mucho más grande que se llama la verdad, y en este país eso casi nunca

ha servido para nada. . . . . Estás como Del Monte, preguntándole a uno si

entiende lo que no se puede dejar de entender . . .” (236). As I show in previous

work (Dettman “Tiempo nublado”), this sort of warning not to delve too deeply

into the past or look too closely for the truth is repeated, on multiple occasions, in

Padura’s most recent detective novel, La neblina del ayer. This anxiety about

historical truth is common to countries with a recent past of violent political strife

or repression (Spain, Argentina, Chile, etc.). This comparison is not meant to

obliterate the vast differences among these countries and their political regimes,

but rather to point to a common preoccupation with unity. There is a sense in

which historical truth is perceived as a threat to national unity. While Padura’s

novels ostensibly interrogate the past, thereby committing themselves to the

46

search for historical truth, they also work simultaneously in the opposite

direction.

1.4 - Del Monte Demonized

! It has already been said that Padura’s novels represent a departure from

the Cuban state’s tendency to mythologize important national figures. Padura,

on the contrary, prefers to humanize them, as explained above. Against this

preference, though, La novela de mi vida presents an interesting exception. In the

passages quoted above, both Tomás and Cernuda compare their idealistic

interlocutors to historical figures, in a parallelism that unites José María Heredia

and Domingo del Monte. However, the treatment that Padura gives to each of

these figures is vastly different. In a corpus notable for the nuanced treatment of

historical figures, Del Monte is conspicuous as an eminence grise. He remains in

the shadows and his specific actions are only guessed at, even when their effects

are clearly felt by the other characters. What accounts for this treatment?

! In 1997 the historian Urbano Martínez Carmenate published in Cuba an

exhaustive re-evaluation of Domingo del Monte. The book, titled Domingo del

Monte y su tiempo, contains passages that will shed light on the nature of Padura’s

treatment of this patron of the arts and key historical figure. Padura’s novel

portrays Del Monte as a traitor who betrayed the confidence of his friends,

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conspirators in the 1823 plot to rebel against the Spanish crown (la Conspiración

de los Rayos y Soles de Bolívar). The infamous Miguel Tacón, governor of Cuba,

reveals the details to a broken José María Heredia: “Ese hombre nunca fue su

amigo. Él fue el que lo delató en el año 23, después de que usted le contara que

estaba conspirando . . .” (Novela 316). The actual historical record, though, as

Martínez Carmenate explains, is far less clear on this point:

La actitud de Del Monte en lo tocante a esa agitación

independentista [la Conspiración de los Rayos y Soles de Bolívar]

no es posible fijarla con certeza. Se carece de evidencias concretas

que permitan caracterizarlo individualmente. Acercarse a él

desdeñando prejuicios seculares implica tener muy en cuenta que

en 1823 aún no disfruta de estrechos lazos familiares con la

oligarquía criolla —situación que ha de variar en 1834, tras su

casamiento—, por lo tanto, ahora no es más que el hijo de un

funcionario colonial fallecido, sin fortuna relevante y cuyos

parientes viven de los productos de un mediocre ingenio. Su

posición social gira en la órbita de aquella pequeña burguesía que

se lanza a la aventura de la conspiración, sin que este aserto

encubra pretensiones de encasillamiento forzoso. . . . Es cierto que

su nombre no aparece —igual que ocurre con sus amigos más

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próximos, salvo Heredia— en la relación de sediciosos descubiertos

y juzgados por la causa de los Soles y Rayos de Bolívar, pero ello no

establece deslindes absolutorios, ni desmiente la posibilidad de que

existiera conexiones, simpatías o sentimientos comunes entre

Domingo y el grupo subversivo. El juicio desfavorable que al

respecto emitiera él, quince años más tarde, en un memorial

dirigido a la Reina, no puede tomarse a pie juntillas como elemento

ilustrativo de su postura anterior, porque se trata de un documento

táctico, adaptado a una realidad nueva, bajo circunstancias

distintas, cuando ya el ideal de independencia es agua pasada.

(89-90)

Here, Martínez Carmenate interprets Del Monte’s negative judgement of the

conspiracy in its historical context, as a “tactical document” befitting a different

political context. Padura makes a similar interpretation of two of Heredia’s letters

that are often interpreted as a betrayal of his convictions. The first, declaring his

innocence in the 1823 conspiracy, is explained as Heredia’s desperate attempt to

avoid exile and separation from his lover and unborn child; the second, as the

poet’s only way to set foot once again on Cuban soil before his death. Padura is

unwilling to grant Del Monte the same benefit of the doubt regarding his

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statements. The historical evidence on which Padura basis his skepticism vis à

vis Del Monte is analyzed by Martínez Carmenate.

A reafirmar la tesis de un incuestionable retraimiento delmontino

ha contribuido bastante el criterio de Nicolás Azcárate, emitido en

1891 —a casi cuatro décadas de la muerte del crítico—, cuando

argumentó que en las pláticas madrileñas sostenidas por ambos en

los años cincuenta, ‘Delmonte (sic) me hablaba de Heredia en el

concepto de un delirante, y creo que alguna vez desatendió

invitaciones del conspirador, y aún procuró disuadirle de algunos

de sus planes’. De entonces a acá, los historiadores han utilizado

esa vaga declaración como elemento tajante, sin tener en cuenta los

matices interpretativos y las suspicacias de cualquier información

testimonial. (90)

Martínez Carmenate’s balanced assessment casts doubt on Padura’s depiction of

Del Monte. In the historian’s account, Del Monte comes across as a careful and

judicious figure, but certainly not the schemer that he appears to be in La novela

de mi vida. In fact, Del Monte even compares favorably when contrasted with the

rash Heredia:

Domingo, de temperamento moderado, reflexivo en grado sumo y

opuesto siempre a cualquier acto violento, se exime de dar pasos

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riesgosos, porque su ideal de cambio revolucionario lo concibe a

través de la evolución pacífica. Heredia, apasionado y delirante,

romántico e impulsivo, se deja arrastrar por el torrente conspirador,

sufriendo los riesgos de la aventura. (92)

! Chapter XIII of Martínez’s book relates the strange episode of Heredia’s

return to the island in November of 1836 and why his former friends viewed this

as a betrayal of the independista cause. It seems that Heredia was at least partly a

victim of his own legend; he had become such an important advocate of Cuban

resistance to Spain that any dealings with the colonial authorities, however

limited, acquired a symbolic value far greater than their immediate political

impact. Padura, as has been noted, humanizes Heredia by showing the necessity

of the letter to Tacón. However, he is less forgiving with the Del Monte circle;

these men are seen as scheming and self-interested. Padura doesn’t fully

contextualize their reaction to Heredia’s return to the island amid Tacón’s

draconian repressions. Martínez, on the other hand, handles Del Monte’s failure

to speak with Heredia with a great deal of nuance:

Del Monte nunca tendrá convincente disculpa para no haber

procurado el reencuentro con José María en el transcurso de esos

dos meses agonizantes que pasa el poeta en la Isla, máxime cuando

no se trataba de una visita común, sino más bien de la deuda

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histórica con un afecto excepcionalmente entrañable. Si no lo hizo

fue porque le pesaba demasiado en su alma toda aquella desgracia

y carecía de valor para enfrentarla. (217)

Martínez, unlike Padura, succeeds in presenting both sides of this friendship

“venida a menos,” and his account is even more tragic and moving than that of

Padura. This fact is made even more puzzling when one considers that Padura’s

novel was published several years after Domingo del Monte y su tiempo and that

Padura mentions Martínez Carmenate in La novela de mi vida’s prefatory

acknowledgments. Despite a familiarity with Martínez that allows Padura to call

him a “matancero furibundo,” little of the historian’s balanced assessment of Del

Monte seems to have made it into Padura’s text.

! Padura’s narration of Heredia’s return to Cuba cements Domingo del

Monte as the grand villain. Del Monte, the cynical pragmatist, appears as the

“owner of history,” while Heredia, the authentic idealist, is consigned to

oblivion. The greatest crime perpetrated by Del Monte in La novela de mi vida is

not the betrayal of the 1823 conspiracy or his poor treatment of Heredia. Rather,

it’s the alteration or complete fabrication of Espejo de paciencia, an epic poem

which functions as the degree zero of the Cuban literary canon. The obvious

consequence of the supposed fraud is that it is Heredia who rightfully belongs at

the head of the canon, not Silvestre de Balboa, if in fact such a person existed. Yet,

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the very notion of a “true” canon works against the thrust of Padura’s historical

narrative, which nearly always insists on humanizing historical figures in a way

that the state, with its iconography and homages, does not.

! The clear and poignant need for historical truth, for the ideal of truth, is

common to all the narrative threads in the novel, regardless of the historical

period or focalization. José María Heredia writes his memoirs as a testament to

the truth; Fernando Terry returns to Cuba to find out the truth about his political

persecution and subsequent exile; the custodians of Heredia’s manuscript

safeguard it against forces whose interest lies in hiding the truth. The fact that the

“truth” about Heredia and Del Monte is so closely connected to the formation of

Cuban national identity is no coincidence. It responds to the dissolution of the

identity formation known as the New Man, which was based on a different kind

of historical truth: the notion of class struggle as the motor of history and of the

Cuban Revolution as a focal point of the global overcoming of capital. In the

post-Soviet era, a (supra)national identity based on a collective project is replaced

by a shared cultural identity that depends on the discovery of a Cuban cultural

essence. The universalization of the experience of exile, censorship, and political

repression is a response to the renewal of a cultural logic which treats the

individual experience of José María Heredia and Fernando Terry as expressions

of lo cubano. “Truth” in history now appears as cultural essence; the idea that this

53

essence could be fabricated generates a certain horror vacui. Thus, at a moment in

which Cuba is moving towards a cultural nationalism that is, in fact, heavily

indebted to the Del Monte circle, there is a felt urgency to condemn attempts (like

the one Del Monte is supposedly guilty of) to fabricate culture and falsify history.

That this requires a different kind of historical dishonesty concerning Del Monte

simply manifests the logical contradictions of cultural nationalism itself.

1.5 - Cultural Legitimation

! That Del Monte, specifically, becomes the villain is an interesting puzzle.

Sonia Behar, in La caída del hombre nuevo, notes that Padura’s own opinion

regarding historical falsehoods and nation building is extremely pragmatic:

“para Padura la invención no supone graves problemas para la realidad

histórica. En su opinión, muchos han reinventado su propia realidad” (120). This,

however, seems at odds with La novela de mi vida, especially when Padura, in his

own non-fiction work on Heredia, claims that he, too, “estaba inventando la

patria” (cited in Behar 120). The question must be asked: what legitimizes

Heredia as national demiurge while causing Del Monte to be cast in a negative

light? One possible explanation is the persistence of class resentment, but this

doesn’t really elucidate the difference between Del Monte and Heredia, both of

whom came from similar backgrounds. A better explanation might be the

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absolute necessity, for cultural nationalism, to incorporate the Afro-Cuban

“essence.” The sugar aristocracy, to which Del Monte belonged by marriage, is

often blamed for undermining the struggle for independence. The enslavement

of Africans, which was adopted somewhat later in Cuba than on other Caribbean

islands, underpinned the sugar aristocracy’s economic interests and political

position. The importation of slaves had radically transformed the island’s racial

composition. Independence could not be won without the support of both free

and enslaved blacks, but fear of a black nation (the example of Haiti was a

constant worry) kept the criollo elite from a decisive break with the Spanish

crown. La novela de mi vida echoes this view of the sugar aristocracy:

[. . .] prácticamente ninguno de los cubanos que gozaban de

influencia y poder se habían sumado a la sedición, aduciendo

excusas como las de mis amigos para no enrolarse en una aventura

en cuyo derrotero siempre aparecía una misma interrogante sin

respuesta: ¿y los negros? Únicamente lo tétrico de aquella situación

impedía que fuera risible el hecho de que los negros traídos de

África y esclavizados en la isla fueran a su vez quienes esclavizaban

las voluntades de sus amos, atándolos a sus mismas cadenas,

castrando su libertad. (153-54)

55

Likewise, the fictional Miguel Tacón offers his verdict on the creole aristocracy:

“¿Con esos señores se puede pensar en la independencia? ¿Esos son los que se

oponen a la trata y a la esclavitud? No me haga reír . . .” (314).

! There is a telling depiction of Matanzas in La novela de mi vida. This city,

nicknamed the Athens of Cuba, lies on the north coast of the island between

Havana and Varadero. Like its namesake, its elite achieved a cultural zenith—in

which the Del Monte circle played an important role—based on a material

wealth produced by slaves. In Padura’s novel, Cristóbal Aquino, one of the

freemasons charged with guarding Heredia’s manuscript, contemplates

Matanzas:

Aquino desconocía quiénes eran los dueños de la embarcación, en

realidad no le importaba identificarlos, pero los imaginó elegantes,

pulcros, satisfechos, con sus manos limpias y sus conciencias

tranquilas. Seguramente habían olvidado que el origen de tanta

belleza apenas se remontaba a cien años, cuando por aquel mismo

río subieron hacia los ingenios del valle las dotaciones de esclavos,

sobre cuyo trabajo y sudor se alzarían las grandes fortunas de la

ciudad, las mismas encargadas por años de retardar el fin de la

esclavitud y la independencia de Cuba. Aquino comprendió que

hasta ese instante nunca había visto el fasto y la riqueza matancera

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con aquella mirada cargada de claridad y resentimiento, y pensó

que jamás lo hubiera hecho de no haber compartido con Heredia la

novela de su vida. (237)

Heredia’s fictional memoirs, or “novela,” make an explicit connection between

Del Monte and the origins of Matanzas’ wealth.

Con el mejor retoño de aquel jardín se había casado el gran

Domingo —sin que me lo anunciara nunca, a mí, «su amigo del

alma»—, para entrar en la alta sociedad cubana, enriquecida gracias

a la infame esclavitud que, alguna vez, Domingo se atrevió a

criticar. Su cinismo era tal que aseguró no tomar un centavo de su

suegro y rechazó la dote de treinta mil pesos, aunque le pidió al

nuevo papá que la invirtiera en algo provechoso y le pasara a su

hija las rentas, pues él viviría de su trabajo como abogado (que

nunca ejercería). (271)

Here, Heredia’s purity and idealism is set off against Domingo del Monte’s

hypocritical materialism. Nonetheless, it’s not immediately clear why Heredia,

who in the novel shares a love interest, Isabel Rueda y Ponce de León, with Del

Monte, should be exempted from speculation about his material motivations.

The novel describes Isabel Rueda y Ponce de León and Lola Junco (who are both

historical personages)5 as belonging to wealthy families. Thus, it seems that mere

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circumstance prevented Heredia from enjoying the same comforts of wealth that

Del Monte’s ties to the vast Aldama fortune permitted.

! It appears that Del Monte’s connections to the ill-gotten wealth of the

sugar aristocracy make him an unsuitable figure to stand at the origins of a

Cuban nationalism that, in the post-Soviet era, begins to place a greater weight

on its African heritage and must somehow incorporate it into the nation’s self-

understanding without addressing the reality that the formation of Cuban

national identity was, in its origins, based on the appropriation of African

elements into arts and culture while maintaining blacks themselves at arm’s

length. This, however, is to jump ahead too quickly.

1.6 - Espejo de paciencia

! The simplest way to solve the puzzle of Del Monte and Heredia’s

respective treatment in Padura’s novel is, perhaps, to ask what is at stake in the

controversy surrounding Silvestre de Balboa’s Espejo de paciencia. This epic poem,

written in 1608, describes the kidnapping and subsequent rescue of Juan de las

Cabezas Altamirano, Bishop of the island of Cuba. The poem remained unknown

until 1836, when José Antonio Echeverría, a scholar and member of the Del

Monte circle, discovered a deteriorating, manuscript copy inside another work,

Bishop Agustín Morell de Santa Cruz’s Historia de la isla y catedral de Cuba.

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Although, the circumstances of the poem’s discovery are strange and fortuitous,

they are not entirely without precedent in Spanish America.6 Echeverría

transcribed the poem, and sections of it were published in 1838 in El Plantel.

! Padura bases his suspicions regarding the poem’s authenticity on José

Luis Ferrer’s doctoral thesis, whose argument appears, mutatis mutandis, in La

novela de mi vida as Miguel Ángel’s conspiracy theory (later confirmed by

Heredia’s lost manuscript).

! —¿Tú sigues pensando que el Espejo es un invento de esos

cabrones?

! —Cada día estoy más convencido. Nada más acuérdate de

que para inventar la literatura de un país hace falta tener una

tradición, y lo que mejor suena a tradición us un poema épico. Si

ellos inventaron la literatura cubana y escribieron los libros que

hacían falta, ¿no te parece demasiado casual que hayan sido ellos

mismos lo [sic] que se encontraron también por casualidad un

poema épico que llevaba dos siglos perdido, del que nadie sabía

nada, escrito por un hombre al que se lo tragó la tierra? Por lo

menos yo no me lo creo . . .

! —Pero no hay pruebas. Tú sabes que me pasé años

revisándole la vida a cada uno de ellos y nada más saqué algunas

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sospechas. Te digo que no hay una sola prueba de que lo hayan

inventado.

! —Tampoco de que no lo hayan inventado. Nunca se vio el

manuscrito original de Silvestre de Balboa, ¿verdad? Ni siquiera se

vio la copia que ellos encontraron. . . . Fernando: el Espejo es

demasiado perfecto, tan perfecto como hacía falta. Por eso yo

pienso que lo inventaron. La armaron bien, no dejaron pistas ni

cabos sueltos, nadie habló. . . . Del Monte era un genio de la intriga

y la conspiración. (174)

Ferrer’s thesis, at least according to Padura’s reading, is grounded on an analysis

of the political necessities of the Del Monte circle and the larger creole elite to

which they belonged. Ferrer’s curious argument is that Espejo de paciencia served

its purpose (the creation of a Cuban consciousness) so well that it cannot not be a

fabrication. The argument, as paraphrased by Padura, reads as follows:

Pudo haber fabricado la superchería de Espejo de paciencia o no, pero

si la fabricaron él y el grupo que lo rodeaba –él como cerebro–, fue

un acto de absoluta utilidad para la historia y cultura nacionales.

Lo que sí tengo por seguro es que Del Monte y ese grupo tuvo el

propósito explícito de fundar una conciencia cubana. Él descubre

que esa conciencia debía ser creada a partir de un discurso

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narrativo; la poesía no era el medio. Y se trataba de fundar una

conciencia para luego fundar un país. La dimensión maquiavélica

de este proceso hace que su propósito sea válido y trascendente

para la cultura cubana. Él dice que hay que escribir novelas, y pone

a este grupo a escribirlas, pagando incluso de su bolsillo, que más

que suyo era el del clan de los Maddam-Aldama-Alfonso, los

dueños de prácticamente la mitad occidental de la isla, su mitad

más rica. Ellos requerían de esta serie de fundaciones para poder

cumplir sus propósitos económicos en una posible Cuba

independiente. Se trata de un tema complicado y apasionante; creo

que no hay otro caso en el mundo donde la literatura haya sido tan

útil para fundar un país. Ello nos explica de alguna manera por qué

la literatura cubana es tan importante para la Historia cubana. Esas

novelas van a dotar de rostro a lo cubano, y no por gusto uno

escribe la novela sobre la mulata, otro sobre el negro esclavo, el

rancheador, el campesino, los aborígenes y la historia. Hay como

una suerte de repartición de las imágenes, que van creando los

prototipos de lo cubano, que salen de ahí. Dentro de ese proyecto

pudo caber perfectamente el manuscrito original de Espejo de

paciencia, de cuya existencia no dudo, aunque sí estoy

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absolutamente convencido de que era diferente del que fue

presentado luego. Esa historia fue manipulada: encaja tan

perfectamente con todas las necesidades de la hora que se hace más

sopechosa —aparte de que nunca se vio el manuscrito original, que

ellos descubrieron, como tampoco es casual que también

descubrieran dos o tres años antes la Historia de Cuba de Arrate.

Sobre todo esto ha escrito una tesis de doctorado un cubano

residente en los Estados Unidos, José Luis Ferrer. Me fue muy útil

poder consultarla, pues enfoca la fundación de la narrativa cubana

desde una perspectiva utilitaria. (Reyes)

! Although Ferrer’s intervention is quite recent, the controversy

surrounding the poem’s authenticity is not new. Raúl Marrero-Fente points to

Carolina Foncet’s El romance en Cuba (1914) as the first work to dispute the

poem’s provenance (”400 aniversario” 279). Marrero-Fente goes on to say that the

doubts about Espejo’s authenticity center on the lack of an original manuscript or

information about the author or the events narrated in the poem. As he

documents, however, much work has been done to supply biographical

information about Silvestre de Balboa, to verify the events and persons

mentioned in the poem, and to reconstruct their social and historical context. In

fact, archival research undertaken in Cuba, Spain, and the Canary Islands has

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confirmed the veracity of the Bishop’s kidnapping and the existence of many of

the principal characters. Textual analysis has established Espejo’s relationship to

other epic poems which Balboa was likely to have read, and has situated the

poem’s depictions of nature in terms of the era’s philosophical concerns with

botany and naturalism, preoccupations which also appear in the pictorial arts.

The overwhelming tendency of historical scholarship supports the authenticity

of Balboa’s poem. Even so, many critics have continued to question it. Marrero-

Fente synthesizes the debate admirably, concluding:

Desde el descubrimiento del poema de Balboa por Esteban [sic]

Echeverría7 en el siglo XIX hasta el presente el camino recorrido por

la historiografía literaria sobre el poema ha sido extenso. El

resultado más interesante del análisis de la trayectoria de la crítica

sobre el poema es la insistencia en negar la autenticidad de la obra

a pesar de los aportes documentales que prueban la existencia del

autor, de los personajes principales y de los acontecimientos

históricos narrados en el poema. En especial, el descubrimiento de

documentos que prueban la participación de algunos de los vecinos

de Bayamo y Puerto Príncipe [ahora Camagüey] mencionados en el

poema en las actividades del contrabando. La tesis básica de

quienes niegan la autenticidad del poema se basa en la idea de la

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falsificación de Echeverría y otros miembros del grupo de Domingo

del Monte, con el objetivo de dotar a la literatura cubana de unos

orígenes interesantes. También se pone en duda la participación

heroica de un esclavo africano, la presencia de la naturaleza, la

alusión a la condición de criollo de la tierra, entre otras. De acuerdo

al balance de los estudios literarios sobre los siglos XVI y XVII, la

sociedad cubana aparece descrita como un ambiente miserable de

una gran pobreza cultural. Basados en estos presupuestos

elaborados sin ninguna base de investigación histórica, algunos

críticos literarios defienden la tesis sobre la imposibilidad de que en

un ambiente de estas características aparezca una obra literaria

como la de Silvestre de Balboa. Aunque parezca un absurdo, aún

hoy en día la mayoría de los estudios sobre la cultura y la literatura

cubanas de los siglos XVI y XVII adolecen de este enfoque

anacrónico, que no sólo ignora el estado de la cultura y literatura

cubanas, sino que ignoran el papel de Cuba como centro obligado

de la flota de Indias y como importante punto de encuentro en el

sistema comercial transatlántico. (291)

! I reproduce Marrero-Fente’s conclusion at length because it makes several

points that will be relevant to my subsequent discussion of Padura’s work and its

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relation to post-Soviet Cuba. First, there is a recurrent attempt to compensate for

the perceived lack of a foundational text (”dotar a la literatura cubana de unos

orígenes interesantes”). The Del Monte circle’s attempts to provide this

foundation are recruited as “evidence” for the falsification of Espejo de paciencia.

Other attempts to found the Cuban nation upon a rhetorical or poetic base were

later undertaken by José Martí and José Lezama Lima, to name only the most

notable. Martí, as Julio Ramos has shown, attempted to make the heterogeneous

elements of Spanish America coalesce around an autochtony which can only be

expressed, in the modern political sphere, via the intervention of the independent

man of letters, whose dense, figurative prose provides legitimation for both the

public intellectual and his political project of nation building. “‘Nuestra América’

registra . . . una repolitización del discurso literario; el intento de llevar la

autoridad de la mirada estética al centro mismo de la vida pública

latinoamericana” (Desencuentros 243). Lezama also placed aesthetics at the center

of his project to provide Cuba with the orígenes that it lacked. Cuba, he argued,

had insufficient historical density to develop a national trajectory of its own.

Literature, according to Lezama, had to supplement the island’s lack of telos.8

! Common to these attempts to invent the nation is an overestimation of the

importance of foundational texts. National literature, of whatever kind, appears

post hoc. A given community, which may or may not eventually be construed as

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a nation, does not emerge from literary texts, even when these texts, as Benedict

Anderson9 has shown, work to consolidate a national consciousness or ideology.

In the case of Cuba, and in the specific case of Espejo de paciencia, the text emerged

from a close-knit community of creole families in eastern Cuba, and was only

later declared to be the foundational document of Cuban national literature.

Concomitant to the misrepresentation of literature as origin is an undervaluation

of the already existing social relations that bring this literature into being: “. . . la

vida cultural de estas villas cubanas respondía a una dinámica social que la

mayoría de las investigaciones literarias sobre el poema no tienen [sic] en

cuenta” (Marrero-Fente 286).

1.7 - National Historiography

! The debate about the birth of the Cuban nation, naturally, has been a

primary concern of Cuban historiography since the early 20th century. The

contours of this debate, among historians, diverge somewhat from the emphasis

on foundational texts common to literary scholarship. Kate Quinn explains that

early Cuban historiography tended to explain the island’s history in terms of the

West’s civilizing mission, carried out first by Spain and then by the US. In the

wake of the influential work of the conservative historian Ramiro Guerra, who

emphasized the importance of Cuba’s plantation economy in the formation of the

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nation (Quinn 382), a revisionist, nationalist historiography began to emerge to

contest previous interpretations. Quinn outlines two competing tendencies

within the revisionist camp that became dominant in the 1940s and that have

persisted throughout the revolutionary era. On one hand, there is a dominant

strand of nationalist historiography that repeats much of the bourgeois

historians’ emphasis on the deeds of “great men.” “A chain of martyrs was

established stretching from Martí, Maceo and Gómez, to Frank País, Camilo

Cienfuegos and Ernesto Guevara: their births and deaths furnished a new,

secular calendar of saints’ days celebrated under the Revolution” (Quinn 386).

On the other hand, Quinn describes a smaller group of historians, most notably

Walterio Carbonell and Manuel Moreno Fraginals, who have criticized

revolutionary historians for “writing ostensibly Marxist works which simply

repeated the historical myths of the bourgeoisie” (387). These more radical

historians base much of their work on the scholarship of pre-revolutionary

historian Raúl Cepero Bonilla, whose work debunked the myth that the creole

elite had been the driving force behind Cuban independence; instead, the

popular classes, including slaves, were the real motivating factor for political

separation from Spain and the abolition of slavery (388).

! Much literary scholarship and, indeed, conventional wisdom, falls into the

less radical of the two camps described above. The heroic figures enumerated

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still act as signposts marking different moments in what is construed as a single

historical narrative, which closely matches the offical version of history outlined

by Fidel Castro in his 1968 speech at the centenary celebration of the armed

struggle begun by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes (Ten Years War). “En Cuba sólo ha

habido una Revolución: la que comenzó Carlos Manuel de Céspedes el 10 de

octubre de 1868 y que nuestro pueblo lleva adelante en estos instantes” (”Una

sola Revolución”). Fidel’s speech added the term “revolution” to the holy trinity

of pueblo/independencia/tierra, forming a cuartet of nationhood converging on the

telos of socialism. In the 1990s, though, when this telos became a mere vanishing

point, it became harder to sustain a historiography based on a progression of

struggles. Rafael Rojas explains that Cuban historiography began a self-diagnosis

during the 1990s that led to a recognition of the significant gaps left by

revolutionary nationalist historians. A sustained attempt to evaluate these gaps

was undertaken; scholars began to study periods that revolutionary historians

had mostly ignored because they didn’t fit neatly into a teleological narrative

(”El debate historiográfico”). However, this reorientation of historical scholarship

doesn’t necessarily imply a challenge to the State. In fact, it parallels the Cuban

government’s own shift in rhetoric, away from the prevailing Marxist-Leninist

discourse that was reinforced during the rectification campaign of the late 1980s,

towards the cultural nationalism identified by Hernández-Reguant, which was

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explained above. What replaces telos, then, as the nexus that binds the terms of

nationhood (independencia, pueblo, tierra) together, is a cultural “essence,” or

cubanía. While the notion of cubanía seems to lend itself to a historical vision of

Cuba not bound as closely to the figures of its heroes of independence and

revolution, these icons still form the basic framework for Cuba’s historical

imagination as it moves toward cultural essentialism.

! This is why La novela de mi vida stages Cuba’s origin story in terms of the

opposition between two canonical figures. In the novel one sees, on one hand, the

escape from revolutionary historiography’s narrow narrative of an independent

nation that began to emerge, ex ovum, in 1868. Padura situates the formative

moment several decades earlier. On the other hand, his fictionalized history still

parallels the historical procedure, criticized by Moreno Fraginals, of making

national history the story of a limited group of founding fathers, who often form

part of the literary canon. Moreno Fraginals, in his Historia como arma (1963), and

Carbonell, in Crítica, cómo surgió la cultura nacional (1961), launched broadside

attacks against the bulk of existing historical scholarship (Quinn 386). Moreno

Fraginals and Carbonell, along with the minority current of historiography that

they inspired, attempted to rescue the contributions of popular classes and,

especially, of blacks.

