Memories of Underdevelopment

In 1961, thunderstruck by the notion of vanquishing a 25% illiteracy rate, Fidel Castro ordered thousands of educated urbanites into the countryside to teach the ABCs to any peasant they happened upon. The success of the Literacy Brigades (Cuba not only leads Latin America in literacy; it surpasses the United States), is the most significant (and arguably sole surviving) triumph of the revolution. But it is one of the richer ironies of Castro’s island fiefdom that Cubans have nothing to read. Owing to decades of catastrophic economic mismanagement, a large segment of its hyper-educated population has no books, no paper, no pens.

Hence, in 1996, when a rare printing of a book appeared--10,000 copies of an anthology of short stories by women writers titled “Estatuas de Sal” (“Pillars Of Salt”)--it sold out in less than two weeks. A second edition of 10,000 sold out even faster. One visitor to the island reported that black market vendors were asking $10--two months’ wages for the average Cuban--per copy for the book and getting it. Now condensed, translated and reprinted in English, under the title “Cubana,” it’s fair to say the readers got their money’s worth. Notwithstanding a self-conscious foreword by Ruth Behar (not part of the original and disavowed in a footnote by the book’s editor and contributors), the voices of these 16 women writers are as refreshing and welcome as a chilled mojito on a steamy Santiago day. Its contributors include women living in Havana, Oriente and the United States, dissidents and boosters, gay and straight, black and white, young and old, introduced nicely by editor and contributor Mirta Yan~ez and ably translated by Dick Cluster and Cindy Schuster.

Most striking about this collection--in view of its original publication in Cuba--is its tart criticism of the government. Consider it the literary equivalent of “Strawberry and Chocolate,” the 1994 Academy Award-nominated Cuban film that savaged the government’s repression of gays. Some of the stories are overtly dissident, others gently mocking, but almost all are layered with the battle fatigue of life in Cuba today. In “The Egyptians,” Adelaida Fernandez de Juan offers a hilarious spoof of the government’s internal spy system. Set abroad, presumably in Africa, the story tells of a group of Cuban medical aid workers. Trained to be suspicious of all foreigners, they find themselves disarmed and bewildered by their friendly Egyptian counterparts. “When Habib asked me for the first time what life was like in our country, it spurred a series of meetings which our brigade chief deemed very necessary. . . . Meanwhile the Egyptians waited with Pharaonic patience, not comprehending why it took two or three cups of tea to find out whether it was easy to grow black beans or whether Cuban winters are very long.”

One of the most compelling stories is Rosa Ileana Boudet’s “Potosi II: Address Unknown,” in which a 40-year-old intellectual looks back on the glory days of the revolution and lovers who have fled. Her emotion-choked reminiscences include an intriguing and insolent reverie on Guillermo Cabrera Infante, author of the celebrated novel “Three Trapped Tigers,” who went into exile in 1965. In contrast to the exuberance of her past, her present life seems as bereft and empty as the shelves in a Havana market.

In dramatic opposition to Boudet’s cosmopolitanism are the characters and diction of Aida Bahr’s “The Scent of Limes.” Set in Oriente and narrated by a 12-year-old girl, it is an aching drama of mother-daughter alienation, an interracial love story and one man’s midnight flight from Cuba. “The weeping and trembling are letting up. . . . The sea was the loser, and Anibal with it,” writes Bahr of one more would-be escapee swallowed into the graveyard of the Florida Straits and the shattered hopes and devastation left in his wake.

Some stories have no politics, such as “Anhedonia” by Mylene Fernandez Pintado, which crisscrosses the parallel tracks of two friends who envy each other, and Marilyn Bobes’ moody story “Somebody Has to Cry,” which tells of four friends whose lives drift apart but whose influence over each other is locked in memory. Among the most haunting stories is the devastating portrait in Uva de Aragon’s “I Just Can’t Take It Anymore” of an elderly couple broken by illness, the pain of living, the costs of dying and indifferent children.

“Who would have thought that after twenty plus years of work and with a university degree, I’d have to stand here on this corner selling my monthly cigarettes?” groans the disgusted smartass narrator of Josefina de Diego’s “Internal Monologue on a Corner in Havana,” who goes on to mock the government’s penchant for initializing all its bureaucracies. “CADECA. . . . Such an ugly acronym, they really outdid themselves this time. There are other terrible, historic ones like CONACA or ECOA, but this one is the worst.” Even her reminiscences of “the good old days” prompt a sour memory. “The important thing is attitude, compan~era,” she is reminded by her superior in response to her complaint of being unable to make ends meet. Hungry for food and desperate for a smoke, she ponders: “To smoke or eat? that is the question” and concludes with an apt slogan for Cuba: “Life isn’t perfect and besides, it’s short.”

Uncomfortable soul-searching goes on in Nancy Alonso’s “Tooth for a Tooth,” a morality fable woven around the Mariel exodus in 1980. When thousands swarmed the Peruvian Embassy seeking to leave, Castro sanctioned their flight but encouraged Cubans to repudiate those who chose to leave. The story opens in the present day with Pepe Cruz, a university professor, scouring Havana’s markets in vain for eggs. He returns home to find a gift left by a visiting colleague who had fled during Mariel--a man who initially incited acts of harassment before defecting himself. The last time Pepe saw his friend was when Pepe joined a mob throwing eggs at him. As actos de repudios are common on both sides of the Atlantic (Miami Cubans are just as likely to hurl eggs and epithets against their visiting brethren), this story is particularly resonant and speaks eloquently to the 40-year stalemate between the two Cubas. Inside the gift box are eggs.

