LITERATURE: Writers Enjoying Boom in Cuba

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, May 12 1998 (IPS) - The economic crisis that has dragged on for eight years in Cuba could be credited also for sparking what many critics and writers believe is a literary boom for the island.

Local writers have won a spate of prizes and increasingly are being published abroad and winning international acclaim, due partly to the near paralysis of the local publishing industry.

Cuban writers have been forced to “seek new frontiers for their artistic talents,” according to local author Leonardo Padura. “Whether or not you can call it a boom, there is no question that literary creation in Cuba is currently thriving, because its potential has finally been focussed.

Paduro’s detective novel “Masks”, won the Spanish “Cafe Gijon” prize for mystery writing in 1995.

Another reason that the work of Cuban writers living at home or in exile seems to be in vogue is a fascination with Cuba’s unique position as the western world’s only surviving socialist system, the 44-year-old Padura told IPS. “On the one hand, that gives Cuban reality a strange distinction and, on the other, gives a certain morbid pleasure in criticising it from the world of literature.”

The enthusiastic search for literature with Cuban themes can be a double-edged sword, he warned. Works of questionable literary value like Zoe Valdes’ “I Gave You My Whole Life”, winner of Spain’s Planeta award, have been launched to stardom simply because they are critical of Cuba’s political system.

Padura, a philologist who worked as a literary critic and journalist before writing his own novels, is one of the protagonists of the current boom which is “overflowing the narrow boundaries within which Cuban literature has moved for nearly three decades.”

His case combines the three essential elements characterising the current boom: he is listed in the catalogue of the prestigious Spanish publishing firm Tusquest, has won prizes at home and abroad, and his work has been translated into several languages.

“Masks” forms part of a tetralogy that uses a detective plot as a pretext for providing a portrait of Cuban society. In this novel, the murder of a transvestite is used to penetrate the homosexual underworld in a “machista” society.

Padura has published several essays on the works of Alejo Carpentier, the novel “Horse Fever”, a book of short stories “As the Years Go By”, a non-fictional work “The Longest Journey” and a book of interviews, “The Faces of Salsa”.

“Since Jose Maria Heredia wrote his first poems, back in the early 19th century, literary creation on the island showed a vocation for transcending national borders that few countries of Cuba’s size – in terms of both geography and population – have been able to sustain,” he said.

Heredia is considered the creator of a defined genre of literature with its own specific characteristics, at a time when a sense of the Cuban nation began to germinate within the breast of what was still a Spanish colony.

Last century, local figures like novelist Cirilo Villaverde, poet Julian del Casals and essayist and poet Jose Marti attained reknown outside the island, and even influenced Spanish-language authors elsewhere.

And in the 20th century, writers such as Alejo Carpentier, Nicolas Guillen, Jose Lezama Lima, Eliseo Diego and Virgilio Pinera penetrated international literary circles, and “made Cuban literature one of the best-known of all Spanish-language genres,” said Padura.

“However, the deaths of several great maestros of Cuban fiction, poetry and theatre in the past two decades left the impression that the country had been left without great figures,” he added.

The recent deaths of poets Dulce Maria Loynaz and Gaston Baquero and novelist Jose Soler Puig seemed to close an era in Cuban literature, which had lost its leading exponents.

But “the fact is that authors who developed both within and outside the country who maintained a definite presence on the international literary scene,” said Padura, who cited Cuban exiles Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Severo Sarduy and Reynaldo Arenas, and Miguel Barnet, Pablo Armando Fernandez and Anton Arrufat at home, all of whom are listed in the catalogues of prestigious Spanish-language publishing houses like Planeta, Alfaguera, Tusquets and Seix Barral.

“Nevertheless, a certain density was lacking, necessary to any artistic process,” he added. But in the early 1990s new Cuban authors began to make headway in international literary circles, timidly at first. But their penetration became unstoppable.

“Perhaps the most visible evidence of the strengthening of Cuban literature’s presence abroad lies in its almost routine presence on the lists of winners of the leading literary contests of the Spanish language,” said Padura.

He pointed to prizes awarded this decade to Cuban writers, such as the Cervantes prize awarded to the late Dulce Maria Loynaz, who died here last year, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and the Juan Rulfo award granted in Mexico to Eliseo Diego, one of Cuba’s great poets, but a representative of a generation which reached its greatest splendour in the 1950s.

Along with such well-known writers, a group of important artists from Padura’s generation, and even younger, have begun to accumulate distinguished prizes. Besides Cabrera Infante’s Cervantes prize, April brought news that Eliseo Alberto and Daina Chaviano – two other Cuban writers living abroad – had won the Alfaguara and Azorin awards.

Six Cuban writers won “the Spanish language’s leading story- telling contest,” the Radio France International’s Juan Rulfo, including Senel Paz for the short story that inspired the film ‘Strawberry and Chocolate’ – the only Cuban film ever nominated for an Academy Award.

And “in Italy, a novel by Cuban-Uruguayan writer Daniel Chavarria, winner of the Planeta-Mortiz prize in 1993, has sold more than 10,000 copies,” Padura added.