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Es lamentable que la concepción colonialista de la cultura

mantenga vigencia entre nosotros. ¿Qué pasado hay que rescatar

aquí? ¿Los consejos políticos de los panegiristas del sistema

esclavista? ¿Será cierto que nuestro inventario cultural está

integrado por el conjunto de ideas reaccionarias de Arango y

Parreño, José Antonio Saco, Luz y Caballero y Domingo del Monte?

¿Es que estos cuatro o cinco calambucos apegados a la ubre del

aparato colonial esclavista constituyen la tradición cultural cubana?

¿Acaso la cultura popular, cuya fuerza reside en la tradición negra,

no es tradición cultural? (Carbonell 37-38)

As Quinn states, “Carbonell’s demands for the wholesale revision of bourgeois

scholarship [. . .] stemmed from an explicit agenda to restore the contribution of

Afro-Cubans to a central place in Cuban national history” (387). Carbonell’s

efforts, however, remained suppressed by the stifling intellectual culture that

began to prevail in the 1970s (Ibarra 8; cited in Quinn). “Not until the 1990s was

there a significant renovation of Cuban historiography, when even ‘recalcitrant’

historians like Carbonell were reassessed” (Quinn 395). La novela de mi vida

embodies the contradictions of 1990s Cuban historiography as it begins to move

away from what Quinn calls the “patrician thesis” that persisted in the main

body of revolutionary scholarship. It is an obvious irony that only after the

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manifest failure of the “people’s revolution” did it become possible to

reconceptualize Cuban history as the movement of the popular classes, rather

than as an epic, anticolonialist struggle protagonized by a pantheon of (mostly)

bourgeois heroes. But this obeys a historical logic.

1.8 - Racial Inequality and National Unity

! Despite concrete progress toward racial equality made by the

revolutionary government’s literacy campaign, expansion of public education,

and housing reforms, and notwithstanding the triumphalist rhetoric of the state

and poems like Nicolás Guillen’s “Tengo,” racialized class divisions have

persisted in Cuban society. Alejandro de la Fuente has described how economic

pressures during the post-Soviet period combined with structural inequalities

between white and non-white populations to “recreate racism.” De la Fuente

describes how the revolutionary government’s failure to complete its housing

reforms left a “traditional geography of race and poverty” in place, meaning that

“in the most dilapidated areas of the big cities the proportion of blacks and

mulattos was greater than that of whites” (De la Fuente 72-73). In the post-Soviet

period, access to the dollar economy, either through remittances from Cubans in

exile or through employment in the tourist sector, became the principal

determining factor for prosperity. Afro-Cubans, by and large, have lacked access

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to this economy because, on one hand, their family members emigrated in fewer

numbers than whites (De la Fuente cites US Census numbers indicating that, in

1990, 83.5 percent of Cuban immigrants were white [77]), and, on the other,

because racism has denied them employment in tourism.

[T]he underrepresentation of blacks in tourism cannot be explained

as a function of structural conditions. It is, rather, a function of the

pervasiveness of a racial ideology that portrays blacks as lazy,

inefficient, dirty, ugly, and prone to criminal activities. In times of

scarcity and growing competition for resources, this racist ideology

justifies the exclusion of an important population sector from the

benefits of the most attractive sector of Cuba’s economy. (De la

Fuente 80)

De la Fuente goes on to offer frightening data and anecdotes about the silent

survival of racist attitudes during the revolutionary era and their pernicious

revival during the post-Soviet period. Here, however, it is sufficient to point out

that the fact of racism and race-based inequality is particularly inconvenient for

the formation of cultural nationalism, which must seamlessly incorporate Afro-

Cubans and their traditions.

! Earlier, I alluded to the construction of Cuban national identity as a

process wherein African cultural elements were incorporated into the “Cuban”

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collective consciousness, even as blacks themselves were excluded from equal

participation in the political and economic life of the emerging nation. In her

essay “Blackface Nationalism, Cuba 1840-1868,” Jill Lane uncovers the

ideological character of teatro bufo, a popular form of comic theater that emerged

in Havana in 1868. In a nutshell, Lane’s argument is that teatro bufo, as an

immensely popular spectacle among creoles of all classes, provided a way to

articulate and consolidate a properly “Cuban” form of speech, in

contradistinction to the colonial “Spanish.” “Primarily through its gleeful

recourse to tropes of linguistic play, the blackface persona also became the

vehicle for the expression of social alternatives to the status quo, enabling the

emergence of a “Cuban” humor, style, and rhythm” (Lane 36). At the same time,

argues Lane, this blackface entertainment, through the innovation of a persona

known as the negro catedrático, parodied and ridiculed the pretensions of the

Spanish while simultaneously reinforcing a hierarchy of color that ensured that

real social status could only be acheived through “whitening,” and that an

educated black was still, after all, only a black.

! Another nexus for the unequal incorporation of non-whites into a national

—or supranational—cultural identity is the concept of mestizaje. Joshua Lund, in

The Impure Imagination, shows how even discourses about cultural hybridity have

race at their heart, “insofar as race acts as a name for the normalization of

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hierarchical social reproduction” (xviii). Cuba has long been a privileged site for

the articulation of theories of cultural mestizaje: its early foreshadowing in Sab;

Martí’s awkward juxtaposition, in “Nuestra América,” of the creole, indio, and

negro in the figure of autochthony; Fernando Ortiz’s ajiaco; José Lezama Lima’s

barroco as a particularly American mode of expression; Miguel Barnet’s

“políticamente, yo soy un negro también.”10 It’s important to note the obvious

fact that, whereas in most of Latin America mestizaje refers mainly to the mixing

of indigenous and European elements, in Cuba it describes the union of African

and European peoples and cultures. One might hypothesize that, the more

starkly apparent racialized social hierarchies become, the more forcefully the

notion of mestizaje or cultural hybridity must be asserted. If even white Cubans

are “black,” the privations of the post-Soviet period can be imagined as a shared

plight, even when Afro-Cubans are affected disproportionately. In this light, the

return to cultural nationalism, the “reinscription” of the baroque Orígenes

aesthetic,11 and the emergence and incorporation by the state of Cuban rap music

in the 1990s (Fernandes) take on an ideological character. Padura’s texts are a

part of this ideological trend, but they also resist it.

! I have shown how Padura’s work, La novela de mi vida in particular,

participates in the post-Soviet shift away from a national identity based on a

political project and towards one based on a cultural nationalism in which, just as

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in the early independence movement, the cuestión del negro acquires a central

importance. In this regard, the novel’s portrayal of the first decades of the 19th

century as the key moment for the emergence of Cuban nationhood is not

coincidental. Padura, in his short biography of Heredia (a work that emerged

from his research for the novel), describes how the young poet’s first real

experience of Cuba (he was born in Santiago but moved with his family to Santo

Domingo at the age of three) coincided with “la transformación definitiva de lo

que Manuel Moreno Fraginals llama una «colonia de servicios» en una «colonia

de producción», gracias a la «revolución plantadora cubana»” (Padura José María

Heredia 11). What this describes is the initial appearance, on the island, of a

domestic economy of production, powered by slave labor. Cuba’s emergence as

an economically autonomous society, a prerequisite for both political

independence and national identity, is owed to the labor of black slaves. A

cultural history still bound to the “patrician thesis” but that wishes to do justice

to the contributions of blacks must choose a founding figure who is

unimpeachable on the account of slavery. As indicated previously, Del Monte,

having made his fortune through marriage into the wealthy Aldama family, is

tainted by his wealth’s origin in exploitation. Heredia, on the other hand, is a

better candidate, because it is more difficult to show any direct benefit he might

have gained from slavery.

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! A binary system emerges, in La novela de mi vida, based on the opposition

between Del Monte and Heredia. The novel stages a competition, sometimes

open, sometimes sublimated, between the two men. Its earliest manifestation is

in the area of poetry, where Heredia is clearly superior. They later compete over

women (Isabel and Betinha) and, here, the winner is less clear: Heredia is clearly

Betinha’s favorite, but Del Monte takes advantage of the poet’s absence to move

in on Isabel. Out of this informal contest emerges the basic difference between

the two men: in letters and in love, Heredia is a pure romantic idealist, allowing

sentiment and passion to govern him, whereas Del Monte is a pragmatist, using

both literature and women as a ladder to fame and fortune. Heredia’s idealistic

sincerity, his complete lack of guile, and his romantic sensibilities innoculate him

against any possible intention to exploit. His relationship with Betinha, although

bearing clear markers of exploitation—a white, bourgeois client’s sexual

relationship with a mulata prostitute—is cast as a relationship between friends.

Both enjoy the sex, Heredia is the woman’s confidant as she reveals to him the

wooden sculpture of Yemayá that she worships (here the poet acts as bedside

ethnographer), and she acts as the poet’s muse. That the generative force of

Heredia’s poetry and, indeed, that of “Cuba” itself has its inspirational source in

the figure of the mulata is extremely significant. Cuba, “el país «fraguado» en los

versos de Heredia” (Padura José María Heredia 45), stages its own primal scene in

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the union between creole and black in a manner reminiscent of Gilberto Freyre’s

Casa Grande e Senzala. Neil Larsen’s provocative essay on Freyre describes the

process whereby the figure of the “hybrid” qua avatar of “Brazil” constitutes

itself as the other of global capital according to a logic of “biologization”

immanent to capitalist social relations.

The ideological biologization of the social in Brazil, that is, must

serve not only to naturalize the social abstractions of capitalist

modernity per se, as it has and continues to do in the metropolitan

centers of capital, but must in addition explain and rationalize the

prior, center/periphery disarticulation of such modernity as the principle

form in which global capitalist ‘development’—up to and including

its ultimately terminal crises of social reproduction—is itself

socially experienced from the periphery. (18)

The implication I wish to draw from this is that national consciousness, in places

like Brazil and Cuba, emerges within global capitalism but in opposition to the

metropolitan subjectivities of the advanced capitalist countries, identified with

capitalism “proper.” As Larsen shows, the national “hybrid” subjectivity of Brazil

masks an attribution of economic “backwardness” to the country’s racial

composition. In Cuba, the perception of backwardness, during the revolutionary

era, appears under the label “underdevelopment” and is understood as a

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consequence of the colonialism or imperialism of Spain and the United States. It

makes little sense to dispute this interpretation of history, but it is perhaps no

coincidence that many of the most powerful critiques of (neo)colonialism employ

mestizo or hybrid figures as talismans to assert the difference between Cuba/

Latin America and the modern capitalist powers (one thinks principally of

Martí’s “Nuestra América” and Retamar’s Calibán). As Cuba moves back towards

cultural nationalism, it runs the risk of naturalizing these economic differences as

racial differences behind the mask of “culture.”

! Even as Padura’s work participates in this “cultural turn,” the pervasive

idealism of his protagonists resists it. Just as Heredia acts as a foil for the cynical

machinations of Del Monte, the tattered, but still intact idealism of Conde resists

both the manipulations of the state and the pragmatic materialism of bureaucrats

like Rafael Morín in Pasado perfecto (1991) and emerging entrepreneurs like

Conde’s partner Yoyi in La neblina del ayer. Conde’s idealism allows him to

experience the social changes of the post-Soviet period as an existential crisis, as

the end of an era, as the onset of an apocalyptic disaster. He is uneasy with the

differences between his generation and that of his partner, Yoyi, whose

entrepreneurial spirit epitomizes the catchwords of the “Special Period,” resolver

and inventar, and presage the impinging capitalist order. The generation gap

dramatizes the existence of two distinct worldviews, but the partial acquiescence

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of the commerce-hardened Yoyi to Conde’s prohibitions on the sale of certain

rare books—the ones that form an irreplaceable part of Cuba’s cultural

patrimony—reveals that Padura shares something of his detective’s idealism and

desire to salvage something from the ruins of socialist Cuba. It’s remarkable that

the generation that was to be the vanguard of socialism, that was to embody the

New Man, has acted instead as the revolution’s rearguard, fighting to preserve

some remnant of a political project that once placed Cuba at the forefront of

world affairs.

! Mario Conde, in fact, embodies a curious juxtaposition of idealism with

the cynicism of the hard-boiled antihero. He is the New Man collapsed back into

a Cuban everyman. His personal tragedies, life-long self-censorship and

revolutionary disillusionment, are assimilated into “the Cuban experience,” just

as the sufferings of José María Heredia become universalized in La novela de mi

vida. A continuity of victimhood is established. Padura seems somewhat

uncomfortable with this, and challenges it in his protagonists by introducing

pragmatic figures like Tomás in La novela de mi vida and Yoyi in La neblina del ayer

for the occasional rant against idealism and melancholy. Nonetheless, a kind of

fatality emerges from Padura’s fiction. In La novela de mi vida and in many of

Padura’s detective novels, there are no clear guilty parties. Occasionally, figures

like Rafael Morín (Pasado perfecto) or or Miguel Forcade (Paisaje de otoño) emerge

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as villains, but despite exhibiting base (bourgeois) motivations like greed or

ambition, they remain human and are often themselves victims of circumstances.

Domingo del Monte is the notable exception in this regard, because his “crime”

strikes at the heart of Cuba’s emergent cultural identity formation. Generally,

though (and this is the case in La novela de mi vida, except in Del Monte’s

historical layer, where the patrician falsifies or invents history), the Cuban

experience is presented as a universal tragedy and the movement of history itself

appears as an oppressive fatum. This ambience, so redolent of film noir and the

American hard-boiled genre that Padura takes as his model, is identifiable with

“social domination” as theorized by Moishe Postone. The dynamic of capitalism

places constraints on individuals that are abstract, but nevertheless real. That is,

the compulsion to work for pay, to acquire goods in exchange for money, to

manage one’s time, etc. is not logically attributable to a single individual or even

a class of individuals (orthodox Marxists or, in Postone’s nomenclature,

“traditional” Marxists will dispute this, attributing domination to the bourgeoisie

by exempting labor from the total social dynamic). Nevertheless, the compulsion

is real, and can be felt by every living person. This abstract, social domination

generates a desire to identify the “guilty parties.” Capitalism (especially in its

apparently “liberal” varieties) thus has an immanent tendency to create

conspiracy theories and witchhunts against the presumed exploiters,

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misidentified as Jews, Muslims, Roma or other groups. In post-Soviet Cuba, the

state’s control of society is undermined by new political and economic

circumstances. It stands to reason that, as the universal mode of (neoliberal)

capitalism begins to assert itself once again in Cuba, abstract domination is once

again felt to be the primary mode of social compulsion. To Padura’s great credit,

he refuses (with the exception of Del Monte) to cast around for specific actors on

which to pin the abstract crime of social domination. Rather, he faithfully

recreates the oppressive and uncertain atmosphere of global post-Fordist

capitalism in which post-Soviet Cuba occupies an exceedingly precarious

position. One of the reasons that the (Miami-)Cuban right appears to detest

Padura is that his novels paint a very critical portrait of Cuba without attributing

all its problems to or materializing abstract domination in a single figure: Fidel.

! In La neblina del ayer, after Conde has concluded both murder

investigations and his inventory of the books in the Ferrers’ library, we are told

that the library’s contents will make their way to the Biblioteca Nacional. Conde

and Yoyi, of course, have already sold some of the books to foreign buyers, but

the important ones remain on the island, thus preserving its all-important

cultural heritage. Conde also keeps several books to give to his friends. Among

them is his gift to his long-time love interest, Tamara. It is none other than the

1832 Toluca edition of the collected poems of José María Heredia. The fact that he

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withholds this book, in particular, is significant, given Heredia’s place in

Padura’s version of the national pantheon.

! The subtraction of this book from the state’s archives acts as a symbolic

restitution. If Del Monte, in Padura’s version of events, papered over the

“cuestión del negro” by misplacing the more radical portions of Manzano’s (auto)

biography, Félix Tanco’s letters, and perhaps a novel that never saw the light of

day, Conde atones for this “sin” by committing a theft of his own, thus

safeguarding Heredia qua authentic essence—incorporating Afro-Cuban culture

as a kind of quintessence—from the manipulations of the state. This move is

consistent with the whole of Padura’s fiction, whose realism implacably

chronicles the post-Soviet period’s emerging racial and class divisions, even as

the state itself continues its triumphalist discourse, with cultural categories,

instead of political and economic ones, now acting as the keystone of national

unity.

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1 It’s worth noting that neoliberalism is not the only modality of post-Fordism.

Other variants exist under more obvious state control, like the neostructuralism

of Latin America’s ALBA bloc.

2 See “Leonardo Padura’s Top 10 Cuban Novels.”

3 James Buckwalter-Arias, Cuba and the New Origenismo, p. 43.

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4 See Sonia Behar, La caída del hombre nuevo: narrativa cubana del período especial,

New York: Peter Lang (2009) and Ana Serra, The “New Man” in Cuba: Culture and

Identity in the Revolution, Gainesville: UP of Florida (2007).

5 Sonia Behar claims that Lola Junco is not a real person. “Dolores Junco no

aparece en las biografías que se han escrito sobre José María Heredia. Leonardo

Padura crea este personaje para presentar un idilio amoroso que comienza antes

del matrimonio de Heredia con Jacoba Ibáñez, y que perdura a pesar de la

distancia impuesta por el destierro” (Caída 109n). Unfortunately, this claim is not

substantiated, either by Heredia’s works—in which there are poems (including

one titled “A Lola en sus días”) in which Dolores Junco appears as “Lola” or “la

ninfa del Yumurí”—or in biographies of the poet such as Será mi asilo el mar

(2001), by Benjamín Araujo, which reproduces a letter from Heredia to Domingo

del Monte that narrates a splendid evening spent with “la bella Lola” and her

sisters (Araujo 52-53).

6 Raúl Marrero-Fente (”400 aniversario” 277) points out that Francisco de

Terrazas’ epic poem, Nuevo mundo y conquista, is known only because of its

episodic insertion in Baltasar Dorantes de Carranza’s crónica, Sumaria relación de

las cosas de la Nueva España con noticia individual de los descendientes legítimos de los

conquistadores y primeros pobladores españoles. Unlike Espejo de paciencia, no original

manuscript of Terrazas’ poem has ever been discovered.

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7 Echeverría’s given name, as stated earlier, was José Antonio. The Cuban

historian has no known relation to the Argentine author and political dissident

Esteban Echeverría (1805–1851).

8 See Rafael Rojas’ discussion of Lezama and Orígenes in Motivos de Anteo, pp.

286-87.

9 See Anderson’s Imagined Communities.

10 See the interview with Barnet published in Emilio Bejel, Escribir en Cuba:

entrevistas con escritores cubanos, p. 28.

11 Consult James Buckwalter-Arias on Orígenes and aesthetic reinscription.

Chapter Two

Abilio Estévez: Writing Between

the Bad Old Things and the Bad New Ones

2.0 - Introduction

! The previous chapter outlined the links between the formal construction

of Leonardo Padura’s historical novel, La novela de mi vida, and the re-emerging,

race-based inequalities of the post-Soviet period. Departing from a similar

consideration of form, this chapter describes the relationship between two of

Abilio Estévez’s works, Inventario secreto de La Habana (2004) and Los palacios

distantes (2002), and the socioeconomic realities of post-Soviet Havana. In this

chapter, inequality emerges once again, but it manifests itself somewhat

differently, not in the persistence of the color hierarchy described in the previous

chapter, but in the privilege accorded to one economic sector in particular—the

tourist industry.

! Estévez confronts a city in ruins, in which a flâneur-like narrator acts as

tour guide or museum curator, sidestepping official exhibits in order to reveal

Havana’s immanent Utopian dimension. The first part of this chapter deals with

Inventario secreto as the aesthetic realization of the desire to rescue this dimension

through a memorializing praxis. In this novel, fiction and memoir mix with the

materiality of the city, whose spaces are revealed to be undergoing a process of

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government-promoted “museumification.” Estévez’s narrative runs against the

grain of this process, attempting to overcome the division of life into domestic

and economic spheres. The second part of the present chapter deals with Los

palacios distantes, which develops a narrative position that resists both official

nostalgia for the failed revolution and the resurgence of capitalist market logic.

Both novels position themselves in the ever narrowing gap between the State’s

faded Utopia and market society, once posited as external to socialism, but now

evidently part of the government’s project of self-perpetuation.

! Abilio Estévez (Havana, 1954– ), is a playwright, poet, essayist and

novelist. Of the same generation as Leonardo Padura, Estévez nevertheless lives

in Barcelona, having left the island, like many others, during the difficult 1990s.

As a young man, he was a good friend of the famous writer Virgilio Piñera.

According to José Quiroga (Cuban Palimpsests 142), this friendship and Estévez’s

homosexuality were seen as problematic by the island’s literary establishment.

Estévez found himself accused of plagiarizing his first novel, Tuyo es el reino

(1997), which had been published in Spain. Although a UNEAC investigation

cleared his name, Estévez nonetheless left Cuba shortly thereafter. Quiroga sees

these circumstances as evidence that fame and success do not insulate writers

from political persecution on the island.

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2.1 - Inventario secreto de La Habana: Taking stock of a divided world

! The world created by Estévez in Inventario secreto de La Habana contains a

faultline that divides it into two hemispheres. The work balances on this line like

a high-wire artist. Havana’s Malecón incarnates this line. As the subject of the

book’s second part, “Largo muro junto al mar,” the Malecón marks a division

between worlds. For the narrator (ostensibly Estévez himself), the sea is the

realm of death and entropy, in contrast to the land where precarious life takes

root. In a fleeting thought that evokes Saramago’s La balsa de piedra, in which the

Iberian peninsula breaks away from Europe and drifts out to sea, the narrator

imagines that the ocean is, in fact, more stable than the land.

Años en que aún ignorábamos (al menos conscientemente) qué

significaba ser un «nativo de las islas», aunque ya tuviéramos la

lejana intuición de la precariedad de esa condición, su falta de

arraigo, su escasa firmeza. Sabíamos, sin saberlo, que vivir en una

isla tenía algo de barco a la deriva. No fue hasta muchos años

después que leímos, en un libro bellísimo de Michelet, aquello de

que «si la vida del mar tiene algún sueño, algún deseo confuso, es

el de la fijeza». (48-49)

In Michelet, the sea yearns for stasis. But in Estévez, the polarity is reversed: the

land is unstable and the sea embodies the principle of entropy and annihilation.

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In a passage that recalls Carpentier’s magical realist description of the malignant

“Gusano” in Los pasos perdidos (43), Estévez describes the devastating effects of

the sea air on the landscape:

El salitre no tiene límites. Mucho menos compasión. Destruye las

palmas, los cocoteros, cualquier árbol, el más robusto, con más

eficacia que las ráfagas y los rayos de las tormentas. El salitre hace

que la flor más viva se deshoje enseguida, como algo despreciable,

sin la gracia de las flores desmayadas de los versos de Darío. Entra

en la piedra de los edificios, la carcome. Carcome con más saña que

los animales que han sido creados con esa única misión. Se mezcla

con las brisas. Abre, por tanto, las puertas, destroza las ventanas,

los goznes de las ventanas, que un día dejan de cerrarse y caen al

pavimento carcomido. El salitre también se cuela en las aceras y en

los pisos (aunque sean de mármol), los fuerza a perder el aspecto

urbano y elaborado, y los convierte en pura piedra, arrecife. El

salitre vuelve porosos los cristales y acaba con las fotografías, mejor

aún si son de algún querido antepasado. Y despedaza los techos.

Agrieta las paredes. Rompe televisores y fogones. Y si puede con

las piedras, ¿cómo no va a conseguir que se doblegue el hombre

que ha tallado las piedras? (65, 67)

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The sea destroys life with its mere proximity, undoing the most durable of

human constructions, and even erasing history (“acaba con las fotografías, mejor

aún si son de algún querido antepasado”). Inventario invokes the sea repeatedly

as a symbol of death: “la muerte llegó siempre a La Habana por el mar” (39). As a

child, the narrator was told the story of a young boy who drowned after

becoming confused by sound “mirages” (29) while swimming at night. He swam

out to sea, thinking the entire time that he was headed toward shore. Although

the narrator later discovers that the story had been plagiarized from Lino Novás

Calvo, this fact doesn’t reduce his fear of the ocean.

! Inventario is narrated from exile. The sea acts a symbolic barrier to return

and the narrator’s memories of the ocean are tinged, retrospectively, by the

voyage of separation. “En La Habana siempre me dio miedo el mar. Y como en

La Habana casi todos los caminos conducen al mar, casi todos los caminos me

conducían al miedo” (18). It’s no coincidence that the narrator’s memories of

home, family, and belonging revolve around Bauta, a small municipality at a safe

remove from the restless and dangerous shores. The sea represents separation,

exile, and the endless waiting expressed by Havana’s most recognizable symbol,

la Giraldilla.1 The guide at Key West’s balsero museum explains to the narrator

that the countless tiny photos that cover the walls and ceiling are of the rafters

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who never arrived (73). In Inventario, the ocean and its proxy, the museum, are

tombs.

! Inventario stands astride this fracture between land and sea, life and death,

patria and exile. The narrator inquires whether it’s better for passerby to face the

city, with its “false elegance,” or to face the endless expanse of waves.

Un largo muro junto al mar. Un lugar para sentarse y definir

posiciones. Ya lo he dicho: creía descubrir dos modos de sentarse en

él: de frente al mar o de frente a la ciudad. A partir de aquí, a lo

mejor es posible llegar a algunas conclusiones de acuerdo con la

actitud de quien allí se ha detenido. Si un paseante habanero decide

detener su camino en el Malecón y dar la espalda al mar para mirar

ese lado frívolo de la ciudad, con los edificios de falsa elegancia de

la década de los cincuenta, y los monumentos entre solemnes y

graciosos (el parque Maceo, el monumento al Maine...), ¿no estará

mostrando su recelo al mar?, ¿o será tal vez que prefiere ocultar sus

afanes, sus deseos ocultos? Y aquel otro que antepone el mar a la

ciudad, ¿qué evoca, qué anhela, a qué se encomienda?, ¿qué nuevos

caminos espera? Una preciosa pregunta sería la siguiente: ¿cuál de

los dos posee más coraje?, ¿el que da la cara a la ciudad o el que

parece despreciarla? (67)

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This passage contains, in embryo, the entire dilemma of exile. When one strips

away all the ideological posturing, the question of whether to stay or to go is a

matter of defining one’s position towards that peculiar object called the nation.

Everyone must eventually decide which side of the divided Cuban identity to

belong to, whether to remain on the island or join the diaspora. Inventario begins

with a seaside walk, which induces the narrator to remember Havana. “Hace

apenas una hora he andado por el paseo marítimo de Palma de Mallorca” (17).

The book ends with the narrator’s failed attempt to speak to a fellow Cuban, a

trumpet player in Stuttgart. Both episodes point to the inevitable desire to return

(at least in memories) and to belong to the nation, even if belonging must be

reconstructed as a camaraderie among exiles. Estévez’s work expresses the

impossibility of severing ties; those who remain may be hiding “sus afanes, sus

deseos ocultos” and those who leave only seem to reject their homeland. He

expresses a similar sentiment in his prose poem, “Doble aventura”:

¿Recuerdas? A lo lejos, nosotros; muy cerca, nosotros también. Los

que se marchaban y los que no se marchaban, nosotros mismos en

una tarde dividida e imposible, nosotros mismos alegres y tristes,

conocedores de esa doble aventura de permanecer y de ausentarse.

(Morán La isla 136)

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The poem, like Inventario, seems to suggest that being Cuban is like a tightrope

act, a walk along the “largo muro junto al mar.” Indeed, the book itself mimics

this walk, “este pasear sin propósito” that begins the narrative. Its plotless

meandering is a kind of literary flânerie; it stops to examine a memory here,

another there, flitting from place to place with no clear purpose. “He dicho

«paseaba», o sea, iba sin objeto, andaba paso a paso, sin prisa, indiferente al

viento, a la llovizna, como si el tiempo no existiera y fuera realmente el dueño de

mis actos” (17). The narrative path walks the line between nation and exile, but

also between past and present and, most importantly, between dimensions of the

lifeworld that can’t be reduced to national identity or place of residence.

Estévez’s Inventario, qua literary praxis, navigates the borderline between

separate spheres of activity, somehow participating in both at once, without

belonging to either. The remainder of this chapter explores these spheres and

their points of contact.