Like De Aragon, Achy Obejas, who contributed “We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?,” grew up in the States. Obejas’ story chronicles her family’s flight from Cuba, their awkward adaptation into the American mainstream, her father’s anti-communist ravings--”[Martin Luther] King was a Communist, he will say. He studied in Moscow, everybody knows that”--and her own life choices, at odds with her parents’ expectations. But it is the portrait of her late father that is unforgettable: On the day Teofilo Stevenson, the great Cuban boxer, scores at the Olympics, he leaps from his easy chair in front of the TV and cheers, his rancorous heartbreak and exile politics momentarily stilled. And during the playing of the Cuban national anthem in the background at the medal ceremony, he will “stand up in Miami and cover his heart with his palm just like Fidel, watching on his own TV in Havana.” Then there are the secrets that bind--she says--”the things that can’t be told . . . like knowing that giving money to exile groups often meant helping somebody buy a private yacht for Caribbean vacations not for invading Cuba, but also knowing that refusing to donate only invited questions about our own patriotism. And knowing that Nixon wasn’t really the one [to topple Castro] . . . no matter what a good job the Cuban burglars might have done at the Watergate Hotel.”

“The Voice of the Turtle,” an anthology edited by Peter Bush and published in England last year, offers an even broader span of writers--some famous, some new, some classics. Regrettably, it is published in paperback on lousy paper and in unattractive print, and the stories are not dated, so we have no way of knowing when they were written. It is, however, redeemed by excellent translations and short biographies of each writer and translator. Octavio Armand writes an inspired introduction on the psyche of the Cuban exile, drawing a compelling comparison to the expelled Sephardic Jews of Spain.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante slyly introduces the title story with the epigraph, “As told by my mother-in-law to me.” His is an irresistible ghoulish fable about a young man’s ill-fated attempt to conjoin with a caguama--a huge turtle common to Cuba. Cabrera Infante, who is enjoying a renaissance in Cuba today, can be an acquired taste, his diction laced with jokes and puns. But no one conveys better the lush, hyperbolic, conspiratorial nature of Cubans.

Other classics here include Lino Novas Calvo’s masterpiece, “The Night the Dead Rose From the Grave,” a feverish Hieronymous Bosch-like tableau of purgatory, and Calvert Casey’s disturbing narrative of a descent into madness in “A Taste of Love.” Lydia Cabrera, the famed Cuban chronicler of Santeria, is represented by “Daddy Turtle and Daddy Tiger,” an Afro-Cuban version of Genesis: “A man went up to heaven on a rope of light. The Sun warned him. ‘Don’t come too close, I burn.’ The man took no notice. . . . He was the first black man, father of all blacks. (Joy belongs to the blacks.) . . . The moon is cold. Cold is white. The man who went to the moon turned white. He was the first white man, father of all the whites. They are sad. . . . [E]verything can be explained.”

“The Truants,” a short story by master wordsmith Jose Lezama Lima, the author of the classic “Paradiso” and Cuba’s answer to James Joyce, is a tough read. The story of two boys skipping school, layered with homoerotic nuances, is dense and byzantine. Lima, whose work can be as unfathomable as “Finnegans Wake,” offers “blankets of beautiful prose,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald said of one of his own novels--but it is a challenge to follow. Also disappointing is the selection chosen to represent the esteemed writer Virgilio Pin~era: “A Conciliar Discourse,” a Swiftian satire too deadly dry to care about.

More accessible are Senel Paz’s exquisite love story “Don’t Tell Her That I Love Her”; Roberto Uria’s short monologue of a Havana drag queen, “Why Is Leslie Caron Crying?”; and the wonderfully resonant “I Sent Quinine” by Alfonso Hernandez Cata, about divided family loyalties in Cuba’s Independence War in 1895.

The brilliant scorched rage of Reinaldo Arenas, who, dying of AIDS, took his life in New York City in 1990, finds eloquence and a chilling fury in “Traitor,” and Zoe Valdes, who succeeded so well in “La Nada Cotidiana,” covers similar ground in “The Ivory Trader and the Red Melons.” A cunning, clever writer, Valdes explores contemporary Cuban despair in a way that can be inspired--at its best--or just plain grating. Jesus Vega mines the same vein in “Wunderbar,” a day in the life of a jinetero, or street hustler, more effectively.

De Aragon, Bobes and Yan~ez are represented in both collections. Yan~ez’s “Split in Two” speaks poignantly of the worst of Castro’s legacy: the divided, sundered family--once the cornerstone of Cuban society. But the piece de resistance of the Bush anthology is Severo Sarduy’s haunting meditation on life, exile, art and death in “Explosion of Emptiness,” written when Sarduy was dying of AIDS in exile. “How can one not see in this succession of frustrations, failures, illnesses and abandonments the repeated blows of God’s hand?” he asks at the beginning of this plaintive monologue. In the end, when he can no longer delay the inevitable, there is accommodation. “He divests himself of dusty books, summer clothes, accumulated letters, faded drawings and paintings. He surrenders, as if to a drug, to solitude and silence. In that domestic peace he awaits death. With his library in order.”