2.1.1 - Havana’s Commercialization

! In the 1990s, as Cuba began to look for ways to compensate for the

economic collapse caused by the fall of the socialist bloc, its government renewed

efforts to promote tourism. In pre-revolutionary times, Cuba was an important

tourist destination, especially for North Americans. Deteriorating relations, Cold

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War politics, and an economic embargo combined to effectively end tourism from

the United States. The legacy of the Cold War persists in these countries’ political

stance toward each other, but the last two decades have seen a massive

transformation in Cuba’s economy, much of which has to do with the resurgence

of the tourism industry. While American tourists are still relatively few—the

trade embargo imposes rather restrictive conditions on US citizens’ travel to the

island—Europeans and Canadians now visit the island in droves, looking for the

perennial delights of the Caribbean: sun, sand, and sex. Other terms must now be

added to this trinity of temptations; tourists now flock to Cuba for a variety of

reasons: to visit a city—Havana—that is uniquely anachronistic, to experience

“socialism” before it disappears, and to get access to cheap, high quality medical

care. Travel agencies now package stays on beachfront resorts with medical

treatment at state-of-the-art clinics accessible only to foreigners. Much of the

development of the island’s tourist industry—which was in need of upgrading

since its boom in the 1950s—has been financed by foreign capital in partnership

with the Cuban government. These partnerships are highly regulated and are

restricted to certain spheres of the island’s economy, namely, tourism, health care,

and the culture industry (parts of which are linked to tourism, and other parts to

foreign consumers of music, film, and literature). Even though trends point in the

direction of economic liberalization, the incursion of foreign capital has been

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mediated and slowed by the Cuban government. There are certain partial

exceptions to this, most significantly in the form of unauthorized remittances and

other under-the-table transactions. This unofficial cash flow has allowed some

small-scale entrepreneurship to flourish. Perhaps recognizing the inevitable, and

in an attempt to regulate and profit from it, the government has now begun to

sell licenses to permit certain small businesses to operate legally. Most recently, it

has approved the purchase and sale of houses and automobiles. Taken together,

the changes in Cuba point clearly to a transition towards a market-regulated

economy, similar (though not identical) to the Chinese experience. One important

difference is that China’s insertion into global neoliberal capitalism was

facilitated by its cheap, large-scale manufacture of export goods. Cuba has little

to export except people, and has done so in various ways. One way is the

traditional route over the Florida Straits. The 1994 balseros crisis was the last

example of flight en masse, but migration continues to Miami, Mexico, Madrid,

and elsewhere. Cuba also leverages the revolution’s educational advances to

export its own citizens and profit in the bargain. Many doctors, engineers, and

skilled technicians are sent abroad for years at a time. In exchange, they receive

higher salaries and other incentives. Cuba essentially leases out these

professionals to foreign governments, like Chavez’s Venezuela, which benefit

tremendously from the Cubans’ expertise and the relative bargain of paying

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below-market rates for services which they repay with goods, subsidies, or

political favors to the Castro government.

! In sum, Cuba has repositioned itself in the global economy as a provider

of services, whether these services are sold at home or abroad. The domestic

result of post-Soviet economic restructuring has been the creation of a two-tiered

system. This economic system first emerged when the dollar was adopted as an

emergency measure in 1993. Those with access to American currency—whether

via remittances from relatives in Miami or through contact with foreigners—had

an enormous advantage in the local economy.2 This is the period that saw the rise

of jineterismo as a sideline or even as a full-time profession: many stories have

been told about professors and computer engineers who turned to hustling or

prostitution as a survival mechanism in the bitter 1990s. Even though the dollar

was banned again in 2004, local transactions sometimes still occur in dollars or

euros, or in convertible currency (CUC) rather than moneda nacional, the Cuban

peso. Now though, many of the methods that individual Cubans employed to

get foreigners to part with their money have been formalized by the government.

Access to work in the lucrative tourism industry is now strictly controlled by the

state and its foreign partners. A racial hierarchy has emerged within the industry

itself, as professional or clerical “front-of-house” staff tend to be white or light-

skinned, while “back-of-house” employees (cooks, cleaners, groundskeepers) are

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usually black. Afro-Cubans also make up the bulk of entertainment workers,

and, if female, are more likely to be perceived as jineteras and providers of sexual

services than their lighter-skinned counterparts (Cabezas 993).

! The tourist economy has also affected the island’s cultural patrimony.

While the kind of looting written about by José Quiroga (Cuban Palimpsests) and

fictionalized by Leonardo Padura (Paisaje de otoño, La neblina del ayer) may have

tapered off since the depths of the Special Period, the island itself is now

becoming a product. Certain kinds of fiction in the post-Soviet period either

exploited (Pedro Juan Gutiérrez) or satirized (Antonio José Ponte) the “aesthetics

of ruins” that emerged from post-Soviet Havana, but the tide of deterioration has

begun to be stemmed by attempts at architectural preservation. In recent years,

as part of the government’s attempts to preserve itself—or, more optimistically,

to safeguard the gains acheived by socialism—an ambitious restoration project,

conceived in the 1980s under the direction of Havana historian Eusebio Leal, has

begun to bear fruit.

2.1.2 - Museumification

! Leal is often celebrated as the genius behind the revitalization of Old

Havana. His restorations are widely considered to be impeccable—heavily

restored areas like the Plaza de la Catedral and Plaza Vieja are visually stunning,

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if oddly garish in contrast to the unpainted and crumbling stone façades one

glimpses down side streets. Leal is not without his critics, though they may be

reluctant to speak ill of this respected historian and public figure. The New Yorker

has no such compunctions, of course, and Paul Golderberger’s profile of Leal in a

1998 article paints him, perhaps unfairly, as a self-promoting authoritarian, but

also reveals a certain tension among notions of historical authenticity, cultural

values, and economic considerations.

A scholar and politician—he is a member of the National Assembly,

and functions within the highest reaches of the Castro government

—and a relentless, if subtle, self-promoter, Leal has awakened the

government’s interest in the city. Almost single-handedly, he has

revived Old Havana, the once decaying colonial core near the

waterfront, making it safe for tourists. Leal made restoration into a

vehicle for development, just as it might be in an American city. The

Old Havana he has made has a pristine, slightly too-perfect air

about it: Old Havanaland. But the government knows that theme

parks are profitable. So the new tourist route in Old Havana

includes craft markets on the plaza in front of the cathedral; a

church restored as a concert hall; and a Benetton boutique in the

Plaza San Francisco. The tourist route doesn’t include the main art

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museum . . . or the Granma, the boat in which Fidel Castro returned

to Cuban in 1956, which has been displayed for years behind the

old Presidential Palace in a glass enclosure that looks like an auto

showroom. The boat is still there; it is just that it has been reduced

to a kitschy curiosity, barely relevant to the new form of tourism, in

which Old Havana feels every day more like Old San Juan. (60)

It’s true that some of Old Havana’s streets feel like a theme park, complete with

period-costumed ladies and singing peanut vendors, but Golderberger’s article

creates a caricature that suggests he didn’t venture very often or very far off the

“tourist route,” which consists, even in 2011, of the major plazas and just a few

streets—Empedrado, Obispo, Mercaderes, Oficios. The rest of Old Havana (and

even the upper floors and back rooms along the tourist route) is largely

residential, even if not as densely populated as other sections of the city; many of

the residential areas of Old Havana remain unrestored.

! One of the unspoken realities of Old Havana’s restoration is that many

residents have been displaced—relocated to apartments in other parts of the city

—to reduce the colonial quarter’s population density and to convert its rich

history into the city’s showpiece. This is because, despite Leal’s continued

insistence that tourism’s only goal shouldn’t be economic, but should also

promote an accurate description of the island’s reality (Leyva), economic rather

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than humanitarian considerations have indeed carried the day when Cuba’s

government has made decisions about where to invest its limited capital.

Consequently, the restorations have concentrated mainly on what is known as

the casco histórico, with its colonial buildings, which in fact makes Cuba’s

“reality” (i.e. the face it projects to the world) very narrow indeed. Other sections

of the city, notably Centro Habana, El Vedado, and El Cerro, contain treasures of

Modernist architecture, but these are uninteresting to tourists looking for

“tropical” or “Spanish” flavor.

! Adjacent to Old Havana is Centro Habana, one of the city’s “popular”

neighborhoods (predominantly black and working class), which has been rather

notoriously neglected. Instead, a section of the city where relatively few live is

rebuilt and burnished in order to project an image of Cubanness to the world.

That this image has a great deal to do with the colonial past so vehemently

rejected by the Cuban independence struggle indicates the government’s

priorities are pragmatic, not idealistic. Otherwise, the popular neighborhoods,

the living heart of Cuban culture, would have been restored first. The heavy

involvement of Spanish capital in funding the restoration only deepens the

situation’s irony.

! Cuban music and literature have experienced a revival, or “boom,” in the

post-Soviet period. This is not a coincidence. Cuban publishers, faced with a

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serious paper shortage, were forced to reduce the number of works published.

Authors were encouraged to seek contracts with foreign publishers. Cuban

cultural institutions like ICAIC and UNEAC became more amenable to joint

productions with foreign artists and studios. It’s safe to say that Cuba’s culture

industry began to orient itself more and more towards foreign tastes. This is

visible not only in the commercialization of son (Buena Vista Social Club), but

also in certain authors who have exploited North American and European

stereotypes of Afro-Latino or “tropical” sexuality (Pedro Juan Gutiérrez) and of

Latin American literature as fundamentally magical realist (Daína Chaviano).

However, my task here is not to trace the effects of this reorientation on Cuban

cultural production (this would require careful comparative work and take me

beyond the scope of this dissertation), but simply to raise it as a contextual lens

for viewing the period’s literature. My own suspicion is that, in all but a few

cases, writers’ work is still determined more by an honest attempt at

representation and/or formal experimentation than by the imagined

considerations of a foreign reading public with whom most resident authors

have had very little contact. The way in which their works are marketed is

another story entirely, but I digress. It’s more accurate to say that literature

responds, generally, to the atmosphere of commercialization, but doesn’t

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necessarily take part in it wholeheartedly. Estévez’s work is perhaps the clearest

example of this.

! As a kind of shorthand, I group these various sorts of cultural

commercialization under the label “museumification,” a term I will explain at

some length. In what follows, I will also show how Inventario resists the

museification of Cuba/Havana by creating an alternative, non-objective

collection comprised of “anecdotal objects” (which aren’t objects at all but

subjective constructions).

! “Museumification” is a phenomenon that can be traced back at least as far

as a 1979 law, “De Museos Municipales,” that allowed the state to administer

what had previously been private collections. This law was passed in accordance

with Cuba’s 1976 Constitution, whose Article 38, Section “i” states: “el Estado

vela por la conservación del patrimonio cultural y la riqueza artística e histórica

de la nación. Protege los monumentos nacionales y los lugares notables por su

belleza natural o por su reconocido valor artístico o histórico.” Here the state

takes responsibility for the island’s cultural heritage as part of its broader

mission to educate and cultivate its citizens (Article 38 deals with “Educación y

Cultura”). According to La Jiribilla (Polanco), the 1979 museum law led to the

creation of 160 new musuems in Cuba. This number is significant, given Cuba’s

small size, but the state began to open museums at an even greater pace after the

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creation of the Consejo Nacional de Patrimonio Cultural (CNPC) in 1995. Rachel

Weiss describes this explosion in To and From Utopia in the New Cuban Art.

The reopening of the National Museum of Fine Arts [in 2001]

coincided with a blizzard of new museums in Havana. Museums

opened or reopened across the city in the same 1990s when so

many other things fell apart. The Museum of Silver Work (1996).

The Farmacia Museo Taquechel (1996). The Firemen’s Museum

(1995). The empty chairs on which Fidel and Pope John Paul II had

perched during the latter’s historic 1998 visit, installed, on a red

carpet in a convent-turned-museum. Seventy new museums

between 1996 and 2004 alone. The museum was a primary structure

erected by a new partnership between historians, ideologicians,

and tourism promoters. The city of Havana itself, or part of it

anyhow, became a museum as colonial plazas sprang to new life

within a cordoned zone of light, not far from where the cruise ships

were now (again) coming in to port. Havana, Cuba itself,

immobilized, reified, museumified, equally beguiling for its

redevelopment as for its dilapidation. . . . Cuba had never been

translated, repeated, so often. Translation, repetition: phenomena

constellated around the need to hold something fast, to recuperate

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something that has been lost. The repetition machine of the

museum remade Cuba as coherent, comprehensible, and valorous:

museums are, in their way, little utopias, ideal versions unassailable

in their logic and completeness, and now the Museum Cuba had

replaced the Utopia Cuba. (172-73)

Weiss makes several important observations here. In the first instance, the

museum, as “a partnership between historians, ideologicians, and tourism

promoters,” has at least three corresponding functions. First, as an archive of

cultural artifacts and memory trove, it preserves the island’s past. Second, it

configures history according to the very particular ideological coordinates of the

present and performs an educative function in line with the state’s official

version of the people, places, and events of the past. Finally, the museum

generates income. Most of the museums in Old Havana charge one entry fee to

citizens in moneda nacional and another, vastly higher fee to foreigners in

convertible pesos.

! Weiss’ second important observation, related to the first, is that “the

Museum Cuba had replaced the Utopia Cuba.” Another way of saying this is that

the commemoration of the revolution has replaced the revolution itself. This is

particularly evident in two of Havana’s most important museums: the Museum

of the Revolution, housed symbolically in what was the Batista regime’s

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Presidential Palace (bullet holes left during a failed attempt to assassinate the

dictator are still visible on the building’s main stairway and in its central patio),

and the José Martí Memorial that overlooks the Plaza de la Revolución.

! The Museum of the Revolution, just a stone’s throw from Angel’s Hill

(made famous by Cirilo Villaverde’s novel Cecilia) and the church where José

Martí was baptized, memorializes the armed struggle upon which the current

incarnation of the Cuban state is founded. In the absence of the socialist triumph

that the state once proclaimed, the Museum of the Revolution feels like the

architectural manifestation of an oxymoron. In a kind of viaje a la semilla, the

displays move back in time to Playa Girón, the fight in the Sierra, the Granma

voyage, Moncada. The old uniforms and weapons make it clear that the

revolution belongs to another era. The fact that the museum exists seems only to

confirm that the revolution no longer does, and that the living struggle of the

masses has become ossified and institutionalized.

! At the José Martí Memorial, a similar sensation takes hold. Scattered

tourists amble through the plaza, photographing themselves in front of Enrique

Avila’s iconic sculptures of Camilo and Che. It’s August and sunny, so they do

not linger. A few workers grind away with stone saws, working to repair the

marble at the base of the imposing monument, known locally as La Raspadura.

Inside the star-shaped monument is a museum filled with photos and

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paraphernalia. Most relate to Martí and his associates, but an entire section

(contained in one of the star’s outer vertices) is dedicated to the monument itself.

Confronted with the old designs, sketches, maquetas, and photos of the

monument’s construction, one realizes that the museum devotes considerable

space to memorializing itself.

! According to the information in the official guidebook, for sale at the

museum, the José Martí Memorial was inaugurated in 1996, during Havana’s

museum boom. It’s telling that this museum in particular—ostensibly dedicated

to Martí but in fact a grandiose gesture of self-legitimation by the Castro

government—insists on semantically doubling the monument: memorializing

the act of memorialization. This strange inversion corresponds to a historical

moment in which the revolution’s only way forward (i.e. the only way it can

justify its continued existence) is to look back and memorialize its own

achievements, including its successful completion of a monument that

Republican Cuba had begun but never finished. Ironically, the Martí Memorial’s

self-referentiality eliminates whatever possibility it had of fulfilling the promise

made on the cover of its guidebook. Here, a blue and white sky evokes the

stripes on the flag flapping in the breeze next to the massive statue of Martí at the

museum’s entrace. Against this background, the upward thrust of La Raspadura

directs the eye to the slogan: “Algo más que piedra.”3

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2.1.3 - Cleavages

! One of the essay fragments that Estévez incorporates in Inventario is from

Ivan de la Nuez’s La balsa perpetua. The passage is hyperbolic—De la Nuez calls

Havana “technofascist”—but it does point to the lost connection between the

spaces and semantics of the city’s built environment and its inhabitants.

Un perímetro hecho para que moren en él los monumentos, las

estatuas y los ecos de los discursos, mas no los sujetos que han

desaparecido bajo el peso inevitable de esa estructuras. (Inventario

316)

These “structures” are clearly meant to be read as ideological and political, and

not merely architectural. But it would be an error to think that Estévez’s critique

ends with the revolutionary government. As I’ll show, Inventario, like Palacios,

contains a critique of economic structures that aren’t entirely under the

government’s control.

! The fragment from De la Nuez is placed—intentionally, I think—within a

long paragraph that begins thus:

Y podría volver a hablar del cementerio, puesto que hubo un

hermoso tiempo en que el cementerio no fue sólo lugar de muertos.

Muchos jóvenes, y otros no tan jóvenes, iban allí a la casa de los

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placeres de la carne, o lo que es lo mismo, y para qué fingir, iban a

donde los muertos a buscar los placeres de la vida. (315)

This passage recalls Antonio José Ponte’s Contrabando de sombras (2002), in which

the cemetery also functions as a refuge and locus amoenus. Estévez’s deliberately

places the De la Nuez fragment, in which the city’s architecture (viz. political

structures) alienates and ossifies its citizens, inside a passage that affirms life at

its most basic and procreative level. Additionally, it makes this affirmation in the

unlikeliest of places—the immense ossuary known as the Cementerio de Colón.

! The “Columbus Cemetery” (as it translates into English) is an enormous

expanse of grave markers and mausoleums. Visible from the air as an enormous

white rectangle embedded at a 45º angle across the regular, perpendicular streets

of El Vedado, the Cementerio de Colón is a true necropolis, a city of the dead

crisscrossed by asphalt streets and dotted with its own plazas. There are many

important historical personages buried there. It receives many daily visitors, and

admission is charged to tourists at the gates. The Cementerio de Colón is a vast

open-air museum. As I’ve written, Inventario associates museums with death. For

that reason, it’s doubly jarring that Estévez treats cemetaries—and this cemetary

in particular—as places which affirm life.

En los cementerios me sentía yo más vivo y lejos de todo lo tenebroso que se

asocia con la muerte. (272)

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El miedo a la muerte desaparecerá en cuanto se cruce la calle

Zapata, se atraviese el solemne y hermoso portalón levantado por

un cubano de origen gallego, Calixto Arellano de Loira, y se entre

en el cementerio. El más ingenio se percatará, con asombro, de que

no hay tristeza en el Cementerio de Colón. ¿Por qué? Difícil

responder. ¿Será quizá la combinación de silencio, olor y

magnificencia? ¿O tal vez tendrá que ver con las parejas cuyo amor

se entregan desesperadamente entre las tumbas? (281)

This life-affirming act of lovemaking is related to the Dionysian counterpraxis in

Palacios, which I will describe in the next section. Just as the trickster figure (Don

Fuco) in that novel models a kind of practical resistence to the misery of post-

Soviet life in Havana, the couples among the tombs defy the death and funereal

structures (both physical and institutional) that surround them. (Again, the

parallels with Ponte’s Contrabando de sombras are striking: in Ponte’s novel the

lovers are harassed by the cemetery guides, the proxies of the State.)

! The dynamic of warehousing cultural anti-commodites in Los palacios

distantes (outlined in the first part of this chapter) is related to the project of “de-

museumification” in Inventario secreto. De-museumification can be thought of as

resistance to the state’s project of memorializing the revolution—thereby

converting a living social movement into a historical relic—and attendant project

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of commercializing Cuba for foreign consumption. In Inventario, the city is a

mnemonic and literary construction. As such, the novel is not a guidebook for

tourists looking for Havana’s hidden corners. Its aesthetization of the city

corresponds to a different impulse and to an artistic consciousness for whom the

physical and literary cities are divided—cordoned off from one another while

retaining an unbreakable connection.

! Estévez reflects on the odd contrast created by the austere manliness of

Hemingway’s image and the American’s obvious zest for life and sensual

pleasure.

De [Hemingway] me molestaban su ridículo machismo y esa

actitud ante la vida que no sé si llamar «heroica»; al propio tiempo,

me fascinaban su voluptuosidad, su hedonismo. Por un lado, el

rechazo al personaje-héroe que como actor se había creado; por

otro, la admiración hacia el sensualista. (232)

Estévez dedicates just 3 of his book’s 343 pages to establishing this contrast that,

although interesting, would be unremarkable if not inserted into a work which

establishes opposing spheres via certain antitheses, some of which are family/

nation, barrio/exile, proximity/distance, love/violence, cemetery/museum

(cemetery, as I’ve shown, represents the positive pole here), life/death, and so

forth.

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! The Hemingway figure, with its unresolved polarization between the

austere “man’s man” and the sensual hedonist, is a point of cleavage at which

these spheres touch, yet remain unreconciled. This separation of spheres reveals

(and critiques) the separation of life and labor qua abstraction, and that

Hemingway’s personal contradictions are turned back against a state now

engaged in the commodification and museumification of life. By this, I mean that

as the island restores its colonial architecture, cleans up its beaches, and

modernizes its hotels, most Cubans now (again) face the reality of labor—as 

hotel workers, builders, taxi drivers, tour guides, musicians, cooks and, yes, as

prostitutes and hustlers—in an economy in which luxury, that sensual side of life

so admired by Estévez, remains just out of reach.

! Estévez’s Hemingway crystallizes a recurring contrast between the man of

work and the man of leisure.

Pareja de enamorados al fin, hacían el amor. Siempre me ha

parecido que semejante galicismo, «hacer el amor», posee una

monstruosa resonancia utilitaria. Como si tuveria que ver con el

homo faber y no con el homo ludens y mucho menos con el homo

amans. (Inventario 55-56)

Here, Estévez opposes the utilitarian principle’s colonization of “el amor.” This

sentiment is similar to that expressed in Los palacios distantes, in which the

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protagonist, Victorio, rejects work discipline in favor of a more ludic existence.

Likewise, what so fascinates Estévez about Hemingway is precisely that contrast

between the disciplined writer who forced himself to work every morning,

standing up at his typewriter, no less, and the man who dedicated his afternoons

to poolside cocktails, conversation, and reading. Like Victorio, the narrator of

Inventario associates luxury with leisure:

Más que el lado material de las casas (en realidad, hablo de casas

humildísimas, con muebles y objetos de muy poca «calidad»), y sin

explicármelo bien, lo que tal vez se acercaba en mi criterio a la idea

del lujo era (y sigue siendo) el ocio. (94)

and with free time:

Lo recuerdo: todos se movían como si cada movimiento, cada

gesto, significara algo especial o poseyera un valor. Para cada acto,

hasta para el más simple, se disponía de todo (todo) el tiempo.

Pequeño reparto de inmortales. De modo que allí, en la escasa zona

de Marianao que comprendía el barrio, junto al Obelisco, tras la

Escuela de Kindergarten y el Instituto de Segunda Enseñanza, se

vivía para «siempre». (95)

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Estévez locates this Utopian leisure in the endless and idle hours of childhood

and in the heart of the home. The idea of work, even domestic labor, is strangely

absent:

No puedo decir en qué tiempo limpiaban las casas o se encerraban

en las cocinas. Sí sé, en cambio, que las casas brillaban y las cocinas

olían, y no sólo las cocinas, porque a determinadas horas las aceras

se llenaban con los olores del fricassé de pollo y de los plátanos

fritos. (94)

Estévez’s childhood memories often revolve around this domesticity without

labor, so unrealistic as to make its status as a Utopian longing clear. Even when

domestic labor does appear, it’s idyllic and has no physical consequences:

La Pinareña cocinaba, limpiaba, lavaba, planchaba, cuidaba, en fin,

de la casa, mientras Cuca y Eloína, vestidas con polainas,

pantalones largos, camisas de mezclilla, y tocadas con sombreros de

yarey, araban, sembraban, cosechaban y alimentaban varias vacas;

también a algunos caballos, puesto que otro de sus negocios

consistía en comprar y revender caballos. Dicen que se las veía

siempre felices. . . . Todo el pueblo se admiraba de que, a pesar de

trabajar la tierra como un granjero, tuviera Eloína aquella piel tan

blanca y cuidada de madonna. (157-58)

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This feminine domestic idyll continued “hasta que llegó el hijo de puta ese,” a

man named Pedrín Miralles. A bad painter, the handsome Miralles seduces Cuca

before abandoning her for her cousin Eloína. Cuca is left to labor in the fields

while Eloína entertains Pedro, who eventually stabs both women to death and

disappears.

! The domestic tranquility, the happiness that Estévez associates with home,

youth, and the quotidian, is shattered by the male figure, depicted as follows:

Y era pintor. Al menos eso trataba de probar el día entero. El

hombre se parecía impúdicamente a Ramón Navarro.

Evidentemente, él lo sabía y se aprovechaba. En cuanto podía, fuera

la bata, al aire torso, bíceps, pectorales. Cuando no mostraba la

musculatura, Pedrín se pasaba el día con la manchada bata blanca y

el caballete montado en cualquier rincón del pueblo. Pintaba tocos

paisajes. Daba la impresión de que hubiese inventado la pintura;

como si antes que él nadie en el mundo se hubiera dedicado a

pintar. Yo he podido ver sus paisajes en casa de Filito-la-malvada.

De pretensiones realistas, y con un fondo romántico, entre Chartran

y Sanz Carta, por decir algo. Bastante tristes y oscuros, a pesar del

intenso colorido. En suma, pocas veces tenía alguien la

oportunidad de ver algo tan terriblemente mal pintado. (158)

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The parallels with Hemingway’s figure are striking—the robe, the muscles, the

posturing, the womanizing. Philip Young once called A Farewell to Arms a

“romantic piece of realist fiction” (Young 96). Estévez draws no clear connection

between Hemingway and Miralles, but the two men share certain qualities—

exaggerated masculinity, violent impulses, a heroic aesthetic—that Estévez places

in contrast to Utopia. Hemingway, in contrast to the bad painter Miralles, is

rescued by his art, his sensitivity to beauty and pleasure, which establishes the

odd duality I’ve mentioned previously.

! The quotidian idyll shattered by the male intruder is notable for both its

unreality—the blissfulness of domestic and agricultural labor—and its

ordinariness. The murder of the two cousins is violent and shocking, but it stands

out even more among the annals of the narrator’s family, in which death is an

inevitable, but otherwise unremarkable, fact of life.

Cuando su hijo, mi tío Aristides, murió a sus dieciocho espléndidos

años, es posible que su estatismo deleitoso se trocara en un

apenado «prefería no hacerlo». Pero eso fue después. El abuelo

sobrevivió a su hijo sólo seis meses. Murió de nada. Quiero decir,

de nada de lo que suelen morir el común de los mortales. (152)

The abuelo, Berardo, dies of nothing, or of sadness, after the death of his son in an

auto accident, one of many that commonly occured on a particular stretch of

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road. Both of these deaths are ordinary, and none of the deaths recalled by the

narrator have anything heroic about them. No one goes out in a blaze of glory.

There is an anti-heroic thread in Estévez’s writing, related to his discomfort with

displays of machismo. He relates the curious episode of Matías Pérez, a tentmaker

who disappeared in 1856 after making a balloon ascent.

Los periódicos de la época hacen, rápidos y displicentes, sin

indagar, la crónica del vuelo. Hasta nosotros ha llegado un hombre

solo, en la barquilla de mimbre de un globo aerostático que se eleva

hacia los espacios siderales en busca de no se sabe qué. Ni del

hombre ni del globo, mucho menos del propósito, se volvió a tener

noticia. Ninguna noticia. De Matías Pérez no se encontró ni el

pañuelo. (251)

Cribbing once again from Iván de la Nuez, Estévez goes on to write that, despite

Pérez’s status as a flight innovator—he had made two previous attempts in an

era in which navigable balloons were still in their infancy—he remains

unrecognized (252). De la Nuez speculates that Pérez has been forgotten because

he doesn’t fit into a tradition of heroes who, like Martí, had died in and for their

country. Estévez connects Pérez’s disappearance, which popular legend

attributes to a kind of fatal boredom or fatigue with Havana and the world, to

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Baudelaire’s ennui. Estévez holds Pérez up as a hero of sorts, one whose heroism

resides precisely in his refusal to be memorialized:

Si algún habanero hace un leve gesto, un gesto delicado con la

mano para indicar los aterradores espacios infinitos, y declara (con

sorna o sin ella): «¿Ése?, voló, voló como Matías Pérez», ya se sabe:

habla de un triunfador que optó por la ausencia y el olvido. (253)

Pérez, who is also mentioned in Los palacios distantes (35), is an important figure

for Estévez. He represents the fate of “el común de los mortales” (Inventario 152),

of the ordinary people whose stories Estévez prefers to tell.

! Estévez’s novel—and here its status as novel is at its most problematic—

devotes itself to rescuing the stories of the most ordinary individuals, in no

particular order, as though recalled at random in the memory of the narrator.

This brings up the thorny question of genre. If the label “novel” presupposes an

extended fictional narrative centered on the development of one or more

characters, what to make of a “novel” that reads like a family history or memoir,

that incorporates fragments of letters and essays, and that even goes on its own

essayistic jaunts in which narration gives way to commentary? One way to

answer this is to say that Inventario does tell a story of sorts: the story of the

narrator’s own exploration of the past through memories. It’s not quite Proustian

—it’s less prolix, for one thing—but feels similar in intent and method. Inventario

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is an act of memory. Better said, it memorializes (fictionalizes) memory. It avoids

character development to focus on the characterization of Havana itself as

constituted by the lives of its most ordinary citizens, rather than the “great men”

of yesteryear materialized and placed on display in the city’s iconography.

Literature becomes a refuge, a counterdiscursive praxis vis-à-vis the state’s heroic

narrative of nationhood. The geographical heart of this project is Bauta, a

nowheresville, an insignificant satellite of Havana. Estévez constructs his literary

Utopia in this place, where Father Ángel Gaztelu, Origenist poet, was once the

parish priest. Estévez understands his writing to enact something similar to the

Origenist aesthetic: “los poetas de Orígenes siempre vivieron en secreta

resistencia, como los iniciados de una secta clandestina” (136).

2.1.4 - The Literary City

! Inventario thus attempts to resist the museumification of Havana (and

Cuba, by extension) by offering an alternative to the state’s memorialization of

the heroic pueblo. The novel creates its own inventory of memories. This

collection tries to avoid the trap of the museum by positing memory, quite

specifically, as a literary creation, as a paseo (17) through the past. If the novel is

an inventory of objects, these aren’t the relics and trappings of martyrdom and

revolutionary struggle. Rather, they are rendered objective by the subjective act

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of writing. Much like certain objects I will describe in Los palacios distantes, which

resist commodification, the items in this “inventory” are “anecdotal objects,”

meaning that their object-like nature results only from the highly subjective

process of remembering and re-telling. Estévez believes that this process, made

possible only by a certain distance, gets one closer to the reality of Havana.

¿No será que La Habana fue la ciudad cuando se convirtió en

verdadero recuerdo, es decir, cuando dejó de ser sólo lejanía, para

ser lejanía y recuerdo? ¿No será que para entender una ciudad, aun

aquella en la que uno ha nacido y vivido, es preciso abandonarla,

para poder evocarla después? (99)

This returns to the dialectic between the real and imagined city. It’s unclear

which city is more “real”: the physical Havana or the literary one. Both, in a

sense, are imagined. Both “narrate” the nation: one with architectural symbols,

the other with prose. In the end they are inseparable.

! For Estévez, the museum is a dead space, much as it was for Valery. “Dead

visions are entombed there.” “For Valéry art is lost when it has relinquished its

place in the immediacy of life, in its functional context” (Adorno 177, 180).

Inventario tries to rescue that immediacy, using memory as a tool to access a vital

sphere that has been buried by hagiographic structures and placed out of reach

by Havana’s emerging tertiary economy.4 The work’s contradictions emerge in

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the fact that it, too, participates in the same double bind as the Martí Memorial: it

objectifies memory, memorializes it. Likewise, it’s no less aporetic that the novel,

although it refuses to fall into the conventions of Special Period fiction as a genre

marketed to foreigners, it is nonetheless published and sold on the Spanish book

market—but this is the inevitable consequence, in Estévez’s case, of his residence

in exile. Finally, that the work and the commodified object—themselves separate

things—reside in the same physical space is just another symptom of the social

separation (in capitalism generally, and in post-Soviet Cuba more specifically) of

economic and vital spheres.

2.2 - Los palacios distantes: The Spleen of Havana.

! Abilio Estévez’s habit of cataloging and taking inventory of Havana’s

hidden spaces exhibits elective affinities with Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire,

whose Les Fleurs du mal emerged in the context of the failed 1848 revolution and

the Haussmann plan for urban renewal that was beginning to efface an older,

precapitalist Paris. Los palacios distantes appears during a similar historical

moment in Cuba, one marked by the crisis of the revolutionary subject and by

the economic disaster that has accelerated both the collapse of buildings and the

renovation of tourist sites, engendering radical changes in Havana’s exterior.

Faced with these circumstances, Los palacios distances offers a twofold vision of

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the city of Havana. On one hand, Abilio Estévez recreates a ruined and decadent

city permeated by the dust of its collapsing structures. On the other hand,

Havana is presented as a place of surprising beauty, in which Paradise is veiled

by the ruined façades and rubble, but can still be glimpsed in the city’s

labyrinthine interstices. This stereoscopic view is present from the novel’s first

pages:

Las paredes muestran el color terroso, gris y negro de los muros

viejos en cualquier ciudad devastada en un mundo donde abundan

guerras, terremotos y otras catástrofes menos evidentes. Las

piedras están desnudas en muchos sitios, con tonos sorprendentes

y rojizos, y grietas en los muros que sin embargo permiten crecer

helechos opulentos, verdes, inesperados entre el derrumbe;

espigados arbustos de paraíso; crecidas matas de calabazas, con

flores acampadas, largas y amarillas. (17)

The Utopian palaces announced by the title, although ephemeral, turn out to be

closer and more real than expected. Victorio, the novel’s protagonist, loses

himself in his memories of childhood, when el Moro, a daring but ill-fated

aviator, would tell the boy that everybody had their own private palace, their

own Utopian space. El Moro also told him that “everywhere is the same

place” (23). This is a key that allows one to see Estévez’s textual Havana, in

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Palacios and Inventario alike, as two cities superimposed on one another,

inhabiting the same space. Cubans live, to be sure, in the banal, quotidian

Havana with its ruins, grime, and poverty, but the narrative allows the reader to

glimpse the palaces, the hot-air balloons, and the opulence of the other Havana.

Y, aunque el cielo esté despejado, ahí están las calles encharcadas,

vencidas por el tiempo, la miseria y el descuido. Las pequeñas

lagunas de las calles de La Habana reproducen las fachadas de los

edificios con mayor nitidez con que los ilumina la penosa luz de los

faroles. Victorio se detiene ante una de ellas, y cree ver reflejadas en

el cristal del agua la silueta de un globo aerostático. (60)

! Much of the novel transpires on Havana’s streets, along which Victorio

often wanders with no definite purpose. The plot of Los palacios distantes lacks

complexities and twists, which distinguishes it from Estévez’s first (much more

baroque) novel: Tuyo es el reino (1997). The story told by Los palacios distantes can

be summarized as follows. Victorio, a single gay man, is forced to abandon his

home due to its imminent demolition. Before leaving, he burns most of his

possessions and abandons his bureaucratic job. He lives on the streets and

among the ruins of other collapsed buildings. He spends his time walking

through the city streets, avoiding the tourist areas where the authorities will be

more likely to notice him. Victorio meets and befriends a young jinetera, Salma.

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Later, he comes across an old clown, whom he has seen on previous occasions.

He tries to follow the clown but collapses from the exhaustion and poor

nutrition, the result of his lack of income and home. When Victorio wakes up, he

finds himself inside an old theater where the clown lives. Don Fuco, an old

acrobat, devotes his life to making people laugh, often in the most unexpected

places and circumstances: nursing homes, wakes, hospitals, and cemeteries. He

does this to shake people out of their boredom and fatigue. Victorio reunites with

Salma, and they both take up residence in Don Fuco’s theater, where they learn

the clown’s art. Together, the three of them make appearances throughout the

city, realizing impromptu performances that baffle and astonish the public. On

one occasion they are arrested. One day, Salma returns to her former home to

pick up a photo of her mother, who has just passed away. There she is discovered

by “el Negro Piedad,” a violent pimp and erstwhile “boyfriend” who wants to

continue exploiting her. He imprisons her in the house, but she escapes with

Victorio and returns to the theater. “El Negro Piedad” finds out where she is and

breaks into the theater one night, killing Don Fuco. Salma kills “El Negro

Piedad” with a heavy bust of José Martí (perhaps an ironic comentary on the use

and abuse of Martí’s image as deus ex machina for all sorts of political or

ideological impasses). She then escapes with Victorio, fleeing across Havana’s

rooftops with Don Fuco’s body.

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! It’s a simple and linear plot that moves along a standard trajectory of

development, climax, and denouement. The novel’s complexity emerges from its

interstices, its entr’actes, its urban wanderings, its excursions into the minds and

memories of Victorio and Salma, and its description of the surroundings and

their subjective impact on the characters. It could almost be said that the plot,

while not unimportant, serves mostly as a framework for the novel’s atmospheric

development. In effect, the ambience that develops vis-à-vis the flâneur-

protagonist’s explorations is perhaps the key element in the work.

! Estévez’s work is rich with intertextuality and blends of literary traditions,

especially those of Cuba and France. Affirming Baudelaire’s notable influence on

Los palacios distantes runs the risks of obscuring the traces of other writers.

Nevertheless, Baudelaire’s imprint deserves special attention because the novel’s

correspondences with his work are the means by which Estévez’s prose relates to

Havana’s physical space and the urban physiognomy of the Special Period. Don

Fuco declares himself a disciple of Baudelaire (99), but this is hardly necessary

for the reader to detect Estévez’s own affiliation with the French poet. The

novel’s ambientation recalls that of París and its famous spleen. Walter Benjamin

defines spleen as “that feeling which corresponds to catastrophe in

permanence” (“Central Park,” 164). Havana’s urban environment, in Los palacios

distantes, is described in similar terms:

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La Habana está en una latitud que carece de transformaciones. A

esta ciudad se les ocurrió situarla en el lado inmóvil del mundo. Y

como es siempre la misma y no conoce el cambio, a la ciudad se la

siente derrotada, deshecha . . . . (137)

This vision of the city is also associated with the poet Julián del Casal, the most

overtly Baudelairean of the Latin American modernistas.5 “Victorio recorre los

palacios gloriosamente reconstruidos, como si anduviera por otro tiempo, el de

Julián del Casal, el gran decadente” (35-36). Casal’s image is associated with the

paseo, or stroll, which takes the paseante, the flâneur, through space and time. Don

Fuco, the clown, resembles the old acrobat who appears in Baudelaire’s poem

“Le Vieux saltimbanque,” in Le Spleen de Paris. In the poem, Baudelaire identifies

the man of letters with a decrepit and dejected clown being ignored by a bustling

public that has long since forgotten his charms. Similarly, don Fuco performs for

indifferent or even hostile spectators.

2.2.1 - Flâneurie

! Beatriz Sarlo has justifiably denounced the abuse of the flâneur as a

meaningless label used to invoke a decontexualized Walter Benjamin.6 And it’s

true that it’s hard to imagine a free and disinterested stroller in contemporary,

automobilized cities like Bogotá, México, or Los Angeles—one thinks rather

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more easily of Michael Douglas’ portrayal, in Falling Down (1993), of the

erstwhile driver affected by “road rage.” Despite this, I think that the urban

practice of flâneurie retains some relevance for post-Soviet Havana. This is not to

effect an uncritical transplant of a type found in Second-Empire Paris to Havana.

There are differences between the Parisian flâneur described by Benjamin and the

Cuban version in Estévez’s novel.

! The flâneur isn’t simply a mobile urban subject who observes his

surroundings in a particular manner; it is the expression of a historically

determined form of subjectivity. As such, Benjamin conceives of the flâneur as one

type among several that reveal socio-subjective aspects of Baudelaire’s Paris. To

speak of Havana’s version of the flâneur implies the task of determining the

specificity of the contemporary Cuban experience of walking through the storied

“city of columns.” But first the similarities should be established. In Benjamin’s

work, the flâneur appears as a protest aganst the industriousness of the

industriousness of specialists, viz. the capitalist division of labor (“The Paris of

the Second Empire” 30-31); in Estévez we see a similar rejection: Victorio flees

from the surveillance designed to force him to work and fulfill his duties; later,

he renounces his job entirely, throwing his office key into a reservoir of water.

Just as Baudelaire railed against the emerging bourgeois morality (thrift, hard

work, etc.), Victorio rejects the Cuban version of this work discipline. It’s true

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that one can’t simply transplant the bourgeois work ethic into Castro’s Cuba, in

which the bourgeoisie was effectively neutralized, but work continued to play a

significant ideological role in the revolution. It’s enough to recall Guevara’s

“hombre nuevo” to begin to see the parallels between Weber’s famous

“Protestant ethic” and the cult to voluntary labor and “emulation” that took root

in Cuba. Benjamin’s flâneur is unintelligible outside the context of the market

society that was emerging in Baudelaire’s Paris. According to Benjamin, the

“empathy” of the flâneur intoxicated by the crowd is analogous to the “empathy”

that allows a commodity to establish equivalence with its counterparts. If this

seems doubtful—as it did to one of Benjamin’s key interlocutors, Theodor

Adorno—it is because the idea of a “commodity soul” is an analogy and not a

form of subjectivity immanent to market relations. In post-Soviet Cuba, however,

the operative fetishisms are the discursive fetish of labor as intrinsically (morally)

valuable and as the ontological basis of socialism, and the market fetish that

arises from the new economic reality of the crisis years. The decline of the former

implies the rise of the latter. The struggle between fetishes, as long as neither

achieves dominance, leaves a space for a critical consciousness that rejects both.

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2.2.2 - Post-Soviet Political Coordinants

! The ideological conflict sketched above coincides more or less with what

James Buckwalter-Arias calls the reinscription of the Orígenes aesthetic, which he

claims is one of the most notable characteristics of Cuban literature in the 1990s.

According to Buckwalter-Arias, this vindication of autonomous art is both an

effort to escape the narrow limits of the politicized art imposed by the Castro

regime and to resist the no less inflexible laws of the market.7 I don’t disagree

with Buckwalter-Arias—in fact, I think the phenomenon he describes is

somewhat broader then a return of “Origenist” literature—but it’s important to

push the analysis further and ask what kind of national subjectivity grounds this

so-called reinscription. To that end, the following excursus will establish some

important ideological coordinants.

! In Cuba, capitalist incursions began to occur without the same

sociopolitical openings (the much ballyhooed glasnost) that took place in the

Soviet Union. The economic crisis of the 1990s forced the Castro government to

implement certain liberal measures like legalizing the US dollar, allowing

investment by foreign capital, and so forth, but these measures—still ongoing—

have happened very slowly and have not led to a loss of Party control or the

wholesale opening of the nation’s economy to foreign investors. At the same

time, the slow return of commodity relations at the level of the individual also

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had its impact. The uncertainty and ceaseless competition of the global market

and the regime’s tight economic controls seemed equally unacceptable. Faced

with the apparent absence of leftist opposition to the regime, and stuck between

capitalism’s post-1989, triumphalist discourse and the regime’s empty anti-

imperialist rhetoric, another mode of expression began to emerge in response to

the new challenges of the crisis-ridden 1990s. This response did not emerge from

the tightly controlled State media, nor from internal party debates, but rather

from a literature that began to represent Cuban reality critically, without always

resorting to a documentary or realist approach. And there have been other

attempts to recover a critical voice by reviving so-called civil society in the form

of independent journalism, blogs, and hip-hop.8

! As I explained in the first section of this chapter, the open secret of the

post-Soviet period is the failure of the Revolution. The recognition of this fact,

however, has not led to celebration. Instead of joy, the prevailing sentiment in the

period’s literature has been disillusionment accompanied by nostalgia. The

nostalgic impulse, however, varies considerably from author to author. In

Padura, whose detective fiction has become synonymous with

“disenchantment,” we read:

—Nos hicieron creer que todos éramos iguales y que el mundo iba

a ser mejor. Que ya era mejor . . .

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—Pues los estafaron, te lo juro. En todas partes hay unos que son

menos iguales que los otros y el mundo va de mal en peor. Aquí

mismo, el que no tiene billetes verdes está fuera de juego, y hay

gentes ahora mismo que se están haciendo ricos, a las buenas y a

las malas . . . Conde asintió, con la vista perdida entre los árboles

del patio.

—Fue bonito mientras duró. (La neblina, 45-46)

Here Padura’s detective protagonist, Conde, converses with his younger, more

entrepreneurial business partner. A gap is revealed between Conde’s generation

(and Padura’s) and the generation that came of age during the crisis. Conde feels

nostalgic for the halcyon days of the revolution, but his young partner was never

under any illusions. For him, cash rules everything. As I will explain in Chapter

Three, the lack of nostalgia for the revolutionary past is also evident in Ena Lucía

Portela’s work.

! This nostalgia is, however, present in Estévez’s work, in certain

reminiscences of childhood, in Victorio’s comment that “cede con gusto a ese

capricho de la imaginación que . . . suele considerar que «cualquier tiempo

pasado fue mejor»” (36). Unlike Padura, whose Utopian nostalgia centers on the

revolution’s early years, Estévez locates it further in the past, during the Republic

or at the turn of the 19th century. In Estévez, the nostalgia forms part of his

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aesthetic via its constant associations and appropriations of writers associated

with the prerevolutionary years and their supposed literary autonomy: Casal,

Piñera, Lezama. Nostalgia, here, is a reaction to the impossible material situation

of the post-Soviet period and to an official culture that channelled art into

increasingly realist or “committed” forms. This nostalgia emerges from a political

and intellectual atmosphere which lacks clear alternatives to the status quo and

plausible explanations for the failure to construct socialism.

! In an anecdote that succeeds in uniting several important problems in

Cuban literary and intellectual history, Antonio José Ponte relates how Josep

Lluís Sert, a Catalan architect, returned to Havana after having earlier been

denied a license to work on the island. When he returned, it was at the request of

Fulgencio Batista, who gave free rein to what Ponte describes as a vengeful

renovation of the city; had the Revolution not intervened, much of the city’s rich

colonial architecture would have been demolished. In a different text, Ponte

notes ironically that the Revolution ended up finishing the job, simply by

allowing the old buildings to fall apart. But he also imagines what may have

happened if a different immigrant, a certain Walter Benjamin, had ever reached

Havana. Maybe, writes Ponte, he would have left immediately, spurning the city

for having denied him a visa.

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[N]o introduciría a sus moradores en la filosofía (continuación de la

de Baudelaire) del pasear desinteresado. . . . Aquellos que desde allí

quisieran obtener atisbos de todo lo anterior tendrían que

esforzarse en traslaciones imaginativas, habrían de traducirlo. (82)

This is an elegant way of pointing out the absence of a particular intelectual

tradition in Western Marxism which takes as its point of departure Georg Lukács

and passes through the Frankfurt School, its collaborators, and certain of its

successors.

! Rafael Rojas, in an essay titled “Benjamin no llegó a La Habana,” echoes

Ponte’s conjecture, considering the impact Benjamin could have had on the

island. Rojas points out a gap in Cuban intellectual debates where Benjamin

should appear (48). Notwithstanding the ephemeral appearance of Pensamiento

Critico (1967–71),9 a journal devoted to the publication of heterodox Marxists, and

despite Desiderio Navarro’s efforts to maintain an open dialogue with Western

theoretical tendencies,10 neither Benjamin nor any other representative of a

“pessimistic Marxism” like that of the Frankfurt School ever appears on the

Cuban scene. In other words, there was never significant exposure to ideas that

challenged the traditional Marxism associated with organized labor movements.

! This absence can be explained partially by the kind of Marxism that

imposed itself in Cuba, an orthodox Marxism linked to a national modernization

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project (the “catch-up modernization” described in Chapter Four). But it’s also

due to the fact that, despite the exaggerated claims of anti-Castro groups,

Stalinism and the gulag were not part of the Cuban experience. The relatively

few (although well-publicized) cases of capital punishment and political

imprisonment and the fact of UMAP failed to generate an international rejection

of Castro comparable to that of Stalin. The most significant chastening that

Castro received from the international community was in response to the Padilla

affair, in which even leftist intellectuals like Sartre expressed their disapproval

(this event also marked the rightward turn of Nobel prizewinner Mario Vargas

Llosa). But Cuba remained popular and prestigious in the eyes of much of the

world, not uncoincidentally among the poorer countries, and it wasn’t until the

crisis of the 1990s that the revolution’s failure became clearly visible. This

permitted, finally, the emergence of a critical left, both on and off the island, that

no longer sees Cuba as a model for socialism, much less communism.

! The crisis in Cuba provoked a generalized disillusionment. Absent any

sort of Marxist theory adequate to the current situation, many abandoned it

altogether, and so did the state, for all intents and purposes. The decline and, in

1991, definitive fall of the Soviet Union meant that a space had opened for

cultural renewal in Cuba. Although the “Rectification of Errors” campaign of the

late 1980s had attempted to strengthen communist orthodoxy, now the state had

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its hands full with the economic crisis, the balseros exodus, and a US government

which was tightening the screws of the embargo.11 A new literature arose, both in

response to the crisis and to the regime’s relaxation of ideological controls. This

literature tended to eschew “committed” writing in favor of less apologetic

attempts, like those of the Novísimos (see Chapter Three), to make sense of

Cuba’s post-Soviet reality. It’s disillusionment is grounded in the decline of a

subjectivity based on the ethic of the New Man. This decline is expressed in the

growing self-doubt that characterized 1990s Cuba. The phenomenon is observed

by Sonia Behar, in her study La caída del hombre nuevo (The Fall of the New Man),

which argues for a Lukacsian approach to the period’s literature (32). Reina

María Rodríguez, in her poem “Al menos, así lo veía a contra luz . . .”, describes

the collapse of the revolutionary subject: “era a finales de siglo y no había

escapatoria. / la cúpula había caído, la utopía / de una bóveda inmensa sujeta a

mi cabeza, / había caído” (Barquet 509). What emerges after this fall is a

subjectivity adrift, one that wanders through Havana’s streets in search of absent

alternatives.

2.2.3 - Victorio’s Total Refusal

! It’s no great leap to suggest that the implicit narrator of Los palacios

distantes is that Cuban subject who no longer believes in revolutionary slogans or

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voluntary labor for the cause, but who also maintains a skeptical view of the

emerging market economy. After his humiliating exit from a restaurant that only

accepts payment in dollars, Victorio determines that it’s not “really hunger that

he feels, but something finer. A hunger for flavor and

delectability” (“precisamente el hambre, sino algo mucho más refinado. Hambre

de sabores, de exquisiteces” [38]). Victorio aspires to more than mere survival,

but he doesn’t long for a bourgeois lifestyle. When he leaves his condemned

apartment, he burns most of his possessions without considering their material

value or whether he could have sold them on the black market. “En un primitivo

bolso negro reúne el cepillo de dientes, el jabón, alguna ropa y el ejemplar de

Saint-Simon. Conserva la fotografía del Moro. Ata la llave del palacio a un

cordón y se la cuelga al cuello” (40). Victorio doesn’t suffer from the impulse of

the philistine collector who, like Rubén Darío’s “rey burgués,” only appreciates

objects for their social cachet. Except what he needs for his personal hygiene, the

objects he rescues have only symbolic value: a photograph of a friend, Saint-

Simon’s volume, and the key to a building whose palace-like qualities exist now

only in memories. He keeps this key, which no longer has any use-value, and

discards a different key, the one to his office as a symbolic rejection of the work

he once did. The act implies a rejection of both the bureaucracy and the capitalist

imperative expressed by the adage “time is money” (in other words, all time is

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labor time). Victorio refuses both alternatives that present themselves: the

hardscrabble, faded existence of the “Special Period” and the brutal pragmatism

of the black market, which puts a price on everything. Victorio and Salma choose

a bohemian way of life to avoid a reality that offers few satisfactions and little

beauty. This new lifestyle clashes with the profit motive. It’s a refusal of work, of

participation in the “new economy” of tourism. It refuses service labor,

entrepreneurship, and entertainment (including prostitution). This, in turn,

generates a conflict between Victorio and the “authorities” and between Salma

and el Negro Piedad, who would like to keep her “in the business.”

! Victorio moves in a space at the margin of the apparent possibllities. He

becomes a homeless vagabond in a city in which loitering and begging is

discouraged to avoid bothering tourists:

La Habana dejó poco a poco de tolerar a los mendigos: les negó la

caridad de los portalones, la bendición de las brisas y el resguardo

a sus relentes bárbaros. Se ha llegado a afirmar (se sabe cuánto de

novelera tiene la imaginación popular) que el cambio comenzó a

notarse el día en que La Habana permitió que encerraran en un

asilo al más famoso de sus vagabundos, el Caballero de París.

Aquel día infausto, La Habana anocheció a las cuatro de la tarde, y

el adelantado crepúsculo asombró a los habaneros. (44)

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Alienated from existing forms of society, Victorio occupies the negative space of

the beggar and walks through the city as an observer outside the normal flow of

crowds and commerce. He winds his way through the capital’s crumbling streets

and plazas where, paradoxically, the more he makes himself visible the less he is

seen. This is a fortutious discovery, since he wishes not to be harrassed by police:

“[s]e aprende también de huir de los policías. En este caso, la clave no está en

huir de ellos, sino en enfrentarlos” (64). Victorio is alone in the crowd, where he

watches, invisible to others, much like Baudelaire’s flâneur from Les Fleurs du mal,

who feels isolated, excluded, alienated, and forgotten. “Sin casa, sin amigos, la

ciudad se vuelve remota, ajena, incomprensible y hostil” (46).  

! The narrator’s frequent comments about surveillance (30-31, 61-62, 238), his

feeling of being deceived (43), the “ruins that speak of History’s march over

mankind” (64), a History that eliminates enjoyment (82), and Salma’s direct

denunciation of communism (53) reveal a critical attitude toward official

discourse, which still employs socialist rhetoric. Mema Turné is the CDR

busybody assigned to his building—Victorio imagines hacking her to pieces with

an axe. The clear allusion is to Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and

Punishment, who murders Alena Ivanova, pawnbroker and avatar of capitalist

exploitation. Mema Turné thus consolidates the two paradigms that the narrative

subject rejects—capitalism and state control.

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2.2.4 - Literature and the “Anti-Commodity”

! Los palacios distantes contains relatively few direct references to the island’s

economy. Although the background for Salma’s occupation as a jinetera is of

course the tourism industry, the book doesn’t focus any direct criticism on

commercialization or capitalism. Nevertheless, the operation of commodity

fetishism appears, via negationis, in the attention given to certain objects which

function as anti-commodities. In Don Fuco’s theater, for example, many such

objects are enumerated:

Aquí están guardadas y bien guardadas las reliquias de la patria,

los vestidos de Rita Montaner, de Barbarito Diez, de Beny Moré, de

Celia Cruz, de Alicia Alonso, aquí están los manuscritos de tantos

escritores famosos, la guitarras de María Teresa Vera, de Manuel

Corona, de Pablo Milanés y Marta Valdés, el piano de Lecuona,

objetos de Alicia Rico, Candita Quintana, Esther Borja, Miriam

Acevedo, Iris Burguet y Blanquita Becerra, la camisa ensangrentada

de Julio Antonio Mella, el mantel también ensangrentado de los

Lamadrid en cuya mesa murió Julián del Casal, lienzos de

Portocarrero, de Amelia, de Tomás Sánchez, de Acosta León, de

Raúl Martínez, piezas de Ñica Eiriz, hay muchas reliquias, amigo

mío, y si no las menciono todas es por no abrumarlo. . . . (134-35)

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These objects are originals, not copies; they represent the possibility of imagining

an origin. They retain the sacred “aura” that Benjamin attributed to artworks

before the age of their technological reproducibility. Their sacredness derives

from their status as relics and from their inaccessibility (“están guardadas y bien

guardadas”). These “objects” are either immaterial or unique. They belong to

what Adorno called the utopia of the “qualitative – the things which through

their uniqueness cannot be absorbed into the prevalent exchange

relationships” (Minima Moralia 120).

! The theater is a warehouse for anti-commodities and, at the same time, an

archive of what the revolution has attempted to deny. (The theater performs an

analogous function to Diego’s “guarida” in Senel Paz’s “El lobo, el bosque y el

hombre nuevo,” in which the young revolutionary David discovers the legacy of

cultural figures like Lecuona and Lezama, whom he barely knows.) The peculiar

interiority of the theater, simultaneously in and out of Havana (a mise en abîme is

created via a replica of the city12 inside the theater), creates a Utopian space (in

the strictest sense) where the island’s cultural heritage is protected from

commercial exploitation and ideological manipulation. It’s an illusory space,

however, which disappears with el Negro Piedad’s break-in. Dressed as a police,

the pimp’s arrival announces the shattering of the illusion; much like the

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example of Mema Turné, economic interest and State power coincide in the

figure of the invader.

! El Negro Piedad’s arrival marks the collapse of the separation of the

opulent theater space and the ruined exterior of Havana proper. “Mientras que

Salma y Victorio han pasado del asombro a la admiración, el chulo, o el policía

(ya no se sabe), ha salido del asombro sólo para caer en la realidad burda de que,

en un teatro en ruinas, bajo las luces de unas cuantas velas, un viejo muy feo,

ataviado con tutú, baila de modo grotesco al son de una música rara” (267). After

this moment it becomes impossible to see the theater as a hermetic space. On the

contrary, its own fiction becomes visible as it becomes apparent that it shares the

same dual nature—paradise and ruin—as the rest of the city. With this, I return to

the “twofold vision” with which I began this section.

! In Los palacios distantes beauty is always linked to the mundane, to the

physical and social reality of Havana in the year 2000. It clearly avoids idealized

beauty; Adorno proposed that Gautier’s pure beauty, l’art pour l’art, is limited

because it purports to be the antithesis of a society whose images and products

are rejected on aesthetic grounds, for their ugliness. Adorno mentions Baudelaire

and Rimbaud as writers who succeeding in creating a socially antithetical

literature by using the very images and products that society offered them

(Aesthetic Theory 237). One would have to include Estévez in this company,

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because beauty in his novel, even while relating to society as its antagonist, arises

immanently from the social and material detritus of post-Soviet Havana. Beauty

doesn’t exist as a pure ideal; it’s not a Platonic form reflected imperfectly in an

object; it is society’s own self-negation, mediated by the artist’s subjectivity and

creative labor. Estévez, despite his obvious affinities to Orígenes, is in this regard

much closer to Piñera’s materialism than Lezama’s idealistic Image.

! Don Fuco’s theater functions as a counter-reality that overlaps only

partially with the “real” Havana. It becomes a space for a way of living and

acting à rebours of Cubans’ daily practice. What is this counterpraxis? In an

interview, Estévez gives a partial answer:

[S]i le quitas a la palabra payasada toda esa parte peyorativa que

parece que le hemos agregado, te queda algo muy hermoso, que es

el lado artificial. El lado de artificio, de transformación, de

travestismo, de disfraz y de maquillaje. O sea, todo eso que es el

artificio es lo que me parece imprescindible para el hecho creador.

Estimo que no podemos pensar en la payasada en el sentido de

aquellos circos espantosos que yo veía cuando era niño y que me

daban mucha tristeza. Es otra dimensión del payaso, es un salir de

la realidad hacia un mundo muy diferente, y ése es el sentido que

yo le doy a esa palabra (Béjar 95).

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The Caballero de París only “walks” in place now, a statue on the edge of the

Plaza de San Francisco. Tourists mug for the camera with the picturesque figure

they don’t understand. In Palacios, Don Fuco, the statue of Mercury come to life,

somehow vindicates the vagrant’s zest for life, even though Havana’s public is as

unappreciative of him as the Parisian crowds were of Baudelaire’s vieux

saltimbanque. Only after the old clown has been killed do Victorio, Salma, and the

reader finally understand that the stage has always been the entire city, Havana

itself. The connection between the novels under consideration, between Palacios

and Inventario, is felt most strongly in this revelation—that, despite the poverty

and banality of everyday life and despite the emerging inequalities of the new

tourist economy, there are possibilities immanent to reality which, in the absence

of the double repression of the economy and official ideology, could make

possible the material and artistic transcendence of what merely exists.

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1 La Giraldilla is the symbol of the city of Havana. Although named after La

Giralda in Seville, Havana’s version is different in appearance and sits, not atop a

cathedral, but in the watchtower of the Castillo de la Real Fuerza, which guards

the entrance to the harbor (it is, in fact, a replica; the original is housed in the

Palacio de los Capitanes Generales). According to legend, La Giraldilla is meant

to represent Inés de Bobadilla, who was said to have spent years in the

watchtower, looking for her husband’s returning ship. Her husband, Hernando

del Soto, never returned, having died on the banks of the Mississippi during an

expedition to the north.

2 These advantages were conferred primarily on whites, for the reasons outlined

in Chapter One.

3 The phrase refers to the title of a poem by Jesús Orta Ruiz (El Indio Naborí),

featured on the guidebook’s back cover. The sentiment of the poem is that the

revolution has succeeded in bringing Martí’s ideals to life: “Ya no soy una piedra

profanada. / Estoy vivo y haciendo.”

4 The emergence of tertiary or service economies is often seen as a positive step

towards a more modern and flexible workforce. Tertiarization, however, is a

symptom of rising inequality, the sine qua non of service jobs, which are

performed by the relatively poor for the relatively wealthy. See the quote by

André Gorz on p. 30n.

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5 Casal was an important bridge between the Latin American modernistas and

their French influences. His translations of both Baudelaire and of French

symbolist poetry were read by another poet, the young Rubén Darío.

6 See “Forgetting Benjamin.”

7 See “Reinscribing the Aesthetic” and Cuba and the New Origenismo.

8 I owe this interpolation to Francisco Morán, who commented on an earlier

version of this essay, but I would add that, in the first two cases at least, it’s hard

to avoid the conclusion that certain proponents of “civil society” are pro-

democracy (that is, “pro-American” and “pro-capitalist) activists who collaborate

with, or are exploited by, programs like USAID that provide cover for a

neoliberalization agenda). At any rate, the State continues to actively co-opt or

suppress these critical voices.

9 The importance of Pensamiento Crítico is explained in Chapter Four.

10 Navarro’s journal Criterios, founded in 1973, has been one of Cuba’s only

publications to consistently feature contemporary literary and cultural theory. It

tends to favor poststructuralist and postcolonial approaches.

11 With the “Torricelli Act” (1992), which intensified the economic embargo by

preventing food and medicine from arriving in Cuba, and the Helms-Burton Act

(1995), which penalized foreign companies for doing business in Cuba, the

United States sought to further destabilize Cuba’s economy in order to force the

island to adopt a market economy.

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12 Such a replica of Havana indeed exists. A vast scale model of the city, known as

“La Maqueta de La Habana,” is housed in Miramar. Intended to aid urban

planners, the model is accessible to the public.

Chapter Three

Ena Lucía Portela’s El pájaro: pincel y tinta china:

A political and aesthetic cul-de-sac in postmodern Cuba

3.0 - Introduction

! This chapter analyzes one of the most challenging novels of the post-

Soviet period: Ena Lucía Portela’s El pájaro: pincel y tinta china. Portela’s work is

particularly difficult to incorporate into a project such as this one, which attempts

to relate aesthetic form to its social context, while historicizing both, because her

novel refuses easy periodization and categorization. It requires considerable

contextualization, so this chapter begins with a discussion of the Cuban

postmodern and the Novísimos, a generation of authors who came of age during

the 1990s. I go on to consider Portela’s novel on aesthetic terms, before finally

describing the implied politics of its form as a reaction to the failures of gender

politics in Cuba.

3.1 - The Cuban Postmodern

! Postmodernity, according to Jameson’s famous definition, is the cultural

logic of late capitalism, a historical period that Cuba seems to have avoided by

virtue of not being capitalist. But as I explained in the Introduction, Cuba’s

historical trajectory is nevertheless comprehensible as part of the global

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transformation of capitalism since the 1960s. However, the vast differences

between neoliberal capitalism and state interventionist capitalism mean that one

can hardly speak of a uniform cultural logic. Indeed, the state-managed economy

and, perhaps just as importantly, the political influence on art managed to keep

postmodernism at bay in Cuba (whether this was an effect of “committed”

artists, the influence of institutions like UNEAC and ICAIC, censorship, or some

combination of all of these seems beside the point).

! Some critics, however, like Raymond L. Williams, have attempted to

theorize Latin American postmodernism as a shift from epistemological concerns

to ontological ones and as a rejection of the “truth claims” associated with Boom

authors like García Márquez. In The Postmodern Novel in Latin America, Williams

assimilates authors like Cabrera Infante, Sarduy, and Arenas to postmodernism,

grouping them with more contemporary authors like Senel Paz and René

Vásquez Díaz (101). While the question of whether the former group of authors is

postmodern is an interesting and difficult one, it will be put aside for now. Of

more immediate concern is the way Williams essentially eludes properly

aesthetic questions in order to periodize the Latin American novel according to

changing philosophical concerns and cultural shifts. In other words, very little is

said about the formal differences between modernist and postmodernist works.

Postmodernism, according to this view, becomes less a question of form—

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economic or aesthetic—than of attitude. If a work expresses skepticism about

truth or knowledge, it can be said to be postmodern. By this measure, then, we

can assimilate a host of writers to postmodernism, including (but not limited to)

Unamuno, Baroja, Juana Inés de la Cruz, Calderón de la Barca, St. Augustine and

St. Paul. Likewise, Williams inscribes Borges and Joyce(!) at the head of the Latin

American postmodernist canon “as modernists who facilitated or opened the

doors to postmodernism with their particular use of language, their attitudes

about literary language, and Borges’s conflation of essay, literary theory, and

fiction” (19). Leaving Joyce aside, the relationship of Borges to either Modernism

in general or Postmodern novels in particular seems complicated. First, although

he would later disaffiliate himself, Borges began his literary career with the anti-

Modernist, avant-garde Ultraísta group in Spain. Second, it’s something of a non

sequitur to place Borges (who never wrote a novel) at the head of an emerging

tradition of postmodern novels in Latin America. Williams, to be fair, later

attenuates his somewhat forced periodizations, placing a new, “post-Boom”

novel between the Modernist Boom and more properly postmodern texts.

Authors like Cabrera Infante, in this new scheme, form part of the post-Boom

(see Williams, The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel, 2003). The

considerable difficulty of these kinds of periodization schemes, even for scholars

as well read as Williams, is that authors like Borges remain elusive. The best

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attempts to periodize highly original writers like Borges must remain oblique,

that is, the periodization must emerge from a consideration of the national

literary context, taking into account local factors (like Borges’ highly visible

dispute with Lugones and less well known polemic with Güiraldes) in addition

to broader, schematic considerations of literary movements and influences. This

is why the richest accounts of “uncategorizable” authors like Borges and Rulfo

are found in critics who remain committed—like Beatriz Sarlo in her Jorge Luis

Borges: A Writer on the Edge and Ángel Rama in his Transculturación narrativa en

América Latina—to teasing out the local factors involved in the creation of so-

called universal literature.

! My approach, then, attempts to avoid this pitfall of periodization by

departing, not from a broad, schematic and descriptive label

—“Postmodernism”—but to posit, for historical reasons relating to the economic

transformations I’ve outlined, a Cuban postmodernity beginning in the late 1980s

and then flourishing in the 90s, during the post-Soviet period.

! Frequent candidates for the postmodern label, like Guillermo Cabrera

Infante and Reinaldo Arenas, don’t fit neatly into the postmodern paradigm.1

Cabrera Infante, for instance, has a trajectory that passes from his early realist

work to his modernist nouveau roman, Tres tristes tigres, to his work in exile,

which is diverse, but which exhibits a marked preference for satire. The satirical

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impulse shows up, not in postmodern pastiche, but in modernist wordplay

structured along classically rhetorical lines.

! Arenas’s work is perhaps best considered to be a hyperbolic realism, the

dark underside of magic realism or, as Ileana Zéndegui has called it, “lo irreal

espantoso.”2 Zéndegui considers Arenas to be postmodern, but contrasts him not

with modernism but with socialist realism, which was the dominant strain of

narrative on the island during Arenas’s life there. It makes most sense to consider

Arenas as a realist writer whose anti-authoritarian realism refused to submit to

the official literary doctrine, refusing the writer’s compromiso with the socialist

project.

! Whether or not Sarduy, Cabrera Infante, and Arenas are postmodern is

less important than the overall point that they comprise nothing like a movement

or generation of writers. That is, taken in its entirety, Cuban literary production

didn’t make its turn to the postmodern until the 1990s, roughly a quarter of a

century after postmodernism was firmly established in Europe and North

America.3

3.2 - Los Novísimos

! A kind of foreshadowing of the postmodern can already be seen in the 80s.

Even before the emergence of the Novísimos, who, I argue, are Cuba’s first

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postmodern generation of authors, writers from the previous generation, while

still formally working within the dominant, realist parameters of the era, begin to

express disatisfaction, if not with the Castro regime directly, with the apparent

result of the socialist project. Jorge Fornet has written about the “literatura del

desencanto” that had characterized, not the authors that emerged in the previous

decade, during the economic crisis, but those, like Leonardo Padura and Senel

Paz, that belonged to an earlier generation that had witnessed, during its

formative years, the most brilliant successes of the revolution, still seen as vibrant

and alive. Rigorously speaking, the “literatura del desencanto” belongs to this

generation and not to the Novísimos, who, having grown up during the social

unrest of Mariel and during a time when Cuba was no longer able to project its

political and military power across the planet,4 were never “encantados.”

! Padura’s generation, including authors like Abilio Estévez whose work

differs markedly from the dominant, realist aesthetic of the time, is characterized

by a regretful attitude, a mourning for something lost, a Utopia whose contours

can still be glimpsed, yet escapes in the very instant in which it achieves its

definition. Even Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, whose works lack this Utopian nostalgia,

still expresses the loss of Utopia negatively, by describing a post-apocalyptic and

dystopian Havana. Such a bitter portrayal can only be understood in the context

of the end of the socialist era, with its promises of paradise. That this context is so

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systematically erased in Gutiérrez’s fiction only underscores the point: his

desencanto is so extreme that it cannot even acknowledge its source. The

revolution appears only in the symptoms of its repression.

! The Novísimos, who followed in the wake of this disillusionment, are a

generation of Cuban writers that began to publish short stories in the early 90s.

They distance themselves from disillusionment as an attitude or mood in their

writings and also break away from the previous generation’s mostly realist

narrative paradigm. Margarita Mateo Palmer, in her essay “Cuban Youth and

Postmodernism,” explains the outlook of the Novísimos’ generation:

Their particular life experiences distanced the Novísimos from the

preset, definitive “should be” [deber ser] of the young Cuban—

experiences rooted in Che’s magnificent ideal of the New Man, a

profoundly humanistic ideal which subsequently exposed them to

empty slogans and schemas, clichés devoid of any real meaning in

the absence of those normative codes that arise from a polemical

confrontation with new conditions. (161-62)

There is a consensus among critics that the Novísimos make a formal and

thematic break with the previous generation. They are Cuba’s first truly

postmodern authors, and their writing exhibits many hallmarks of a Cuban

postmodernity. Nanne Timmer attempts to sketch a typology of the 90s Cuban

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novel, saying “Among those [textual characteristics] the[. . .] [Novísimos and

Postnovísimos] do share, we can name the ‘negation of the values of the system,’

an interest in the marginal, the eschatological, and the body, and particularly a

theme that Cuban critics – surprisingly perhaps – have only rarely elaborated:

the theme of subjectivity.”5 These writers also avoid the themes that

characterized Cuban fiction during the previous two decades; in other words,

they abandon the ideal of the “committed” writer, turning away from socially

conscious themes, and reduce the narrative scope from the representation of

totalites like the nation, the island, or the revolution, to that of individual

experience. Timmer explains that “recent literature saw a shift from the collective

to the personal. The crucial question was no longer ‘who are we’ (as in the 60s),

but rather ‘who am I.’”6

! Another important difference from the previous generation is that the

Novísimos begin to challenge the sexual politics of their predecessors by

featuring gays prominently in their short stories (the Novísimos appeared

initially as short-story writers). Even celebrated works like Paz’s El bosque, el lobo

y el hombre nuevo and Padura’s Máscaras don’t feature gay or lesbian protagonists

in the unblushing, matter-of-fact way of the Novísimos. Padura’s “El

cazador” (1990) which features a transvestite, prefers an essentially negative

portrayal of a conflicted man who is marginalized by a homophobic and

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essentially machista society. While these works are ground-breaking, and contain

important reflections on gays in Cuban society, they are quite different from the

Novísimos’ works, which tend to avoid statements on the place or role of gays in

society in favor of more disinhibited portrayals utterly lacking in political

pretension. In Senel Paz’s novella, for instance, Diego is never depicted in a

sexual act. Indeed, in the movie version, Strawberry and Chocolate (1994), filmed

by the famous Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, or “Titón,” the only sex scenes are

heterosexual. The closest the film comes to a direct portrayal of “gay” sexuality is

a very brief shot of a photograph of a naked male in a suggestive, full-frontal

pose. It’s as though Paz, in the novella, and Alea, in the film, allow the expression

of just enough queerness to make a (still homophobic) public uncomfortable,

thus creating the affective conditions necessary for understanding the

transformation of the young revolutionary, David, and perhaps for the public to

undergo a similar transformation, thus “rectifying” the missteps of the

revolution.7 Both the story and the film have been criticized for its stereotypical

portrayal of the gay man as “conservative culture queen” (Quiroga 133). This

maintains gays in a subordinate role similar to the one often assigned to women;

Diego is valued for his contributions in the area of culture, yet his participation in

politics is not expressed as a possibility. Inasmuch as it preserves clear

distinctions between public and private spheres (Bejel “Strawberry” 77-79), one

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could view the film as an attempt to assimilate queer sexuality’s challenge to

male political dominance, as well as to exculpate the revolution for its past

treatment of gays.8 The literatura del desencanto thus tends to be fairly

conservative in terms of the politics and representation of queer sexuality.

! Among the Novísimos, on the other hand, queer sexuality tends to be

expressed very explicity, but without the clear political or social messaging that

characterized the work of the previous generation. Ena Lucía Portela’s Pájaro:

pincel y tinta china (1998), which will be discussed at length, includes a narrative

description of a sexual encounter between two women. The two principal male

characters also have sexual relations, although, interestingly, these interactions

are sublimated, never narrated directly, which suggests that the taboo on

representing sex between men may still be operative. (Pedro Juan Gutiérrez,

again, would appear to be the partial exception to this generational difference,

since his novels, like El rey de La Habana (1999), feature gay or bisexual characters

—who, additionally, break the taboo of direct portrayal of sex between males—,

but still fall largely into a macho/hembra binary, without the ambiguities seen in a

figure like Ena Lucía Portela’s Camila.)

! This is not to go so far as to assert, as does one critic, that the Novísimos

subvert the Castro regime (understood primarily as a hegemonic discourse) by

inscribing a queer counter-discourse supposedly incompatible with the dominant

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narrative of Cuban nationalism.9 One simply has to remember that Mariela

Castro, Fidel’s niece, is an activist for transgender rights. Rather, it is simply to

state that the Novísimos, including Portela, exhibit literary characteristics that

can be understood in terms of postmodernism, in the broad sense, as an

epistemological and/or aesthetic “condition” characterized by its a priori

rejection of “grand narratives,” by which is meant theories or artworks which

attempt to account for, or represent, the totality within their purview. On the

Novísimos’ terms, this can be seen as a rejection of the nationalist narrative of

socialist development, not necessarily or exclusively as homophobic (after all, the

“postmodern condition” hasn’t innoculated society from violent acts of

homophobic bias), but simply as having failed, as a totalizing narrative, to

adequately account for reality. Margarita Mateo Palmer writes that “[a]t a very

young age, [the Novísimos] became aware of the disjunction between official

history—what was propagated through the press, for example—and the actual

history that they lived in daily life and on the street” (161).10

! Luisa Campuzano places Mateo Palmer herself in this context, and

highlights the “transgressive and destabilizing” writing of the (pos)novísimos.

Como se ha señalado por la crítica [sic], las escritoras más jóvenes

por lo regular eluden toda referencialidad al contexto social y a un

ámbito que no sea el más inmediato, personal, o de grupo; y

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asumen un discurso de lo individual, de un autoconocimiento que

permanentemente se niega o se cuestiona. Son las llamadas

posnovísimas, y su producción, expresada a traves de formas de

poderosas y notable creatividad, se inscribe en una poética

transgresora y desestabilizadora que se explayará en los textos de

las novelistas que publican en estos años y en un libro sui generis de

ficción y ensayos, Ella escribía poscrítica, de Margarita Mateo. (151)

Portela’s novel, El pájaro: pincel y tinta china (El pájaro, hereafter), is emblematic of

this postmodern literary movement’s flight from the broader, national social

context away from the “politics of the totality” and towards . . . something else.!

3.3 - Portela

! Ena Lucía Portela (Havana, 1972– )is one of the youngest members of the

literary movement known as the Novísimos, finishing her first novel when she

was scarcely 25.11 She writes (and gives interviews) in a playful, mordant tone,

saving her sharpest barbs for those most unfortunate of creatures—literary critics

—and for her rivals in Cuba. She has written four novels, numerous short stories,

and a few essays. El pájaro, her first novel, won the prestigious UNEAC (Cirilo

Villaverde) prize, although apparently not without some controversy. As Portela

herself explains, certain people recognized themselves in the novel, felt offended,

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and reacted angrily. Portela claims that she even received death threats. Despite

all this, the novel was eventually published. Portela attributes the fact that she

has not won another prize in Cuba to the controversy her first novel generated.12

Despite these claims of marginalization, Portela continues to live and write on

the island, and even sat on the UNEAC jury that awarded the 2002 Cirilo

Villaverde prize to Ulises Cala’s El pasajero. And much of her work, like Djuna y

Daniel (2007), about the life of North American author Djuna Barnes, continues to

be published in Cuba.

3.4 - El pájaro: pincel y tinta china

! El pájaro was first published in Havana and, later, by Casiopeia in Spain.

The novel’s reach has been limited in comparison to that of other post-Soviet

Cuban novels published in Spain by larger publishers like Tusquets or

Anagrama. To begin discussing the novel’s plot and some of its formal features,

Nanne Timmer’s succinct précis is very useful.

The story is about three characters, Camila, Fabián, and Bibiana,

who, unbeknown to the others, all fall in love with a fourth person,

Emilio U. . . . As the story progresses, we discover that Emilio U. is

the writer of a novel named El pájaro: pincel y tinta china. The main

story lines are the relationships [among] the characters and the

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search for the writer Emilio U., but the most interesting aspect is

the way these stories intersect with Emilio U.’s novel. The suspicion

of a simple mise en abyme, i.e. that Emilio U. is the writer of the story

we are reading, finally cannot be maintained, as the fictitious world

his novel is depicting gets confused with the world in which the

novel is written. (“Dreams” 196)

There is really only a single, minimal storyline, centered on Camila. She meets

Fabián, enters into an abusive cohabitation with him, and falls pregnant. The

fetus is exposed to radiation and must be aborted. After the abortion, Camila has

a breakdown and remains in the hospital for treatment. She is cured, not by the

medical staff, but rather by reading a story from Salvador Redonet’s anthology

Los últimos serán los primeros, the collection of short stories that brought the

Novísimos (including Portela) to life as a literary generation. Camila returns to

live with Fabián, but their relationship has changed. Camila now refuses sex with

Fabián, but has at least one sexual encounter with Bibiana, Fabián’s neighbor and

the other member of this odd trio. The rest of the story consists of Camila’s

(unsuccessful) search for the author of the story that cured her, Emilio U.

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3.5 - The Form of Formlessness

! Before returning to plot details and, especially, to the idea of an imperfect

mise en abyme (Timmer notes this imperfection in her astute reading), some of the

narrative’s formal features should be highlighted. Its perspective is constantly

shifting, often with no warning or transition. The reader is constantly forced to

decide which of these three characters is providing the standpoint. The novel

sometimes shifts into a metanarrative mode, either from an omniscient

perspective or from the less reliable focalization of Emilio U. In fact, there are

really two Emilios: the novel’s purported author and the one who appears as

another character. The novel places heavy demands on the reader; it’s extremely

disorienting. Sometimes pages-long passages only make sense in retrospect,

when the identity of the narrator finally emerges from the shimmering,

kaleidoscopic interplay of perspectives. The novel is often cited as a

paradigmatic example of the kind of de-centered, fragmented and self-aware

writing that emerges among this generation of authors. Some see the text as

corrosive, a “negation of the great values of the system.”13

! The novel ends with Camila, still searching for Emilio U. and wondering if

her story was a fable invented by Fabián, who has by now mysteriously

disappeared. The supposed author of the tale, Emilio U. is problematized by the

contaminations between the story’s characters and his own life. The other

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possible author (Fabián) has vanished, leaving Camila there as a character in

search of of an author. She still seeks the elusive author of the story in Redonet’s

anthology, Emilio U., who is still, presumably, the primary narrator (even though

Camila’s speculation that Fabián might be the author of her story throws this into

doubt as well). Camila seeks to reunite the two Emilios (author and character),

thus merging her story with its teller. The tale begins to eats its own tail, and

what previously seemed like two distinct dimensions or narrative frames turn

out to be indistinguishable, once the loop is completed. If Camila were to find

Emilio, this would complete the collapse of the narrator into the narrated. This

deserves further explanation: since Camila is very expressly the fictional

construct of a narrator presumed to be Emilio U., a meeting between these two,

within the space of the narrative, would effectively abolish the distinction

between the narrative content and the structuring voice, or frame, of the

narrative. Camila’s search for Emilio is an attempt to unite the frames, or at least

to eliminate one of them. Finding Emilio would mean (in logical terms) that he

was a character but not the narrator, but that would simply mean a reversal in

which Fabián the character would turn out to be the (meta)narrator, author of a

fable narrated by a character/narrator Emilio, in which another Emilio and

another Fabián appeared as characters.

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! Camila’s unsuccessful search for Emilio U. dramatizes the text’s

ambiguity; this is a novel whose narrative content destroys its own frames of

reference, yet remains driven inexorably onward by the telos of its no-longer-

present form. That is, the formal unity of the novel derives from the

metanarrative voice of Emilio U. When this voice becomes problematized, the

narrative itself begins to lack coherence. It’s as though Camila, the subject of this

narrative, became conscious of her fragility as a fictional construct and set about

to find her final cause, the story’s narrator.

! From a formal standpoint, the novel is fascinating. But it fails to sustain an

affective engagement with the reader. It’s not that there are no passages that elicit

mirth, revulsion, or sympathy, but that these don’t add up to an emotional

investment in any of the characters, not even in Camila, the character around

whom the limited plot arc develops.

! The formal and stylistic features of El pájaro are foregrounded to the

detriment of its narrative potential. As Timmer notes, “la trama es menos

importante que el escribir mismo” (“Crisis” 127). This means, quite simply, that

the novel’s form itself somehow prevents the story from really being told, or at

least being told well. Camila’s story is the central narrative thread; she is the only

character who undergoes a genuine transformation. But this transformation is

seen, rather then felt. That is, the reader understands that Camila has somehow

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changed, but it’s like looking at before and after shots of people in those

commercials hawking the latest diet and exercise fad. One sees that Camila has

changed from an abject figure to one more proactive and in control of her own

destiny, but this transformation is inexplicable. The reader is told that the story

from Redonet’s anthology both cured Camila and changed the course of her

destiny, but then must attribute mysterious qualities to this story, or to Literature

itself, to explain the transformation. I’ll briefly discuss how the novel prevents

the reader from gaining a truly interior perspective on any of the characters,

especially Camila.

! The narrator, at one point, expresses something like a theory of beauty and

aesthetic apprehension. Bibiana, a wholly self-absorbed individual, likes nothing

more than to be stared at, not as an object of lust, but as the object of a more pure,

disinterested gaze. “Bibiana . . . también conocía, quizás por solitaria, el valor de

la mirada esencial, de lo que pudiera llamarse ‘la mirada en sí’” (31-32). The

Kantian nomenclature of the “gaze-in-itself”14 leads one to understand this gaze

as a pure form of perception, independent of the particularities of the object

perceived.

“La mirada en sí. Una esencia frágil y a la vez interminable,

siempre en lucha con la oscuridad y el tiempo, poderes

corruptores. . . . Raras veces la confundía Bibiana con el deseo.

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Desear es fácil, se decía, ¡tantos la habían deseado! Para algo era

bella, ¡no faltaba más! La Mirada, en cambio . . .” (32)

This pure gaze is similar to the disinterested aesthetic judgment demanded by

Kant, according to whom beauty can only be recognized as such by a “merely

contemplative” observation, bereft of interest or desire.15 In a certain sense, this is

the stance demanded of the reader by the novel. It makes this demand in two

ways. First, it empties out its narrative content into pure form, as we have seen,

by abolishing the limits or separation between the story and its teller. This has

the effect of subordinating the narrative content to the formal play of the text

itself, making the story of less immediate interest. Likewise, it is also very

difficult for the reader to orient herself vis-à-vis the content of the narrative, since

it is so fragmented and partial. Second, the novel keeps its reader at bay, never

allowing her to delve beneath the surface of the characters, refusing to permit

emotional attachment or identification with them.

! One might say that El pájaro misunderstands the relationship of literature to

the reader as purely aesthetic, or rather that it misconceives aesthetic

apprehension as sensorial and cognitive, but not emotional.16 Apart from

scattered moments of amusement, irony, and bitter mirth, generated more from

clever turns of phrase and witticisms than from the novel’s overall development,

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El pájaro fails to generate an affective investment in the fate of any of its

characters.

! The reason for this is intimately bound up with the novel’s formal

attributes. The narrative frame, even while shifting among focalizations, always

pulls back at a certain point, refusing to delve beneath the surface of the

characters. The characters, who lack an inner life, move through the novel like

chess pieces. Indeed, the narrator describes them as such: “¡Agarra ahora tu

peoncito!” (33) “La imaginaba pieza, trebejo de un increíble juego de

irracionalidades por escaleras y corredores prohibidos” (42). The narrator puts

his (for he is definitely male [31]) women through their paces, admitting that they

lack “at least some important qualities” (31), alluding to their superficiality.

Whenever the plot development threatens to reveal interiorities, that is,

whenever the characters might begin to develop a psychology of their own, the

narration stalls, digresses, or directly deflects the penetration of the reader’s

gaze. An example: at the beginning of chapter two, Fabián, Bibiana, and Camila

stare at a lava lamp. Instead of offering a glimpse into their interior psychology,

or into the social relations in which the characters are presumably embedded, the

narration offers an external, literary comparison: “Dispersos por la sala,

observaban fascinados, tal vez a la manera de los increíbles lectores de Finnegan’s

Wake” (29). This move is typical of the novel; it uses external literary references as

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a substitute for character development. The basic pattern—character X does Y as

if she were in Z (cultural reference)—is followed throughout. The novel deflects

the reader’s gaze, deferring meaning towards literary externalities. For instance,

Fabián’s reaction to the news of Camila’s pregnancy is described through a series

of comparisons he makes between the possibility of twins and cultural references

like the prince and the pauper, the man in the iron mask, the prisoner of Zenda,

etc. The narration become focalized through Fabián, but where one might expect

a window into his psyche, one comes face to face with an extended simile. This

constant deferment creates the impression that Fabián and the other characters

are merely literary constructs. Beyond the obvious fact that they are, in fact, such

constructs—many novels, including the work that stands at the head of the genre

in the Spanish-speaking world, Don Quijote, make explicit the fictional

construction of their characters—one feels that Portela’s characters are nothing

but constructs, that is, that they fail to express a human essence at all. The

characters’ psychology must either be guessed at or pieced together carefully

from the cultural references that stand in for psychological interiority. The latter

approach seems like a fool’s errand, given the narrator’s explicit warning: “yo

cito alegremente, sin preocupaciones de ninguna índole” (137).17 Critics have

puzzled over Portela’s use of citations and allusions. Some, citing the relative

lack of references to the Cuban canon, see it as an attempt to orient Cuban

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literature outwards, toward foreign (and here one can read “universal”) models

(Peris Peris 14).18 Others, perhaps closer to the truth, see a kind of narcissism at

work in these citations, which serve no obvious purpose other than to display the

author’s considerable erudition.19 The simplest, and best answer to this puzzle

(one supported by the narrator’s own statements) is that the citations are, in fact,

excessive and gratuitous.

! The argument sketched here is that these references—inasmuch as they lack

systematicity, and because they stand in for the inner life of the novel’s characters

—weaken the novel by preventing authentic character development. Portela’s

characters become armatures of people, taking the shape of authentic individuals

but without internally driven transformational experiences. The players take the

stage and interact with each other according to their natures, but these natures

are, in a sense, costumes.

! A related matter is the question of what kind of reader would “get” these

literary references? Only a critic well-schooled in both the classics and popular

culture could hope to decipher them all. It is certainly odd to think that a novel

by an author who often professes disdain for critics, and that contains a scathing,

parodic representation of literary criticism in general, may have been written (in

terms of its ideal reader) for nobody if not those very critics.

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! Despite the brutal send-up of postmodern literary theory that we see in El

pájaro, the novel itself relies on postmodern strategies of deferral and

fragmentation to avoid positing anything like a finished product, a well-

developed character, or a total work. This will to fragmentation is seen even at

the sentence level in formulations like “frente a un loco de rostro renacentista que

se muerde los labios como invitando a.” (41). Here again the structure is

truncated before any interiority is revealed, before we learn anything about what

Fabían might invite one to do, what he wants one to do. Likewise, with Camila

one gets only a vague sense of the purely literary desire of a purely literary

construct, as she searches for the author of a work of literature and of herself.

! The fragmentation and shifting perspectives mostly prevent the reader from

identifying with any particular character, with the possible, and partial exception

of Camila. Insofar as the reader identifies with Camila, it has to do with empathy

for her radical abjection. This changes when she knees Fabián in the groin. After

this event (which follows the aborted pregnancy), Camila takes on a more active

stance vis à vis her own actions, more mentally active (e.g. her critique of the

literatos at the university). But Camila’s transformation itself is never developed;

it has no process, no cause. There are no visible motivations behind her actions.

Camila and the rest of the characters are automata, driven by the need for a

minimal plot sequence rather than any kind of inner necessity. The novel fails to

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make lived reality a factor internal to the characters and their development.

Neither is the novel really about writing itself or about the writing of itself in the

way that Unamuno’s Niebla is, for instance. There are moments of meta-literary

commentary, i.e. about literature itself, but an extended, critical reflection on the

writing process seems absent. Thus, the novel lacks a central theme, which fails

to emerge from characters whose lives seem arbitrary. That is, Portela’s

characters don’t develop organically according to the needs of the narrative.

Rather, they arise from the novel-form’s inherent need for a structuring narrative;

they spring, full-grown, from Portela’s head, who then plays them off against

each other in a kind of sandbox, in a watered-down, postmodern version of a

roman à thèse.

3.6 - Aesthetic Failure, Political Failure

! The aesthetic shortcomings outlined above are best understood as a

response to a particular social configuration in which both feminist politics and

the archetypical New Man enter a crisis phase. Generally speaking, some of the

features of special period narrative can be tied, more or less directly, to the crisis

of the 90s. Thematically, we see the emergence of a variety of urban underworlds

where crime, prostitution, and the daily struggle for subsistence make up the

immediate reality. We see a reduction of existence to quotidian concerns about

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food and security which can no longer be guaranteed by the State. We witness

the practical failure of the collective project and the emergence of a dog-eat-dog

salvage economy. Timmer, when describing Portela and her contemporaries,

notes the disappearance of the nation as an explicit referent. In other words,

being Cuban, even when the topic of cubanía appears in the Novísimos’ texts, it

no longer seems tied to a shared destiny or political project.

! Timmer, for instance, does a good job connecting social changes in Cuba

with formal changes in literature. She ties the appearance of the Novísimos and

their postmodern novels to a shift in thinking about subjectivity. No longer

preoccupied with collective identity, writers now focus on the individual, but

find that this individual is an unstable, fragmented (in a word, postmodern)

subject.

! It should also be noted that the 90s mark the crisis of what might be

considered the female counterpart of the New Man. The Cuban Women’s

Federation, or FMC, although it would describe its mission in somewhat

different terms, for years promoted what in the US would be described as a

second-wave feminist project, fighting for women’s right to equal work

opportunities and pay, and attempting to combat a patriarchal system that

enforces a second-shift. Movies like Portrait of Teresa (1979) dramatize this

struggle, depicting a noble, hard-working woman (portrayed by Daisy Granados,

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wife of director Pastor Vega) whose lazy husband expects her to be home at

certain hours, to do all the cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, etc. !

! The movie displays this situation as a conflict, not just between Teresa and

her husband, but between the revolutionary project and the retrograde machista

attitudes still held by many Cuban men. The revolution demands that everyone

work to maximum capacity (Teresa works a full shift in a factory, then works

additional hours designing costumes for a kind of cultural competition among

factory shifts). Teresa’s ability to optimally contribute to the revolution is

compromised by her husband’s refusal to share domestic labor.

! Julianne Burton, in an essay about Portrait of Teresa, points out that,

although the movie highlights problems like sexism, the double shift, and double

standards (doble moral), the film also refuses “to confront the complementary

issues of the sex-based division of labor and the socialization of children” (81).

Burton also writes that the film fails to challenge the commonly held belief that

“the lowest common denominator in sexual politics is not one sex "abstracted"

from the other, not women’s issues or men’s, but both sexes together as the basic

social unit: la pareja, the heterosexual couple” (94). In other words, while

critiquing Cuban society as excessively machista, Portrait of Teresa fails to get at

the heart of the gender-based separation of roles and the inequalities expressed

in and generated by heterosexual matrimony.

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! Teresa herself is a problematic female archetype. She is the avatar of a

particular kind of femininity, one consonant with Cuban officialdom’s gender

parameters. As early as the 1960s, the sort of woman that the revolution

promoted was an object of critique. Belkis Cuza Malé, one of Cuba’s long line of

talented women poets, penned the following verses as a response to the

revolution’s gender politics.

Están haciendo una muchacha para la época,

con mucha cal y pocas herramientas,

alambres, cabelleras postizas,

senos de algodón y armazón de madera.

El rostro tendrá la inocencia de Ofelia

y las manos, el rito de una Helena de Troya.

Hablará tres idiomas

y será diestra en el arco, en el tiro y la flecha.

Están haciendo una muchacha para la época,

entendida de política,

y casi de filosofía,

alguien que no tartamudee,

ni tenga necesidad de espejuelos,

que llene los requisitos de una aeromoza,

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lea a diario la prensa,

y, por supuesto, libere su sexo

sin dar un mal paso con un hombre.

En fin, si no hay nuevas disposiciones,

así saldrá del horno

esta muchacha hecha para la época. (Oviedo 147)20

Women’s politics in Cuba after 1959 have been inseparable from the Castro

regime. In 1960, an umbrella organization was created to unite several existing

women’s groups. Called the Federación de Mujeres Cubanas (FMC), the

organization was headed by Vilma Espín, revolutionary leader and eventual

spouse of Raúl Castro, until her death in 2007. The FMC’s house publication,

Mujeres, commemorated her death with a special dossier. Whatever Espín’s

personal attributes may have been, and notwithstanding her very real credentials

as a revolutionary fighter, she is depicted on the cover of the commemorative

issue as smiling and affable, in a military uniform that owes as much to the Girl

Scouts as to guerrilla warfare. As Maria Mies has noted, “many have seen this

direct participation of women in the guerrilla struggle as a direct contribution to

women’s liberation. Their reasoning is that women with a gun in their hand

would no longer accept male oppression and exploitation. But the history of the

national liberation wars . . . has taught us another lesson” (195).

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! Scholars have remarked on the “bland no-problems attitude” that

characterized Mujeres magazine for much of its history (Verity Smith; Nissa

Torrents). Notable feminist Germaine Greer visited Cuba for the Fourth

Conference of the FMC in 1985. She notes that Cuban women are expected to

synthesize varied and even contradictory roles—they must promote socialist

ideals while continuing to maintain the bourgeois nuclear family (Greer 289,

cited in Verity Smith).21 Even the conference logo exhibits these odd

juxtapositions, resembling an "art-nouveauish montage of Kalashnikov rifles and

Mariposa lilies" (271, cited in Verity Smith). Likewise, the May, 1981 cover of

Mujeres displays a woman nursing a baby while carrying a Kalishnikov. Shannon

Bell explains how official publications construct the Cuban female body as both a

working body and a maternal body, as laborer and mother.22 To this one might

add that the female body must also be a militant body and a sexual body,

available for fighting and fucking, should the need arise.

! The FMC itself has promoted, rather explicitly, this problematic image of

the militant female. Espín is called a “guerrilla bride” in the organization’s

official literature (Aguiar 28). It would be one thing if the leader of Cuba’s largest

women’s organization merely happened to be married to one of the highest

members of the male-dominated revolutionary government, but it is quite

another for that same organization, which assumes the mantle of feminism and

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even purports to improve upon “bourgeois” feminism, to describe its leader in

terms that evoke an idealized housewife: a “sweet, exacting, industrious, tireless

woman” (28).

! In 1990, the FMC created its Casas de Orientación a la Mujer y a la Familia.

It’s worth noting the circumstances under which these community centers were

created. They were initiated at the 6th FMC Congress, at which Fidel warned of

difficult days ahead and gave women “a mandate and a challenge” (28) to

prepare. The tone of the congress, according to Espín, was one of optimism: “We

saw how creativity was making its way. We never heard pessimistic remarks;

they talked about the solutions they were trying to find to numerous

problems” (28). It’s striking how much these remarks resemble those of capitalist

governments today, which celebrate creativity and promote optimism in the face

of painful austerity measures that differ from those imposed in 1990s Cuba only

in their absolute lack of apology or remorse for the coming immiseration.

! Despite Fidel’s admonition to prepare, the FMC found itself ill-equipped

to handle the challenges that women would face in the post-Soviet period. Like

virtually every other institution, it was forced to cope with a drastic loss of

funding. But it was also ideologically ill-equipped to deal with the realities of

privation. Something remained of the bourgeois mentality of Vanidades; when

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women faced the hard choice between prostitution and total immiseration, the

FMC could only moralize and minimize the problem:

Surveys conducted show that part of those girls have been

neglected by their families in several ways, and are characterized

by a lack of ethics and moral values.

! Frequently, the enemies of the Revolution, in tergiversation

and misinformation campaigns, use this issue in trying to

undermine the prestige of our social project by exaggerating the

size of the problem and distorting its causes. (Aguiar 21)

With such an outlook, the FMC had no hope of addressing the real causes of

gender inequality, domestic violence, or prostitution.

! In the 90s we see the practical death of Teresa as female archetype. The

FMC reaches unprecedented levels of unpopularity among women, who view it

as too closely imbricated in Cuba’s still mostly male political ruling class. The

FMC’s status as a feminist organization was never entirely clear. Even though the

organizations stated goals were to contribute to equal rights and opportunities

for women, its relationship to feminism was somewhat strained, due to the

political framework of the revolution. The FMC shared this dilemma with other

women’s organizations in the wake of successful anticolonial revolutions or

wars. As Mies notes, “an anti-patriarchal struggle . . . was prevented by the

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Marxist-Leninist parties which led the liberation wars, because all contradictions

among the people, including the man-woman contradiction, were subordinated

to the main contradiction between the nation and the imperialist power” (198).

Indeed, the FMC’s own literature exhibits this tendency as late as the 1990s: “the

most serious case of violence against women in our country is the inhuman and

brutal blockade that, for over 35 years, the United States has imposed on our

people” (Aguiar 21). This is true enough, but it allows the FMC and the Cuban

government alike to elide Cuban society’s own role in perpetuating gender

inequities and misogyny. Catherine Davies indicates that “socialists considered

feminism a white, middle-class phenomenon which had no role to play in

Cuba” (119). In other words, women’s issues were always subordinated to the

supposedly more central problems of class conflict, national underdevelopment,

and imperialism.

! Despite (or perhaps even because of) the establishment of the FMC in

1960, “[i]n practice, no women have held important government posts and few

women have any political power. Women are expected to work and bring up a

family, and their husbands do not help. Most women work long hours at the

workplace and do the housework (the ‘double shift’) without the benefits of

household commodities, aggravated by long queues for food and

transport” (Davies 119-20). The FMC was perceived to have failed at its core

176

mission: the betterment of women’s living and working conditions. Not only had

it failed to address problems like domestic violence and AIDS, it had failed to

reduce women’s household labor. In fact, as the State withdrew social services

during the crisis of the 90s, women were forced to pick up the slack, absorbing

the domestic work that could no longer be provided by government.

! If Teresa was the ideal female archetype for the FMC, it’s noteworthy that

the female characters in Portela’s novel are quite unlike her. Bibiana is a vapid

blonde, lacking both intelligence and depth; in fact, she’s little more than the

superficial objectification of a very typical (Westernized) kind of female beauty.

She is also unable to conceive, thereby making her unfit for the paradigm of

femininity on offer by the revolution. Camila is an abject figure, barely

distinguishable as female, who Fabián exploits for sex and domestic labor. Her

own pregnancy is aborted after she (perhaps intentionally) exposes the fetus to

radiation. Neither of these women are employed, and neither fits the mold

established by the revolution; in fact, they are antithetical to it.

! The male characters in El pájaro receive no better treatment. Fabián is

violent and abusive; Dr. Schilling, Camila’s physician after her breakdown, is

patriarchal and tyrannical; Emilio U. is a kind of bemused, failed demiurge,

unable to reconcile his own creation to himself.

177

! To return to the figure mentioned before, that of the truncated mise en

abyme, I’d like to suggest that this has to do with the failure of the male author to

close the charmed circle of his own narrative. Unlike novels like Unamuno’s

Niebla, for example, El pájaro doesn’t simply dramatize the dialogue between the

author and his creation. Instead, it completely confuses the narration and its

characters with the supposedly extradiegetic reality of Emilio U. The novel

gestures at the mise en abyme, but there are too many contaminations. That is,

Emilio U. himself remains within the infinite regress. The narrator cannot, in the

end, escape his own narrative, and becomes part of its formal logic.

! The Dionysian aspects of the novel, which include its gender-bending and

shapeshifting characters, the fragmented and elusive thread of its narrative, and

its ludic interplay of citations (the juxtaposition of Rousseau with Rayuela and the

Second Declaration of Havana), finally elude the rational intentions of the male

author. In a few, isolated apostrophes in which the narrator addresses the reader,

the novel interpellates this reader as feminine. On at least one occasion, this

direct form of address includes the bracketed possibility of a male reader, but this

appears as an afterthought, as a parenthetical (o) denoting masculine

grammatical gender. It’s as if the novel were conscious that its formal

dramatization of the male author’s failure is also at the same time the failure of

the masculine reader, who is forced to accede to the demands of this open,

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contaminated narrative, to accept the impossibility of the male-for-himself qua

formal device.

! The novel’s fragile unity depends on this masculine narrative voice,

around which the many other voices and perspectives coalesce. There are really

two Emilios, the narrator and the character in the novel: Emilio narrator and

Emilio narrated. Upon Fabián’s mysterious disappearance, the link that the other

characters have to Emilio the character also disappears. Emilio the narrator,

however, remains behind as the implicit (meta)narrative voice. This highlights

the difference between the diegetic Emilio, Fabián’s lover, and the ghostly, merely

formal presence of that other Emilio, now understood as isomorphic with the

novel’s form.

! This foregrounding of the novel’s form as explicitly male should be read

against the context of the underrepresentation of women authors in Cuban

literature. Between 1959-1984 nearly 200 novels were published by men. In

comparison, women published 12, many of which were not really novels but

testimonios, memoirs and other supposedly feminine genres.23 Davies points out

that prerevolutionary Cuba did not have a strong tradition of women novelists,

but that one would expect an egalitarian cultural politics to have changed this, or

at least to have made inroads (123-24).

179

! In the post-Soviet period, despite the vastly reduced number of published

works overall (due to scarcity of paper), there is something of an explosion of

women novelists. Some have speculated that this is because Cuba’s young male

writers left in larger numbers during the balseros exodus that began in 1989

(Cámara).24 Whatever the case may be, it seems clear that the 90s brought greater

opportunities for women to publish.

! Portela herself is sensitive to the fact that she is treated as a novelty in

ways that a male writer would not be. For example, when critics mention her

erudition and the fact that she avoids local themes and color, she enumerates a

long list of Cubans (Martí, Casal, Carpentier, Lezama Lima, Abilio Estévez)

whose work incorporates non-Cuban, cosmopolitan elements, and points out

that nobody asked (or asks, in the case of Estévez) these men why they include so

many references to so-called universal culture. As far as women authors go, she

says, the more ignorant they are (or pretend to be), the more successful they are.

In an interview, she states: “[M]ientras más borrica, desinformada y ñame sea la

fulaneja en cuestión, mejor, pues así queda más cuqui, más sexy, más

femenina.”25

! The novel, then, challenges masculine literary dominance. Its very

existence contests the primacy of male authors in Cuba’s domestic book industry,

its style challenges traditional conceptions of what constitutes masculine and

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feminine literature, and its form questions the ability of the male author to

dominate the genre and the material.

! I would extrapolate this still further and make the claim that this is a

manifestation of an epistemological collapse, one perhaps best expressed in

Reina María Rodríguez’s poem, “Al menos así lo veía a contraluz.”

“era a finales de siglo y no había escapatoria.

la cúpula había caído, la utopía

de una bóveda inmensa sujeta a mi cabeza,

había caído”

The ideal of the hombre nuevo, embodied by Che Guevara and disseminated

through his images, has crumbled, leaving behind individuals who must either

attempt to reconstruct an identify from the broken shards of the socialist project

or forsake the ruins and face the equally painful dilemma of exile.

! It must be emphasized that the hombre nuevo remained a kind of

institutionalized and normative subjectivity that was both masculine and

heterosexual. In the 90s, I would argue, this masculine subject enters its crisis

phase. Movies like Strawberry and Chocolate attempt to upgrade the New Man for

the times by allowing him to indulge his literary sensibilities and even have gay

friends. But Strawberry and Chocolate, along with Juan Carlos Tabío’s Waiting List

(2000), which attempts to revive a fading collectivism, are fighting a rearguard

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action as events overtake the hombre nuevo and replace him with figures like

jineteros and pingueros, cocotaxi drivers and hotel service workers.

! Interestingly enough, though, Portela doesn’t advance anything

resembling a vindication of a more “feminine” form of writing, much less a

feminist subjective standpoint. This is unsurprising in light of the previous

discussion about the FMC and the limitations of feminist politics in Cuba.

Portela’s novel seems to erase the gender binary altogether, just as it erases the

distinction between the textual and extratextual.

! If Padura, et al., belong to the literatura del desencanto, Portela’s is the

literatura del ensimismamiento. The characters in El pájaro are emotionally (and

sometimes physically) isolated, even from the reader, who is kept at arm’s length

and is mostly unable feel empathy for them. Disenchantment has not

disappeared entirely, but rather has only been solidified into the outlook of a

generation whose refusal to even consider (either positively or negatively) the

Utopian solutions of the past speaks for itself. The fact that Utopia disappears as

a visible presence in the work of the Novísimos is a testament to its failure. The

so-called generation of disenchantment still treats Utopia as a real possibility—

it’s just that this possibility now appears as retrospective, in the mode of “if

only.” In the work of the Novísimos, Utopia vanishes completely from the

horizon of thought. It is no longer conceivable. Leonardo Padura registers this

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generational shift in La neblina del ayer, which recognizes that, for the younger

generation, Conde’s idealism makes him seem like an extraterrestrial.

! El pájaro, on its surface, also rejects Utopian solutions. The characters are

emotionally or physically isolated. The outside world, beyond the small, self-

contained circle of the four central characters, seems hardly to exist. Beyond the

casual sexual encounters that Bibiana and Fabián have with occasional,

anonymous lovers, the characters avoid the society of others. When they do come

into contact with others, that external sociality is invariably depicted as

grotesque (Bibiana’s conversation with the bar patrons, the absurdity of the

university lectures, etc.). Fabián has no contact with his neighbors other than

Bibiana; likewise, Camila’s paralysis and inability to speak keep her isolated

from others in the hospital.

! The exception to this isolation is the moment of solidarity in the hospital

when one of the caregivers reads the story to Camila. This moment, one that

cures and transforms Camila (even if this transformation is only dimly sensed by

the reader), is one in which an emotional connection is created between Camila

and the story read to her, a connection later assimilated to its author, Emilio U.

This occurs despite the novel’s otherwise total rejection of literary groupings and

movements, as evidenced by both the aforementioned critique of academic

literary scholarship and the parodic representations of a more artistically

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oriented literary society, one suspiciously similar to Reina María Rodríguez’

famed rooftop circle.

! Camila’s felt solidarity with the text and its author, Emilio U., demonstrates

that the Utopian impulse still exists, even though its realization is now a formal

impossibility, according the reading I have outlined, in which Camila cannot

succeed in her quest for Emilio without destroying the novel’s entire narrative

frame. But the search itself is the manifestation of a sublimated Utopian impulse.

It should be recalled that Camila’s transformation and subsequent quest for

Emilio were sparked by reading a story in Salvador Redonet’s anthology, Los

últimos serán los primeros. It was this anthology that first posited the Novísimos as

a coherent literary movement or generation. Here, a generational collectivity

embodied in an anthology inspires Camila to search for Emilio, the

representative of that generation, in an attempt at solidarity or bonding. Camila’s

sublimated desire for belonging manifests itself as Camila’s interaction with, and

search for, the avatars of her generation (the Novísimos), respectively

represented, in objective and subjective form, as Redonet’s anthology and Emilio

U.

! Even though the novel disavows literature as both academic discipline and

collective artistic praxis, it reinstates a notion of Literature as the key to personal

transcendence. Hidden in this conception of literature and bound together in the

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idea of generation (itself placed under erasure or displaced by a single text by a

single author) are the concepts of collectivity and history. But history and

solidarity are presented as purely literary phenomena, as an interplay of texts.

Seen in this way, the proliferation of allusions now seems to take on an

ideological function, as relations among people now appear as relations among

things—among texts, in this case—in something approximating Melanie Klein’s

object relations theory, but without the relationship between the characters’ inner

life and their environment ever emerging. Likewise, the human ability to

transmit experience, to empathize, to commiserate, etc. is undermined by the

constant substitution of image for affect, that is, of gratuitous cultural references

for psychological or social representation. The novel implicitly posits a Literature

that can compensate for this loss of affect. This is its fatal mistake, both

ideologically and aesthetically. The replacement of a self-consciously Utopian

project of which literature formed a part by a rather mystified yet still Utopian

conception of Literature surely cannot be seen, in either social or literary terms,

as an improvement.

185

186

1 Cuban critic and essayist Margarita Mateo Palmer, in addition to Cabrera

Infante and Arenas, names Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, Virgilio Piñera,

and Severo Sarduy as “ilustres antecedentes posmodernistas,” but falls short of

claiming that any of these writers were in fact postmodern. See Mateo’s Ella

escribía poscrítica (Lexington, KY: Atom, 2010).

2 See Ileana Zéndegui, The Postmodern Poetic Narrative of Cuban Writer Reinaldo

Arenas (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2004).

3 Neil Larsen, in “Postmodernism and Imperialism” and elsewhere, argues that

testimonio is, in fact, a postmodern form of literature, since it responds to the

need, sensed by scholars in the North American academy and elsewhere, to give

voice to alterity, to the marginal, or to the subaltern. In Cuba, however, even

though it was here that testimonio gained its initial impetus, the genre still

functions as an ideologically legitimizing strategy for the revolutionary regime.

To take Barnet’s Cimarrón as an example, Montejo’s voice is instrumentalized in

order to make the socialist project even more totalizing, giving it roots in the

historic struggle of black slaves. In other words, it seeks to incorporate alterity

into the national project of economic modernization.

4 See Fornet’s “La narrativa cubana entre la utopía y el desencanto.”

187

5 Nanne Timmer, “Dreams that Dreams Remain: Three Cuban Novels of the 90s,”  

in Theo d’ Haen and Pieter Vermeulen (eds.), Cultural Identity and Postmodern

Writing (New York: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 190-91.

6 Ibid., p. 191.

7 In the late 1980s, partly as a response to Cuba’s economic woes and partly as a

reaction to the economic and social liberalization occurring in the Soviet Union

under the media catchwords glasnost and perestroika, Castro began a campaign of

rectification of errors. This campaign, among other things, brought stricter

prohibitions of private enterprise, attempts to combat bureaucratic corruption

and inefficiency, and an increased idealism in an attempt to recapture the

effervescent spirit of the revolution’s first decade. In part, Paz’s work responds to

this increased idealism with an attempt to make the New Man more

compassionate and tolerant towards groups, including gays, who had

traditionally suffered repression.

188

8 Despite Strawberry and Chocolate’s rather obvious apologia for patriarchy and

officialdom, it is quite good, as is most of Gutiérrez Alea’s work. Emilio Bejel, in

Gay Cuban Nation, and James Buckwalter-Arias, most recently in Cuba and the

New Origenismo, both point out that the film’s vindication of the aesthetic values

of Cuba’s Orígenes group and its leading figure, José Lezama Lima, subtly

critiques the cultural politics of the Castro regime. Likewise, the film is still seen

by many as a watershed in terms of the public’s perception and acceptance of

gays in Cuba.

9 Patricia Valladares Ruiz, in her dissertation, Subjetividades sexuales y nacional en

la narrativa cubana contemporánea, claims that a queer standpoint in literature can

be “un gesto y una actitud a través de los cuales se pueden develar y denunciar

las contradicciones . . . y socavar las bases de un sistema que se sustenta en la

visión dicotómica del género” (54).

10 Mateo makes the same argument in Ella escribía poscrítica, in an essay/chapter

titled “Los novísimos narradores cubanos o Chicago en Cárdenas.”

11 Some writers, most notably Luisa Campuzano, label Portela a “posnovísima,”

due to her relative youth. I do not maintain this distinction.

12 For Portela’s recounting of these events, see the interview published under her

name in Nuevo Texto Crítico, pp. 11-12.

189

13 Timmer (“Dreams that Dreams Remain,” 196) attributes this quote to Nara

Araujo, in “Erizar y divertir: La poética de Ena Lucía Portela,” Unión 42 (2001),

22-31. In the version of Araujo’s article published in Semiosis 7 (2001), 20-32, the

statement does not appear.

14 Kant’s Ding an sich, or thing-in-itself, refers to the “raw” existence of something

independently of its sensorial or cognitive apprehension.

15 See Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Chapter 12, Sec. 5.

16 Neil Larsen, in an unpublished essay titled “Literature, Immanent Critique and

the Problem of Standpoint,” has developed a notion of literature as an “affective

object,” that is, as a non-empirical object whose formal properties generate affect.

17 Cecilia Peris Peris devotes portions of her dissertation to documenting, and

attempting to systematize, the abundant cultural references found in El pájaro:

pincel y tinta china.

18 Peris Peris reads Portela’s novel as it seems to want to be read, as a literary

object defined by its atemporal relationship to the Greek canon. The logical

outcome of this reading would imply that the novel enacts its own “end of

history” by removing itself from contemporary literary history and theoretical

debates, thereby transcending its sociohistorical context.

19 See Emilio Bejel, Gay Cuban Nation.

190

20 The author of these lines, incidentally, was caught up in the infamous “Padilla

affair,” and was briefly jailed after being accused of counterrevolutionary writing

by her husband, Heberto Padilla, in his well-publicized “confession.”

21 It’s as though the FMC was unable to exorcise the ghost of Vanidades, the über-

bourgeois women’s revue (think Cosmopolitan en español) that was nationalized

and became Mujeres.

22 See “The Political-Libidinal Economy of the Socialist Female Body.”

23 See Patricia Valladares Ruiz, “Subjetividades sexuales y nacionales en la

narrativa cubana contemporánea (1990-2003),” unpublished dissertation,

Université de Montréal (2005), p. 119. Also see Luisa Campuzano’s 1988 essay in

Letras Cubanas “Woman in the Narrative of the Revolution: An Essay on

Scarcity” (cited in Davies 126). Campuzano established that 12 “novels” had been

written by women from 1959-1983. Two were by exiled authors, three were

testimonios and not really novels, three were detective novels, and two are

described as being very bad. The two that stand out among the twelve, according

to Campuzano, are Dora Alonso’s Tierra inerme and Mirta Yañez’ La hora de los

mameyes, both using a rural setting. Catherine Davies, in her study of Cuban

women’s literature, mentions 6 additional novels from 1959-84, which she

describes as “not particularly inspiring” (127). In any case, a ratio of 18/200

novels points to a clear paucity of publishing opportunities for women novelists.

191

24 Madeline M Cámara, “Antropofagia de los sexos como ‘metáfora de

incorporación’ en ‘La urna y el nombre (cuento jovial)’ de Ena Lucía Portela,”

Torre de Papel 7.3 (1997), 167-83.

25 Iraida López, “Ena Lucía Portela,” Hispamérica 112 (2009), 49-59.

Chapter Four

Love and Labour Lost: José Manuel Prieto

and Jesús Díaz Confront the Crisis of Work

4.0 - Introduction

! José Manuel Prieto and Jesús Díaz, two Cubans in exile, each published a

novel within a year of each other, in 1999 and 2000, respectively. This would be

unremarkable, especially for authors as productive as these two, if it weren’t for

an odd similarity between the two books. Prieto’s Nocturnal Butterflies of the

Russian Empire and Díaz’s Siberiana are both about love affairs between a Cuban

man and a Siberian woman. Upon reading, the similarity begins to dissolve:

Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire takes place in formerly communist

Eastern Europe shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc while Siberiana is set

about a decade and a half earlier in Siberia; Prieto’s prose is lush, wending its

way through a non-chronological series of retrospections, while Díaz’s plot is

more linear, driven forward relentlessly by an unpretentious, yet skillful diction.

The love affairs themselves are also very different. In Díaz, the affair is explosive

and tragic; in Prieto, it peters out wistfully after its initial spark. If at first glance

these novels appear related in subject matter, they diverge considerably in style

and thematics. But that is not to say they don’t share deeper affinities. I argue in

this chapter that the formal development of both novels betrays a preoccupation

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with global events after 1991, specifically with the demise of the socialist bloc

and the promise of worker-led government.

! One of the assertions this dissertation attempts to sustain is that formal

relationships between literature and its social-historical context exist and can be

identified if sufficient attention is paid to both the works and the social and

literary milieu. Until now, my readings have concentrated mostly on Cuban

novels’ relationship to the island’s domestic economy and sociocultural trends,

examining the connection between Padura’s La novela de mi vida and

contemporary shifts in political culture and the socioeconomic status of Afro-

Cubans, revealing Ena Lucía Portela’s first novel as a response to the failure of

gender politics as practiced within the framework of the revolution, and

describing Abilio Estévez’s aesthetics as a critique of both the instrumentalization

and commodification of culture. The present chapter broadens the scope of

analysis and reads Díaz and Prieto’s novels in terms of the post-Soviet era as

experienced by a significant segment of the world’s population in countries once

considered socialist. These two novels lend themselves to such an analysis

because they are set in the former Soviet Union or its satellites and were written

in exile by writers deeply familiar with the Soviet bloc both before and after its

collapse.

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! The transition from socialism to the market economy has played out

differently in each country. In places like Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine, the

period has been marked by the rise of right-wing nationalism. In other places,

like Cuba and China, the state has maintained a greater degree of control over

industrial and monetary policy. Despite the many differences, whose

enumeration lies outside the scope of this work, there are certain shared

experiential realities that should be highlighted. For example, in virtually every

socialist country but North Korea, the state has either abandoned or relaxed its

cultural politics. This creates an opening for civil society to play a more active

role in the redefinition of national culture. The state has also, in varying degrees

and at varying speeds, withdrawn social safety nets like medical care, education

and child care subsidies, employment guarantees, and pensions. (It’s worth

noting, in terms of what I characterize in the Introduction as the false opposition

of socialism and capitalism, that Cuba’s recent cuts to workers’ pensions and its

abolition of the libreta (ration booklet) mirror similar developments in advanced

capitalist countries like the US and the UK.) Three historical developments

common to the former Soviet bloc and Cuba should be highlighed here:

(1) Culture has replaced oppositional politics (the fight against

Western capitalism or imperialism) as the center of gravity of

national identity.

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(2) Individuals no longer have their market transactions mediated

primarily by the state. The individual is not the direct agent of

commodity exchange.

(3) The nature of work has changed drastically as economies

undergo tertiarization, with important implications for workers’

subjectivity, including notions of gender identity.

In what follows, I will show that these developments leave their trace in both

Díaz’s and Prieto’s novels and that the post-Soviet historical moment forms the

aesthetic substance of both works, although this is less obvious in Siberiana,

whose historical content predates the post-Soviet period by at least two decades.

4.1 - Prieto

! José Manuel Prieto (1962– ) was born in Havana. He attended the Instituto

Vladimir Ilich Lenin, a vocational prep school. Upon finishing his studies there,

in 1980, he travelled to the Soviet Union to study computer engineering. He lived

in Novosibirsk for five years. Since then, Prieto has lived mostly abroad,

returning to Cuba only occasionally. He has lived in Saint Petersburg, Mexico

City (where he earned a Ph.D. in History from UNAM), and New York. His

novels include Enciclopedia de una vida en Rusia (1998), Livadia [Nocturnal

Butterflies of the Russian Empire] (1999),1 and Rex (2007). He has also written

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numerous short stories, essays, translations, and a travel narrative, Treinta días en

Moscú (2001).

! Prieto flies easily through the world’s literary stratosphere—he is a

member of the PEN American Center and his books are heavily promoted in

publications like The New York Review of Books and the Frankfurter Allgemeine

Zeitung. Like fellow Cuban exile and historian Rafael Rojas, he has held a string

of prestigious Visiting Professorships at Ivy League universities.

! Prieto’s status as a card-carrying member of the liberal cultural elite is less

interesting, perhaps, than his deep familiarity with Cuba and the Soviet Union in

the period before and after the latter’s collapse. Much of his fiction interrogates

this transitional period. Indeed, the late and post-Soviet periods in Russia could

be considered the central preoccupation of his oeuvre up to the present. In an

interview published in the Parisian daily Le Monde, Prieto admits as much about

both Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire (henceforth Butterflies) and his

latest novel, Rex: “Mais tout comme Papillons de nuit, Rex est une réflexion sur

l’époque postcommuniste.”2 While some, notably Rojas,3 insist on reading

Butterflies strictly as an allegory of Cuba, it seems that taking Prieto at his word is

a reasonable starting point: Butterflies, then, is an attempt at a literary

interpretation (as opposed to an allegorical depiction) of the post-Soviet state of

affairs, not in Cuba so much as in Europe.

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4.2 - Butterflies

! Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire is the story of a Cuban known

only by the initials “J.M.”4 An erstwhile writer, he now works as a smuggler,

moving contraband across the porous borders of post-Soviet Eastern Europe,

profiting from unstable currencies and fluctuating exchange rates. Although he

usually smuggles conventional commodities or military hardware like the night-

vision goggles featured on the cover of the original Spanish edition, J.M. accepts

a rather odd commission from a wealthy Swede: to capture a rare specimen of

butterfly from its last known habitat, the shores of the Caspian Sea. Failing to

locate the butterfly, he travels to the Crimean peninsula, to Livadia,5 where he

believes a specimen may be found. First, though, he stops in Istanbul, where he

meets V., a butterfly of another sort, a papillon de nuit (in less romantic terms, a

whore) indentured to an Armenian pimp. Enamoured of V., J.M. plays the hero,

breaking her out of the seraglio and smuggling her out of Istanbul on board a

merchant ship, just as he usually smuggles commodities across borders. Prieto’s

novel narrates these events and other events through a series of retrospective

meditations occasioned by the letters J.M. receives from V. while waiting in vain

for her to join him in Livadia. In vain, because she had tricked him into rescuing

her, then abandoned him at the first opportunity. J.M. realizes, too late, that this

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butterfly’s powers of mimicry had gotten the best of him, and that like the

yazikus, he would never capture her.

! In Butterflies, the letters that J.M. reads and writes obsessively function as

as both Leitmotiv and plot device. J.M. is obsessed with letters; he reads not only

V.’s letters but also epistles both famous and obscure, too many to enumerate but

which include Dostoevsky’s letters to Marfa Brown, Marx’s correspondance with

Vera Zasulich, and several Pauline epistles.6 The novel’s final scene has J.M.

burning V.’s letters, along with his notes and extracts from the letters he has

studied. The only thing that escapes the flames is the draft of the novel itself. The

letter-burning erases the traces of the novel’s creation. The letters function as a

vanishing mediator between the story and its telling; they are the lost steps of the

writing process of the novel we read.

! But something else is lost when J.M. destroys the letters: the voice of V.

herself. Her story is not told in her own words, but rather in those of her would-

be rescuer. Exploring J.M.’s psychology and, in particular, his obsession with

letters, will reveal a great deal about what the narrator’s ventriloquizing of V.

might signify.

! The letters are an example of a handmade, artesanal product. As such, and

for a reason to be explored at some length, they fascinate J.M. They also function,

in contrast, as a sign of abstract, disembodied wealth. The letters both reveal and

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conceal, much as a banknote expresses value while concealing its source. These

letters, which I’ve described as vanishing mediators, are analogous to a different

kind of vanishing mediator, the commodity itself, as a peculiar object possessing

both abstract and concrete dimensions. Recall Marx’s famous first chapter to

Capital, in which he describes the commodity as “an ordinary, sensuous thing”

that “changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness” because, in addition

to being a physical object, a use value, it also contains an abstraction called

exchange value, or simply value, which, Marx goes on to say, “no chemist has

ever discovered” in a commodity.

! J.M.’s treatment of letters as simultaneously tangible and intangible is an

expression of his fetish for the concrete, material properties of commodities. He is

obsessed, for instance, with a handmade knife made of reindoor horn. But he

also worries constantly about the “density” of his contraband, wondering how to

obtain a more favorable ratio of profit to mass—in other words, how to jam more

value into a smaller, more easily concealable commodity. Here there is a parallel

with Prieto himself, who was reportedly eager to change the Spanish title of his

book from Livadia to Mariposas nocturnas del imperio ruso when he realized that

rebranding it would mean greater sales. This is mentioned here, not to identify

the author with J.M., his creation, but to signal that the book’s protagonist

expresses, mimetically, a concern with the same market realities that an actual

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person—Prieto—must consider in order to realize the value of a commodity.

J.M.’s concern with value—with the abstract or spiritual—is seen repeatedly in

his invocation of money as precipitate, akin to water vapor that can suddenly

materialize out of the atmosphere under certain conditions (the ethereal

becoming material), and, finally, in his own “bilocationality” as he himself is

finally rendered both abstract and concrete in the climactic out-of-body

experience.

The lights were on in my room. Strange because I had left early,

going to Massandra for the wine. I stood quietly in the soft glow

through the lace curtains, which were drawn back: someone had

been in my room.

! The same light flowed under my door, spilling out to

illuminate the whole passage. I advanced slowly, my wings trailing

heavily, feeling them scrape against the parquet floor, until they

began to grow smaller, diminishing my great feeling of euphoria,

expelling the air that had swelled my lungs as I floated above the

couples making love in the sand, hearing the cries of the women,

seeing them clearly though they could not see me. Like an angel or

an enormous night bird soaring over sea and shore. (311)

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The quoted passage describes the strangely voyeuristic, real or imagined

transformation of J.M. into a butterfly. Although he later reunites with his human

body, waiting for him in the room, this moment marks what the narrator himself

understands as a spiritual transformation. The remainder of this section is

devoted to what this transformation means in terms of the post-Soviet moment

in Europe and beyond.

! J.M. is a smuggler, a particular kind of commercial capitalist, in

contradistinction to Stockis, the Swede, who is a money capitalist. Stockis fronts

the money for the night vision goggles, which J.M. retrieves and valorizes by

exploiting the currency differentials and economic conditions at play in post-

Soviet Eastern Europe. From Stockis’ perspective, his outlay valorizes itself, since

he is removed from the labor performed by J.M, the merchant capitalist.

. . . because money advanced as capital has the property of

returning to the person advancing it, to whoever spends it as

capital, because M–C–Mʹ′ is the immanent form of the capital

movement, for this very reason the owner of money can lend it as

capital, as something which possesses the property of returning to

its point of departure and of maintaining and increasing itself in the

movement it undergoes. He gives it out as capital because, after

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being applied as capital, it flows back to its starting point. (Marx,

Capital, Vol. 3 471).

Stockis can let go of his capital in a laissez-faire manner because the laws of

circulation and interest assure him that it will return, enlarged, to his

outstretched hand. In one scene that foreshadows what J.M. will percieve as V.’s

betrayal, Stockis requests a bottle opener from Lars, his yacht’s machinist, just as

V. approaches in search of J.M.:

From below Lars warned, “I’m going to throw it!” or “Here it

comes!”. . . and launched the opener in a soft curving trajectory,

making it easy for Stockis to calculate its flight and put out a hand

so it landed in his palm. I had to get up and answer. It was V. She

would be gone in a minute. (148-49)

Everything comes easily to the wealthy Stockis, but J.M. sees his willingness to

wager his money as vulgar (215), because Stockis has no concept of the

calculations involved. He leaves the management of risks to J.M., just as the

factory owner leaves the daily management of the production process to a

worker elevated to the superintendency of labor. J.M. is in a peculiar position: on

one hand he is simply a small-time merchant, buying cheap and selling dear; on

the other, when working on behalf of Stockis, he functions simultaneously as a

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kind of commercial capitalist and as the supervisor of his own labor as manager

of the capital entrusted to him by the Swede.

! J.M.’s strange ideas about bilocationality—that he is simultaneously in

two places at once—and his obsessions with the material and immaterial

properties of letters (and commodities, more generally) stem from his dual role

as both capitalist and laborer. His work as a smuggler places him in the

simultaneous role of commercial capitalist and worker. As capitalist, the letters

(and commodities more generally) fascinate him as a representation of wealth

and as a potential source of wealth; as worker, they represent a Utopian image of

unalienated labor, insofar as they retain some vestige of handicraft or artesanal

labor.

! Prieto’s narrator engages with the need to engage in commerce while

simultaneously regretting its intrusion into every aspect of life. J.M. would like to

maintain the distinction between the commercial sphere and the domestic one,

but he is unable to conceive of V. as anything but a commodity. When V.

challenges her status as commodity, J.M. feels that his masculinity is threatened

and reacts angrily, even demonstrating a certain homophobia. When J.M. realizes

“at last that V. wasn’t coming” (276) and takes refuge in Oscar Wilde’s “De

Profundis,” he asserts his own heterosexuality while assuring the reader he isn’t

at all bothered by Wilde’s queer sexuality:

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About Wilde’s imprisonment: the whole thing started with a letter,

a little note, an accusation (which was not calumny, as Wilde and

his lawyer tried to claim) of pederasty. So what? That didn’t bother

me a bit, it wouldn’t have bothered me to be one and I’m not, so

help me God! (278)

And again:

I could figure out how much I had invested in V., for example, what

it had cost to bribe the captain of the Mikhail Svetlov, the pile of

dollars I’d given him, on top of a bottle of the finest cognac, things

like that. But the truth is that I spent it on a woman (not a man),

and a beauty besides. (278-79)

! Throughout the novel, the narrator betrays a misogyny of a particular

kind. It is a misogyny that, on one hand, he seems to overcome through his

transformation—his decision to no longer hunt the butterfly (pursue the woman)

—but which remains unexamined on a deeper level. There is no recognition of

misogyny as such. It is a "casual" misogyny because it is mostly non-aggressive,

manifesting itself as a sort of "benign" sexism of the kind which leads J.M. to

engage in patriarchal rescue fantasies like the one in which he imagines

rescueing both V. and her counterpart Leilah from the seraglio only to install

them in a locus amoenus that, objectively, would function as his own harem.

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I would have liked to rescue them both, since V. was very fair,

while Leilah’s skin was a shade or two darker in the creases inside

her knees and elbows, skin that could stand up to a lot of sun. We

could go for long swims in the sea while V. waited under the pine

trees. . . . (254)

J.M. thinks women are stupid, incapable of understanding optical physics, for

instance: "I would have to describe [iridescence] very simply so that she could

grasp it. Not an easy task" (283). Women, in J.M.’s imagination, "always run off

with your money" (7), are "swindlers trying to steal my bags" (11), set traps for

men (128, 235), and are skilled in the black arts of mimicry (131) and

counterfeiting (163). Already we have seen that J.M. is perplexed by his decision

to let V. interfere with his business plans (his quest for the yazikus); now it

becomes clear that J.M. thinks that women, due to their nature as thieves and

deceivers, undermine the rational calculus on which his profit-making depends.

Many of J.M.’s reflections on women, taken together, establish a clearly

delineated sphere of feminine activity, corresponding to what we often call the

domestic sphere. Women, for instance, are the best letter writers (165) and even

those letters which have been deemed fit for publication, written by men, are

attributable to the support role of women: "behind them--and behind my draft--

are invisible letters from women, true works of art, sublime" (166). When women

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are not acknowledged to perform this invisible, backstage role, they are

described as possessions:

V. was my woman in Istanbul (176);

she was mine (8);

or bad investments:

I see I’ve been wasting my money on a woman who offered so

little security, her reserves seeming to vanish right before my eyes,

like the currency of some weak country, flimsy paper money. . . .

(234-35)

Women are associated most often with enclosed spaces where goods and

possessions are stored: brothels, harems, warehouses, woodsheds. When V. dares

to challenge her status as property, she provokes a visceral reaction in J.M:

I had been way too easy on V., I thought, when what she needed

was a couple of súkas (bitches) from me—yelled out harshly,

through clenched teeth, or flung lightly, carelessly—to grab hold of

her wrists and shake her memory of the past, make her see I had

her, she was mine. (8)

J.M. never acts on these impulses, but they are present despite (and perhaps

because of) his self-understanding as a chivalric male.

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! His anxiety is rooted, in part, in that V. could be anywhere in boundless

Russia. He has lost the ability to control her movements like he can control the

movements of merchandise across national borders, through customs, and into

the hands of the buyer who will pay him a sum calculated precisely in advance.

The random flight of the butterfly is unpredictable.

! V. attributes—falsely, according to J.M.—her successful escape to the

intervention of a feminine deity. “From all this horror Isis had saved us” (282).

J.M. disputes this because he is holding on to his macho rescue fantasy.

[O]ne thing was perfectly clear: I had saved her; she could hardly

deny that, even if it was equally clear that all the assistance I had

lent was not disinterested, that I had approached her in the café

across from the Saray figuring on getting her into bed, exercising

that “energy vampirism” of hers, gaining absolute dominion over

her. . . . (282)

! Yet another sign of J.M.’s will to dominate V. is his behavior in the hold of

the ship. Once the danger of discovery by the pimp is past he and V. have sex.

J.M. is obsessed with night-vision goggles. Of the many kinds of merchandise he

moves across borders, it is the night-vision goggles that he mentions most often.

! The latent militarism represented by the goggles—both in the text and on

the book’s original cover7—finds an unlikely parallel in the so-called boevik novel

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which emerged in post-Soviet Russian literature. The boevik novel evolved from

the more politically orthodox detective fiction of the Soviet years. As Jeremy

Dwyer explains,

The post-Soviet Russian detektiv revival can be traced back to 1994,

when Viktor Dotsenko first started to win a large audience for his

series of novels about heroic crime-fighter Savelii Govorkov, who

goes by the pseudonym ‘Beshenyi’ (’The Wild One’). Within two

years Dotsenko’s blend of fast-paced action, extreme violence,

advanced weaponry and sex was being embraced by millions of

readers, and he was identified among the most popular authors in

Russia. (6)

Dwyer goes on to analyze boevik literature’s “attempt to reconstruct post-Soviet

Russian masculinity and the anxieties that emerge from this attempt” (9). As he

shows, the boevik hero’s masculinity is strangely passive, especially in contrast to

his frenetic and violent exploits. Dwyer connects these and other self-

contradictory aspects of post-Soviet masculinity to the “more general

disorientation following the Soviet Union’s collapse” (21). While Prieto’s novel

bears no overt relationship to boevik literature, the general development of J.M.’s

masculinity follows a similar course towards passivity. After sex with V., J.M.

puts on the goggles and contemplates each section of V.’s body, surveilling her

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“like a predatory insect with compound eyes” (270). Here, J.M. is cast in the role

of hunter—the woman is his prey. But his final transformation involves

renouncing the hunter’s role.

! While waiting in vain in Livadia for V. to arrive, J.M. begins a sexual

relationship with a Tartar woman, Alfiá, whom he uses as an audience for his

“interminable speeches” (282). Alfiá is mute, and therefore cannot converse with

J.M.; she can only listen passively.

“It was lucky the Tartar was my audience and not V., a woman with

plenty of ideas of her own, who objected to everything, with whom

I would have to argue, trying to convince her of the opposite, no

matter what the subject, I have to say it was the ideal combination:

Alfiá, who listened to me in silence, representing, you might say,

the silent majority of Russia, and V., who offered her words from

afar, to whom I could reply only in writing. (282)

Alfiá’s mutism makes her the ideal interlocutor for the masculine writer. As

mentioned previously, J.M. is not really interested in a conversation, even with V.

He destroys her letters in order to rewrite them in his own voice, a classic case of

speaking in the name of the subaltern. Alfiá is a Tatar woman; as such she

belongs to Russian (now Ukranian) Crimea’s repressed minority.

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! J.M.’s colonization of the Tatar woman takes a different form than that of

the Soviets and the tsar before them, whose preferred course of action regarding

the Tatars was to forcibly deport them en masse.8 J.M. is content to marginalize

Alfiá, possessing her body, her bed, her home, without ever acknowledging her

as a lover, much less an equal like V., whom he is grudgingly forced to recognize

as such. There is something pathological about “love” in Butterflies—it’s

inevitably connected with domination, as in the sexual act on board the merchant

vessel on which J.M. stowed V. away like so much cargo. V. would have been

destined to the sphere of domesticity (like Alfiá) if she had not taken on

“masculine” attributes by asserting her right to leave the domestic space of the

seraglio and the equally domesticated space of a relationship with J.M. or Stockis.

J.M.’s letter burning is the symbolic silencing of V., a way to relegate her to the

status of the mute Tatar woman.

! In Prieto’s first novel, Enciclopedia de una vida en Rusia (1998), we see an

earlier version of J.M., who tells the story of his beginnings as a merchant-

smuggler:

Pero una tarde, allí mismo en la cocina del bar, leí un titular del

Berliner Zeitung, un ejemplar que asomaba de la chaqueta del

cocinero. . . .

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! Verkauf, Inkauf. Palabras fáciles de descifrar. Verkauf im

summer. . . . Plan de rematar las muy decentes mercaderías

oestealemanas. Despejar kilómetros de estantes para el tremendo

empuje de la Bundes Republika. Dresde, Potsdam y Karl-Marxs-

Stadt con todos sus Grandes Almacenes en remate. ¡Los precios

irrisorios! . . .

! Y bueno, lo logré porque ya estaba en el secreto, sabía que

hacer dinero, enriquecerse, era una virtud. Había superado las

estrecheces de Marx y redescubierto la sencilleza adámica (Smith),

un excelente apoyo teórico para un uso más propio del ÁBACO.

(73)

The basic outlines of the J.M. in Butterflies are already here: his obsession with the

“secret” of money making and his predilection for the simple calculus of buying

and selling. The abacus is already a sign of his fetish for rationality and

simplicity, an ancient device rendered obsolete by the complex calculations

required by modern finance. But the world emerging in Butterflies is a complex

and irrational space where value calculations are less important than price

speculation. J.M.’s transformation is indeed like that of a butterfly’s; he changes

form, but remains the same species—Geldsubjekt.

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! In fact, like the butterfly, J.M. can be thought to have achieved his real

form, just as the “butterfly is the true image, the incarnation of the soul, the

entelechy of the caterpillar” (299-300). J.M.’s symbolic transformation (his

dematerialization in the out-of-body experience) demonstrates his acceptance of

the new economic reality. He no longer pursues the butterfly (V. or the yazikus)

because he realizes that the physical commodity no longer matters. He renounces

the concrete in favor of the abstract, the ephemeral and the fictional. The yazikus

may not exist, but J.M. discovers he can proceed as if it does, selling any old

butterfly to Stockis and cashing in. Likewise, he addresses his long-meditated

letter to V. using her real name, Varia. This word, which in Spanish denotes

plurality, indeterminacy, and inconstancy, symbolizes the slippage from J.M.’s

previous insistence on the materiality of goods (the reindeer horn knife, the

viscera of the musk ox, etc.) to a new notion of value no longer moored to the

concrete useful substance of the commodity. In other words, he comes to accept

the terms of the newly emerging credit economy, whose practices he once

rejected as vulgar forms of gambling.

! J.M.’s decision to no longer ‘hunt’ women as he ‘hunts’ profits isn’t a

personal spiritual transformation so much as an adjustment to the new reality of

commodity society, one that all Cubans, whether on the island’s black market or

in making sense of the complex geopolitical market forces in exile (as, say, a

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writer must do in order to publish) must now face at a time when the state ceases

to function as a kind of meta-capitalist in lieu of its citizens. By this I mean that

there is a way in which the Special Period, with its dual currency system, turned

every Cuban into a currency speculator,9 creating a new kind of monetary subject

(Geldsubjekt) as individuals replaced the State (the collective subject) as the

primary market players or agents of commodity exchange. That this monetary

subject is the narrative subject-form of Prieto’s novel proves that the author has

indeed succeeded in a literary representation of the post-Soviet moment, if only

to affirm it.

4.3 - Jesús Díaz

! If in Prieto’s novel the protagonist’s metamorphosis is motivated by

economic transformations, in Jesús Díaz’s novel the tragic resolution responds

equally to the economically grounded political dilemma of the former Soviet

sphere. Jesús Díaz, in contrast to Prieto, who flaunts his refined bourgeois tastes

for all to see and admire, is an unlikely exile from an island which, arguably,

represents the most successful experiment in socialism ever undertaken. Díaz

was long a committed revolutionary and, while certainly critical of the Cuban

government as an exile in Europe, his opposition arose from a nuanced position

"within the Revolution." Fredric Jameson’s description of Díáz in the introduction

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to The Initials of the Earth (the only one of Díaz’s works to be translated into

English so far) gives some sense of the complexity of Díaz’s political position,

which fails to be expressed in the Spanish pejorative gusano, often used to refer to

members of Cuba’s exile community (especially the Miami-based group).

[. . .] It would be wrong to think that Jesús Díaz (1941–2002) was

only a political novelist, or indeed that he was only one example of

the Cuban writer and intellectual among others. In fact . . . he was

an extraordinary personality and a very distinctive figure—a

passionately political militant (deeply involved in the Nicaraguan

revolution as well) and a filmmaker of high quality, whose works

also have something to teach us about the way films can be political

and have political consequences. (Lejanía [1985], or The Parting of the

Ways, in particular, is one of the few serious and successful

meditations on the difficult personal relations between Cubans

living in Miami and those living in Havana.) Nor is Díaz, a

founding member of the exile journal Encuentro, to be assimilated

to the garden-variety dissident (motivated by personal or

professional interest), even though his exile from Cuba was

occasioned by strong official displeasure with the 1990 film on

which he collaborated, Alice in Wonderland, a critique of Cuban

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bureaucracy in the fictional small town of Maravillas. At that point,

Díaz was on a research fellowship in Germany, where he remained.

But it is certain that his initial position of critical sympathy with the

revolution hardened into an implacable critique of Castro and the

revolutionary state, as his exile lengthened (an exile tragically

brought to an end by his premature death in 2002).

! Whatever the meaning of this evolution (which was

profoundly political and militant, as Díaz could not cease to be), it

is important to avoid the omnipresent Cold War misunderstanding

whereby any critique of socialism and bureaucracy is a sign of

nascent dissidence. On the contrary, the critique of bureaucracy is

one of the central vocations and distinguishing characteristics of

socialist literature as such. (xii-xiii)

It’s clear that despite efforts on both sides to portray his exile as a definitive

break with socialism and a renunciation of his former ideology, one is hard

pressed to find statements from Díaz himself to support such a conclusion. His

exile seems to have been a reluctant one, however controversial it was to his

archenemies on the right and his former compañeros on the left.10 Between the

repudiations of his former friends on the island and the wild-eyed conjectures of

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the hard-line, reactionary sectors of the exile community,11 Díaz carved out his

own space for an independent leftist debate on Cuba.

! Much of Díaz’s work responds to his own biography, exploring themes

like censorship (Las palabras perdidas) or the complicity of intellectuals in an

authoritarian regime (La piel y la máscara). Numerous parallels can be found

between his fiction and revolutionary Cuba. Many of his characters (like el Flaco,

el Gordo, el Rojo, and Una in Las palabras perdidas) are based on himself, his

friends and acquaintances. His narrative, however, responds to much more than

these thinly disguised references. Díaz has always been sensitive to a work’s

historical context and the ways in which literature can age. In an interview with

Lilliam Oliva Collman (Cuban Studies 29, 1999), Díaz explains why he undertook

a complete rewriting of The Initials of the Earth when its publication was finally

approved after a decade of censorship.

En 1985, Armando Hart fue nombrado Ministro de Cultura. Hart

designó a Alfredo Guevara para que diera una opinión sobre la

novela. A fines de ese año, se me autorizó la publicación. Hasta

entonces yo no había vuelto a releer la novela. Los diez o doce años

que habían pasado le habían hecho daño. O yo había cambiado. El

hecho es que a mí no me gustaba la novela por razones literarias.

Entonces, entre el 85 y el 87, la reescribí. (156-57)

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Díaz’s responsiveness to his milieu demands a reading of Siberiana that pays

careful attention to both the historical material in the novel and its contemporary,

post-Soviet context.

4.4 - Siberiana

! Siberiana is the story of an Afro-Cuban journalist who travels from his

tropical country to the frozen wastes of Siberia to report on the construction of

the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM), an epic railroad project developed as a

strategic alternative to the Trans-Siberian Railway, which connects the Russian

heartland with the Soviet Far East. The reporter, Bárbaro Valdés (a name with

religious, racial, and historical resonances), sees his journey as a quest. Indeed,

the plot trajectory mimics the myth cycle, in which the hero must surpass a series

of obstacles in order to fulfill his destiny. The object of Bárbaro’s quest is to have

sexual relations with a woman: the pyschological motivation to overcome a

repressed sexuality and the notion of coming of age or Bildung, both traditional

novelistic tropes, are compressed here into the more archaic and archetypical

questing hero of myth or romance. One hardly knows what to make of Bárbaro:

he has the makings of an interesting protagonist, yet he is transformed into a flat

archetype by the story’s mythic elements. This is a fundamental tension in the

novel, because as Bárbaro’s character develops, he emerges as a compelling and

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contradictory figure. Abused physically as a child by an alcoholic father and

raped as an adolescent by an army official who also kept Bárbaro’s older sister as

a mistress (and who was nevertheless the only father figure he had), Bárbaro is

plagued by insecurities stemming from his family’s extreme poverty and the

abuse he suffered at the hands of his father. Bárbaro’s sexuality doesn’t fit neatly

into the traditional gender binary and, for this reason, his father committed many

acts of cruelty against him, including forcing his son to destroy his favorite toy, a

dollhouse that provided an imaginary escape from poverty and his horrible

family life. The adult Bárbaro’s sexuality is likewise uncertain. He appears as a

very large, masculine man, yet is extremely timid—he is afraid of heights and

flying, and is intimidated by women. His timidity is such that, on the few

opportunities that he has had to sleep with women, he has suffered from

impotency. Bárbaro’s “gender trouble” is both psychological, rooted in his

childhood experiences,12 and symbolic, since he personifies the syncretic deity of

Santa Bárbara, the Catholic saint who provides cover for the hypermasculine

Yoruba god, Changó.

! When Bárbaro arrives in Irkutsk after the long flight from Havana, with a

stopover in Moscow, he is confronted immediately with the two most formidable

obstacles of his quest: the brutal cold of the Siberian taiga and Nadiezdha, the

woman who has been assigned as his interpreter and guide as he visits the

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worksites along the BAM. The narration follows Bárbaro as he suffers the effects

of sub-zero temperatures, including pneumonia, and the frustrations of his

attraction to the icy Nadiezdha, who herself seems to be fighting an internal

battle against her sexual attraction to the Cuban.

! This is perhaps the moment to delve into Siberiana’s backstory. We have

seen that Bárbaro, in his role as journalist, travels to Siberia to report on the

construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM), a branch of the Trans-Siberian

Railway built as a strategic alternative to the original route (still in operation),

sections of which lie close to the Sino-Russian border. The construction of the

BAM was an epic undertaking, a kind of macroevent in the history of the Soviet

Union.

! The project’s history covers most of the 20th century. As Christopher Ward

outlines in his historical study, Brezhnev’s Folly, the Building of BAM and Late Soviet

Socialism,

[t]he BAM of the 1970s and 1980s [Siberiana’s historical setting] was

not the first undertaking to carry the name Baikal-Amur Mainline

Railway. Built between 1932 and 1941 and 1943 and 1953,

respectively, these endeavors stretched from Komsomolsk-na-

Amure in Khabarovsk Krai (region) to Sovetskaia (also known as

Imperatorskaia) Gavan, also in Khabarovsk Krai. These railroads

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were built by labor camp inmates, military personnel, and in the

case of the 1943-1953 project by thousands of German and Japanese

prisoners of war.

! It is estimated that perhaps 150,000 of these forced laborers

died during construction of the railway, which was abandoned

after Stalin’s death in March 1953. The idea of restarting the BAM

project would not gain official favor until the Brezhnev era. (5)

Brezhnev tacitly recognized the loss of life that characterized earlier attempts,

vowing to build the railway “with clean hands only” (Ward 8). While the BAM

did not use forced labor, this does not mean that it didn’t take a significant

human toll.

! The mythical image of the BAM as collective trailblazing to the future,

promoted in Soviet newspapers, and which included a typically Stakhanovite

“Hero of Socialist Labor,”13 stood in contrast to the reality of life in the work

zones. There were, however, instances of “heroic” labor and clever technical

solutions to problems. Matt Castle recounts one such episode:

The tunnels were particularly troublesome. The unswerving

straight-line commitment of the original Soviet planners meant that

in a number of cases, tunnels were built unnecessarily: later

geological reviews suggested that acceptable diversions through

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easier terrain were possible at greatly reduced cost and with

minimal increase in the distance of the track. Yet with

commendable enthusiasm the Soviets dug onwards. The Dusse-

Alin Tunnel was successfully built in the Stalin era without any

survey work whatsoever; incredibly, when the two tunnelling

teams of BAMlag14 workers met in the middle, they were out of

alignment by only 20cm. But while the passage lay abandoned for

twenty years, water seeped in through the bedrock and froze solid.

The dismayed railway engineers of 1974 were left with the problem

of dealing with 32,000 tonnes of ice blocking the shaft–and also of

disposing of the frozen bodies of the gulag workers they frequently

stumbled on while reconditioning the tunnel. When all else failed,

the Soviets resorted to raw power. The workers jury-rigged an

aircraft jet engine at one end of the tunnel, and hit the ignition. Its

stream of superheated exhaust rapidly blasted a path through the

wall of ice, clearing the tunnel for further work. (“Building the

BAM”)

Ward’s book outlines many of the problems faced by workers along the route,

which included freezing winter conditions, an insect-plagued summer season, a

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patriarchal and misogynist social environment, racism, loneliness, corruption,

crime, and tremendous environmental degradation.

! Upon completion, BAM failed to become a viable transportation corridor,

temporarily ending hopes of developing an industrial heartland along the

transportation nodes in Siberia. Too often, the failure of these projects under

socialist regimes is used as the centerpiece of a morality play that counterposes a

“misguided” socialist politics with its “enlightened” alternative: capitalism and

liberal democracy. After 1989, History (in its role as cosmic arbiter) was thought

to have passed judgment in favor of the latter. Much of the celebratory rhetoric

has cooled, however, in light of the global economic crisis that now afflicts every

area of the planet, no matter how “capitalist” or “socialist” any given country

was thought to be. Some historical materialists have been grappling with the

Soviet Union’s relationship to what has typically been considered capitalism

proper: the liberal West. One diagnosis is developed theoretically by Robert

Kurz, who uses the term “catch-up modernization” (nachholende Modernisierung)

to describe what other observers, with varying degrees of insight, have called a

“deformed workers’ state” or “state capitalism.”15 Kurz’s premise is that, as

industrialization became a global phenomenon, national economies were forced

into a brutal competition that meant that economic backwaters like Russia could

only catch up to the more industrialized countries in Western Europe and North

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America by developing rigid command economies capable of mobilizing

thousands of workers in vast projects like the BAM.

! Although the era of these massive, state-sponsored projects has seemingly

ended, the search for alternatives to the overloaded Trans-Siberian line has

revived the dream. Russia hopes to resuscitate its Far East, whose population has

been in decline since the 1990s.16 The success of the BAM will depend largely on

whether Chinese exports continue to expand, because the need to expand the

Eurasian rail corridor results from the limited capacity of Pacific ports to handle

the volume of container traffic to the US. This provides an opening for the BAM

to become economically viable, because an Atlantic-Eurasian export corridor

could reduce transport time from China to the Eastern US by around 3 weeks.

Russian president Medvedev has promised to invest $15 billion in the BAM to

add a second track and make it capable of handling modern containerized freight

at competitive volumes and rates. It’s unclear, however, whether Russia will be

able to maintain this kind of public spending in the face of inflation and a serious

budget deficit, and with economists everywhere making shrill calls for austerity.

One thing is clear: if the railway does get upgraded, it will be on the backs of

those who will never benefit from the riches that stream across Siberia.

! The recommencement of the railway’s construction in the 1970s, not on the

backs of slaves of political prisoners, but by exploiting poor Russians lured to

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Siberia with the promise of higher pay and other incentives, forms the historical

ground from which Siberiana’s narrative springs. Yet this history is sublimated in

the work, emerging obliquely only through certain details and suggestions: in the

parsimonious description of the construction camps, as the premise for Bárbaro’s

reportage, and in the curious attitude of the protagonists.

! Bárbaro is in Siberia to report on the greatness of the Soviet spirit, its

technological prowess, its conquest of nature, and so forth. His task is to

mythologize the BAM for a Cuban audience, adding to the legend of Zlobin and

the other “spectral saints of labor.” But he finds that these laborers have been

mythologized in quite a different way.

! Nadiezdha and Bárbaro are kept apart by the climate, culture, and the

harsh living and working conditions in Siberia. Most of all, though, what keeps

them apart is Nadiezdha’s sense of duty, which manifests itself in her strict

professionalism as an interpreter and in her loyalty to her husband Sachenka, an

ex-political prisoner who, like Nadiezdha’s father, had been forced to work in the

Kalyma mines. Sachenka is a ruined man, a miserable alcoholic. Nadiezdha

cannot contemplate leaving him, however, because Siberia’s political prisoners—

especially those who remain voluntarily in Siberia—occupy the highest levels of

her value system. These men are the “reyes morales de aquel mundo” (81).

Russians residing in Siberia are saints or demigods, living there through “la

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sagrada combinación de la voluntad de Dios y el libre albedrío que los convertía

en elegidos” (81). The word choice here is critical: elegido, or “chosen one,”

resonates strongly in Cuba. It is a word that has been used to refer to the

generation of Cubans who grew up after the Revolution and who were thought

to be the builders of socialism. It is also used as shorthand for Cuba itself, as the

pueblo elegido whose historical mission it is to build (or preserve) socialism for the

future. It is also commonly employed in elegies to martyred revolutionaries like

Che Guevara or Abel Santamaría, to whom Silvio Rodríguez17 dedicated his

Canción del elegido. It is a word with almost religious overtones. Nadiezdha’s

reverence for the Russian elegidos is rooted in their status as revolutionaries. But

the men of Siberia are not armed insurrectionists; they are building the

revolution with their labor, providing the raw materials for industry and

undertaking the “Project of the Century,” as Brezhnev called the BAM.

! The central figure in the novel, that which drives the dynamic of the

relationship between Bárbaro and Nadiezdha, and which makes the plot

possible, is labor. The labor of railroad building, of journalism, and of

interpretation forms the novel’s ground, its underlying reality. Nadiezdha’s

reverence for the martyrs of labor forces her and the Cuban into a tense dance, in

which they both orbit around the recalcitrant problem of Sachenko like binary

stars around a black hole.

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! There is another connection between the novel and proletarian revolution,

one that can be understood only in terms of Jesús Díaz’s intellectual biography.

Díaz appeared on Cuba’s literary scene with his award-winning18 episodic

narrative of urban and rural revolutionary struggle, Los años duros (1966).

According to Seymour Menton’s exhaustive Prose Fiction of the Cuban Revolution

(1975), Díaz’s first work was published at “[t]he highpoint of Cuban novelistic

production” (39). The period saw the appearance of major novels like Lezama

Lima’s Paradiso (1966), Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres (1967), Sarduy’s Cobra

(1972), and Carpentier’s El siglo de las luces (1962). Díaz’s story collection brought

him a measure of fame and influence that placed him at the forefront of this

effervescent period of intellectual and literary innovation in the late 1960s. Díaz

was a founding member of two of Cuba’s most influential journals: El Caimán

Barbudo, begun as a literary supplement to Juventud Rebelde and now

approaching its fiftieth anniversary, and Pensamiento Crítico, a journal published

by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Havana. The latter

publication, despite its brief, four-year lifespan, was enormously influential,

contributing to the cross-pollination of ideas among Latin American

revolutionaries and the North American and European New Left. Pensamiento

Crítico was also a primary source of theoretical inspiration for the Sandinistas

and for the Salvadoran revolutionary Roque Dalton. Jesús Díaz was on the

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journal’s board of directors and was responsible for the selection of texts and the

preparation of a number of special issues. In 2000, Díaz would describe the

journal’s beginnings—and its end—in his new journal, Encuentro de la Cultura

Cubana:

No teníamos formación filosófica, desde luego, e intentamos una

vuelta a los clásicos del marxismo combinada con un

redescubrimiento de clásicos cubanos de los siglos XIX y XX —

Varela, Martí, Varona, Ortiz, Guerra—; con la frecuentación de

heterodoxos europeos de los años veinte —Lukacs, Koch, Gramsci,

Luxemburgo—; con la de historiadores de la revolución rusa —

Deutscher, Carr—; con algunos economistas bolcheviques de la

primera hora —Preobazhensky—; y con pensadores

contemporáneos de izquierda de Europa Occidental —Althusser,

Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer—. El cóctel, desde luego, fue

explosivo; estaba compuesto por ingredientes similares a los que en

París, México y Praga conducirían a la revolución del 68, y que en

Cuba, paradójicamente, propiciarían el fin de la revolución. . . . En

esa atmósfera nació y se desarrolló la revista Pensamiento Crítico; de

esas raíces partieron su grandeza y su miseria. La tarea que nos

habíamos autoasignado consistía en contribuir a rescatar la riqueza

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original del marxismo para conectarla con sus desarrollos históricos

y contemporáneos en Europa y también con las culturas cubana y

latinoamericana, y utilizar el resultado como un arma «cargada de

futuro». Empezamos a traducir como locos. Muy pronto

entablamos correspondencia y canje con nuestros pares, las revistas

de la nueva izquierda en otras latitudes: Cuadernos de Ruedo Ibérico

en el exilio español; Pasado y Presente en Buenos Aires; Quaderni

Rossi y Quaderni Piacentini en Italia; Partisans en París; New Left

Review en Londres y Monthly Review en Estados Unidos, entre otras.

Amigos como Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn, Javier Pradera,

François Masperó, Paul M. Sweezy, K. S. Karol, Fernando Henrique

Cardoso, Laura Gonzáles, Rossana Rosanda, Saverio Tutino y otros

muchos nos consideraban sus interlocutores. Todos pasaban por

nuestra oficina si visitaban Cuba. Regis Debray compartió con

nosotros muchas jornadas durante sus largas estancias en la isla.

(“El fin de otra ilusión” 112-14)

The intellectual contact and reciprocal influence Díaz describes here can be

verified in Kepa Artaraz’s book, Cuba and Western Intellectuals since 1959, which

documents the influence, mostly forgotten, of the Cuban revolution on the

international New Left. The journal’s impact within Cuba was somewhat

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different. Rafael Rojas, in Tumbas sin sosiego, describes the significance of one of

Díaz’s essays.

Una contribución especialmente valiosa de Jesús Díaz a la revista

fue su ensayo «El marxismo de Lenin. Del X Congreso a la muerte

(1921-1924)», aparecido en el número 38 de 1970. El tema de la

relación de Lenin con el marxismo clásico había sido tratado antes

en la revista por medio de reproducciones de textos de

Lunacharski, en el número 27 de 1969, y de Althusser en el 34/35 a

fines de ese mismo año. Jesús Díaz, sin la menor inhibición frente a

las autoridades en la materia, desarrolló sus atrevidos argumentos

sobre Lenin, insistiendo en pasajes polémicos de su biografía

intelectual y política como las «desgarradoras disyuntivas» entre

«internacionalismo o chovinismo, desarrollo o estancamiento,

democracia o burocratización, contrarrevolución y comunismo». En

la interpretación de Díaz se mezclaban, naturalmente, la mirada del

novelista y el razonamiento del filósofo. De ahí su interés en captar

«la imprescindible llama de utopía . . . y, bajo ella, toda la ciencia, el

realismo y la angustia de quien mensuraba las posibilidades y sabía

que eran pocas». La principal conclusión de su ensayo era que

Lenin, muy lejos de las semblanzas acumuladas por una mitología

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estalinista, era un pragmático, un realista del poder: «Lenin

reconoce exactamente el sentido real de la historia, por sobre el

sentido ideológico de todos los marxistas ortodoxos y

neortodoxos.» (314-15)

It is far from clear that the antibureaucratic and antidogmatic tone of Díaz’s essay

—somewhat exaggerated by Rojas—was what ultimately provoked the Cuban

government to shut down Pensamiento Crítico. It seems unlikely, given that

sixteen more issues appeared before the end of its run. Rather, the magazine’s

eventual closure reflected a broadening gap between Cuba’s official ideology and

the international New Left, whose preoccupations were mirrored closely and

influenced by Pensamiento Crítico. Nevertheless, Rojas is right to highlight its

significance. Díaz’s had an editorial role at the journal; rarely did he author any

pieces other than brief introductions to some of the issues. Among the 51 issues

(of a total of 53) that I have been able to consult, the Lenin piece is the only full-

length article that bears Díaz’s name. The essay was to be the final chapter in a

book about Lenin that, unfortunately, Díaz was never able to publish.

! The essay/chapter concludes with a description of Lenin’s final days. As

he lay dying, he was accompanied by his partner of many years.

El artículo está firmado un 2 de marzo de 1923, siete días después

Lenin sufrió un segundo ataque que lo privó del habla para

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siempre. Nadiezhda Krupskaya, que pasó junto a él todavía ocho

largos meses, cuenta en sus recuerdos que Lenin, antes de morir, le

indicó que le releyera un viejo cuento de Jack London en el que un

hombre que se sabe condenado por los hielos piensa en la forma de

morir dignamente. Se llamaba El amor a la vida y era el mismo

cuento que, herido, pensando que iba a morir, recordaría en el

combate de Alegría de Pío el comandante Ernesto «Che» Guevara.

(59)

It’s fairly obvious that Díaz’s fictional Nadiezdha is modeled on the real-life

revolutionary. Siberiana even includes the same death-bed vigil described in the

Lenin essay, where Bárbaro languishes, “condenado por los hielos.” Nadiezdha’s

most prominent feature, the deep creases at the corners of her unsmiling mouth,

likewise gives her more than a passing physical similarity to Krupskaya. And

while Díaz’s novel bears little resemblance to London’s survival tale, its premise

—the placement of an Afro-Cuban into the frozen wastes of Siberia—is a

typically naturalistic one. Within this strange constellation of political and

aesthetic tropes, the character Nadiezhda represents a revolutionary commitment

and a connection to the 1917 proletarian revolution. In the novel, though, the

object of her loyalty is transformed. In the place of Lenin stands a drunk,

unworthy of Nadiezdha’s firm resolve and commitment. The washed-up

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Sachenka is eventually displaced by Bárbaro, who, in this symbolic structure,

stands in for Cuba’s (incomplete) revolution.

! The novel’s climax is a scene of lovemaking on the icy banks of the Angará

River, a frenzied release of repressed desire that results in Bárbaro’s death. Here

he reaches the end of his trajectory as Romantic hero, yet the novel continues

with a different focalization. The last few pages belong to the title character

alone. The novel ends with the siberiana, Nadiezdha, drowning herself in the

semi-frozen waters of the river. Just as Bárbaro’s character derives from his

patron deity, Sta. Bárbara/Changó, Nadiezdha is the incarnation of Angará, who,

according to Buryat legend, is the daughter of the god Baikal, who drowned her

for trying to elope with a lover. Nadiezdha’s suicide, while fitting the Romantic

pattern, is in fact staged on the plane of myth.

! The novel, while it resists reduction to simple allegory, clearly has

something to say about the union of Cuba and the Soviet Union. Why else take

such pains to construct Bárbaro and Nadiezdha as cultural avatars of their

respective countries? Why turn them into expressions of Cuban and Siberian

folklore? What does it mean for an author like Díaz, who in exile still retained, I

believe, some kind of revolutionary commitment, if no longer a commitment to

“the Revolution” of the Castro government, to stage this union of nations as a

self-destructive impossibility?

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! Given the inevitability of grappling with the matter of allegory in Díaz’s

novel, it seems appropriate to begin answering some of these questions by

considering Jameson’s infamous essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of

Multinational Capitalism.” Jameson’s essay, published in 1986, has been the

target of numerous critics (Aijaz Ahmad among the most trenchant)19 who take

exception to Jameson’s “othering” of third-world literature as “necessarily

allegorical” in a way that “Western” literature is not. It’s not that this critique is

entirely invalid—both Prieto and Díaz challenge Jameson’s too-easy

generalizations by placing Cuba explicity on a liminal plane between the West

and its most obvious, albeit erstwhile political “other”: the Soviet Union—but

that it serves to obscure Jameson’s contribution to theorizing what was then

called the third world and is now labeled, with less precision, the global South or,

in the rarified discourse of the metropolitan academy, “postcoloniality.” One

suspects that much of the tendentiousness that has characterized reactions to

Jameson’s essay stems from its frontal assault on then-ascendant

postcolonialism’s “logic of singularity,” which, according to Peter Hallward,

refuses both relationality and mediation as determinants of its object.20 It’s no

wonder that Jameson’s attempt to specify, however broadly, a determinate

“third-world” literary mode in relation to another, differently but equally

determined, “Western” mode struck such a nerve among the anti-theoretical

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“theorists” of postcoloniality.21 It’s ironic that Ahmad’s Marxist critique of

Jameson’s failure to adequately account for the specificities of national, class, and

gender differences with the general category of “third-world literature” should

have been so eagerly echoed by those who oppose nebulosities like “hybridity,”

“interstitiality,” or “transnationality” to the sort of determinations Ahmad found

lacking in Jameson, who is invoked here in order to relate Díaz’s particular

allegory in Siberiana to a problem unique to the revolutionary intellectual in the

post-Soviet world.

! Imre Szeman suggests that, for Jameson,

the nation is the name for a frankly utopic space that designates

"whatever programmes and representations express, in however

distorted or unconscious a fashion, the demands of a collective life

to come, and identify social collectivity as the crucial centre of any

truly progressive and innovative political response to

globalization” [the quote is from Jameson’s “Globalization and

Political Strategy”]. (821)!

If this is indeed the case, then the allegorical elements in Siberiana must be read

against the fate of Cuba’s collective political program, the revolution itself, in the

“globalized,” post-Soviet world conjuncture. This implies that Díaz’s novel is the

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objective realization of the “allegorizing process as a structural tendency in the

narrative forms of ‘peripheral’ modernities” (Larsen, Determinations 19).

! But in Siberiana this allegorizing process occurs, not because of the novel’s

more obviously allegorical elements, but despite them. Díaz constructs the

allegory along cultural lines, bringing the Afro-Cuban elements into contact with

the harsh climate and strict social norms of Siberian Russia, but he is too much

the realist to end here. He proceeds to develop the characters until their

psychology emerges clearly and independently of the mythic elements.

! The twist at the end, the shift of focalization that forces the reader into the

belated realization that this is Nadiezdha’s story after all, obliges us to reconsider

Bárbaro in light of her life—and of her suicide—as a flesh-and-blood woman,

and not as the archetype Díaz forces her to become in order to complement

Bárbaro’s myth-symbolic identity. The mantle of deity fits Nadiezdha

uncomfortably, as if it were merely a formal necessity of the novel. It adds no real

complexity to her character and causes us to re-evaluate (and devalue) the

mythic aspects of Bárbaro’s character as well. This is an error of concept, not

execution; Díaz’s error is to have begun with the mythico-cultural premise

instead of the human and economic reality of Siberia and the construction of the

BAM. In a way, his mistake is similar to the one Marx reproached Ricardian

economist James Mill for in Theories of Surplus Value: abandoning reality as his

235

raw material (791). Just as Mill falls behind Ricardo’s point of departure, Díaz

fails to conceive Siberiana within the realist aesthetic of his best work.

! Díaz seems to want to suggest that Cuba somehow could have been an

antidote to the sort of joyless duty esteemed by the Soviets (Bárbaro embodies

this in his utter foreigness—his blackness—and this is why Nadiezdha is so

attracted to him). Díaz begins to articulate this difference via cultural archetypes,

but the character development, as I’ve stated, eventually undermines this

attempt. The biographical details of Nadiezdha and Bárbaro shift the narrative

away from myth into a more realistic mode. And a different sort of mythology or

hagiography begins to emerge: that of labor. The entrance of the “saints of labor”

into the narrative marks the definitive humanization of Nadiezdha, making it

impossible for her to remain a plausible archetype for Baikal’s daughter Angara.

She remains the daughter of a Spanish woman, Angustias, and thus points

toward another aspect of the Soviet legacy: the Stalinization of Republican

Spain.22 Nadiezdha’s suicide, as a re-enactment of Angara’s death, is Díaz’s

attempt to put the genie back into the bottle and provide closure to the now

rather tattered mythological structure of the novel. One might imagine a less

tragic ending for Bárbaro and Nadiezdha, one with less romantic overtones. But

there is a kind of formal regression at work in the novel, in which myth and

realism blend into a fatal Romanticism at odds with Díaz’s lifelong political and

236

aesthetic project. It’s his own theoretical reverence for labor as a classical Marxist

that closes down the possibility of transcendence for his characters. If the novel

is, indeed, a hidden allegory for the workers’ revolution, the redemption of their

labor no longer seems possible from the standpoint of the post-Soviet era. So the

regression of theory mirrors that of literature, and the path forward remains

obscured.

237

1 The book’s original title was Livadia, after the Black Sea resort town. The

English translation opted for the lepidopterous Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian

Empire. The Spanish version was quickly rebranded, and subsequent editions

carry the more picturesque and vaguely magical-realist title Mariposas nocturnas

del imperio ruso.

2 “But like Nocturnal Butterflies, Rex is a reflection on the postcommunist era.”

3 See “Las dos mitades del viajero.” Rojas flits indecisively between two barely

complementary readings: Butterflies as an allegory of “imperial” Cuba and of

periphery or underdevelopment. The latter interpretation strikes closer to the

novel’s heart, since Prieto wishes to depict the moment when Europe’s capitalist

core begins to integrate its periphery.

238

4 One should take care not to identify J.M. too closely with José Manuel Prieto.

J.M., known variously as José, Hussein, etc., is a recurring character in Prieto’s

work. While the character shares many biographical details with the author,

reading J.M. primarily as a fictionalized version of Prieto leads towards the

rather shaky ground of authorial intent or pop psychology.

5 US readers will be more familiar with nearby Yalta, where the famous post-war

conference took place. Although called the Yalta Conference, Churchill,

Roosevelt, and Stalin actually met in the nearby Livadia Palace, the tsar’s former

summer home. The historical symbolism here is obvious: Prieto uses Livadia to

bookend the Cold War. 1945 and 1989 thus mark Europe’s two most significant

political reorganizations of the 20th century.

6 One of these epistles, Paul’s letter to the Romans, is misattributed to St. Peter

(59).

7 As mentioned, the Spanish version of the novel was quickly rebranded after the

English translation’s title. If one removes the first Mondadori edition’s dust

jacket, a rather sinister image of a man peering through night-vision goggles

appears on the front cover.

239

8 The difference in the way J.M., the quintessential Westerner, and the “Russian

Empire” carry out their projects of colonization are could be the basis for a

humorous allegory: what the Soviets did crudely and excessively the Western

capitalist powers do nonchalantly, as if by natural right. J.M. follows (stalks)

Alfiá, interprets her silence as a welcome and enters her home without a second

thought, then takes a nap on her bed. Later he sleeps with her and subjects her to

“interminable speeches.” US presidents have given countless speeches about

democracy and human rights while simultaneously carrying out violent

occupations.

9 See Esther Whitfield’s Cuban Currency.

10 For instance, Aurelio Alonso’s prediction, made from the pages of La Jiribilla (a

journal founded in part as a response to Díaz’s Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana),

that Jesús Díaz would soon reconcile himself with such staunch anti-Castro

figures as Guillermo Cabrera Infante, seems to have missed its mark (see Alonso,

“La segunda vida de Jesús Díaz.”). I am aware of no meeting between the two

men, much less a "reconciliation." Indeed, the two authors seem to have avoided

each other during the decade or so in which they both lived in Europe. As far as I

know, Cabrera Infante never collaborated with Encuentro, the most visible and

influential Cuban cultural review since the halcyon days of Casa de las Américas.

11 As an example of the conservative reaction to Encuentro, see César Leante’s “El

largo brazo de Castro.”

240

12 Díaz’s treatment of sexuality in Siberiana, although still naive and

heteronormative by 21st-century academic standards (Bárbaro must sleep with a

woman to become an “authentic” man, the implicit attribution of his sexuality to

childhood abuse, etc.), is a major break from the apparent homophobia of his

younger years, expressed in texts like Los años duros and in his polemical attacks

on El Puente, a publishing group that he and his colleagues at El Caimán Barbudo

considered a rival. While it’s not entirely certain that Díaz’s criticism of El Puente

was motivated by homophobia, his polemic with its editor, Ana María Simo,

mentions “la disolución Ginsberg.” Alan Ginsberg unleashed a scandal during

his 1965 visit to Havana. His public comments about his sexual attraction to Fidel

and Che, his promotion of marijuana use, his criticism of capital punishment,

and his sexual affair with Manuel Ballagas (son of the reknowned poet Emilio

Ballagas) were too much for the strait-laced, macho revolutionaries in power.

(See Robyn Grant, “Seducing El Puente: American Influence and the Literary

Corruption of Castro’s Cuban Youth.”) El Puente eventually fell victim to the

cultural politics of the government and was shut down. In Díaz’s Las palabras

perdidas, the fictional version of El Caimán Barbudo is accurately and sardonically

portrayed as a male-dominated literary cult. Whatever Díaz’s shortcomings, the

inability to critically reflect on his own past doesn’t appear to be among them.

241

13 N.A. Zlobin was canonized as the prototypically enthusiastic proletarian,

whose track-laying brigade always surpassed the monthly benchmarks. This

humble guru of rail-building had supposedly stumbled upon a miraculously

effective method of laying track. After teaching his brigade members the secret,

he sent them down the line, like Jesus’ disciples, to spread the “good news” to

other laborers. Ward speculates that, given the absence of interviews or photos to

document Zlobin’s existence, the saint of the tracks may have been “as spectral

as the other components of the BAM ‘myth’” (“Selling” 8).

14 “BAMlag” is a reference to the use of prisoner labor during the first attempt to

build the rail line.

15 For a précis of Kurz’s “nachholende Modernisierung” and his account of the

“collapse of modernity,” see Neil Larsen’s Determinations, p. 49.

16 The magazine Slate once proposed that Russia sell the RFE to China, but the

persistence of nationalist sentiments and imperialist economic policies probably

makes this option politically unpalatable.

17 Silvio Rodríguez is an internationally recognized singer and songwriter

considered one of the founders of the Nueva Trova movement of the 1970s, a

politically charged renovation of trova, a traditional musical form that arose in

Oriente province. Nueva Trova was influenced by American folk singers who

opposed the Vietnam war, and ran largely parallel to the Nueva Canción

movement of murdered Chilean artist Víctor Jara (1932–1973).

242

18 Premio Cuento, Casa de las Américas (1966).

19 See Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness.”

20 See Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial, “Introduction” and Chapter One,

“Postcolonial Theory.”

21 The adjective “anti-theoretical” will, no doubt, cause resentment among the

disciples of Said, Bhabha, and Spivak. However there is simply no more accurate

way to describe a field that, in Hallward’s words, “does not offer [a] general

degree of clarity and distinction” (xi-xii).

22 This is a topic dealt with by Leonardo Padura’s sprawling historical novel, El

hombre que amaba a los perros (2009), which recounts the exile and eventual

assassination of Leon Trotsky.

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