Small island, big cultural landscape

Cuba is a tiny island in the middle of the Caribbean and so it’s really striking to think that it has produced a culture that rivals those produced in very large, very rich and important countries like Mexico, Argentina or Peru. Cuba’s about 1,400 kilometres long and about 200 kilometres wide. It’s very small, but it has an outsized presence in the cultural landscape. It has produced some of the most important writers in Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries; names like José Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy, Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Reinaldo Arenas.

Politics and a baroque culture

Directorio Revolucionario José Antonio Echevarría, Juan-pedro-carbo. University of Havana, Cuba. 2 February 1956. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

In the 20th century, Cuban literature is unique because it’s traversed by politics and by the culture of the Cuban Revolution after 1959. The Cuban Revolution was made to overthrow a very bloody dictator named Fulgencio Batista, who ruled Cuba with an iron hand, starting in the late 1930s and especially through the 1950s. It got very ugly: many university students were tortured and killed.

Even before the Cuban Revolution, many writers were responding to the political situation, and their work is somehow shaped by this. Mixed with that, there’s also an incredible imagination which is unique to Cuba, and quite baroque. Severo Sarduy wrote extensively about this – how Cuban culture is, by definition, baroque. It’s a bit like the unconscious. It doesn’t understand contradiction. Different things coexist that would be contradictory in other places in the world.

José Lezama Lima

One of my favourite writers is José Lezama Lima, who wrote a great novel called Paradiso, which was translated into English by Gregory Rabassa, the translator who notably put into English One Hundred Years of Solitude and other novels by Gabriel García Márquez. Part of the project of Lezama Lima was writing a novel that describes life in Cuba in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s – so, life in the world that he lived in – but to do so, he chose a very erudite, baroque, literary language of the 17th century. So, there’s a little bit of a clash between the register of the language and the world that he’s describing – a world of peasants, students and people running around the streets of Havana. But the language is all of these words taken from this incredibly beautiful and obscure baroque poetry.

Paradiso’s “typos”

There’s a good anecdote. The first edition of Paradiso was made in Cuba in 1966, and it was apparently full of errors. Two writers who immediately realised what an important novel this was decided to work with Lezama Lima to fix it. One of those writers was Julio Cortázar, and the other was Carlos Monsiváis, a very young Mexican writer.

There was one thing that they couldn’t figure out, which was that all the commas, all the punctuation, seemed to be in the wrong place. It was really like a puzzle that they couldn’t crack, so they went to see Lezama Lima in Havana. By that time, Lezama Lima was older, and very large. He had asthma and had trouble breathing. The writers said, ‘José, we can’t figure out the punctuation. It makes no sense. Could you tell us what’s happening here?’ And Lezama Lima came out with a remarkable answer. He said, ‘Well, I’m asthmatic, so I just write commas when I run out of breath. This is the way I would speak if I were to read the novel.’

So, the novel has this asthmatic rhythm. The writers decided they couldn’t touch the commas. Those commas were sacred; they were asthmatic commas.

The plot

Paradiso is a bildungsroman. It’s the story of a boy called José Cemí, who is born into a middle-class family near Havana. Cemí goes through all the experiences of a young boy and then a young man in Cuba. He goes to school, he meets his friends, he has a sexual awakening.

The novel talks about homosexuality in a very interesting way, again using this baroque language to describe the boy’s first experiences with other boys. To give you an example, there’s a moment in the novel where the boy sees the penis of another boy in school and it’s described in Spanish as el aparato germinativo tan tronitonante. Tronitonante is a word that exists in French: tronituante. It comes from ‘thunder’ and the noise that thunder makes. So, he talks about the reproductive apparatus as being thunderous.

Cuba and sexuality

Cuba, like other countries in the Caribbean, has a distinct relationship to the body and to sexuality. In Latin America, this is quite striking, because most Latin American countries, from Mexico to Argentina, come from a very heavy-handed Catholic tradition. The whole relationship to the body and sexuality was oppressed for a very long time by the Catholic dogma.

Santería is a system of beliefs that merge the Yoruba religion with Roman Catholic and Native Indian traditions. This ceremony is called "Cajon de Muertos". Havana (La Habana), Cuba. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Cuba was truly distinct. It seems like Catholicism never really took root, even though it was officially a Catholic country. But it was also a country that imported African religions. Below the radar, Afro-Cuban religions were the most important religions in Cuba. When you go to Cuba, you see everyone wearing all of these different bracelets and signs of santería.

What’s interesting about santería is that it’s almost the opposite of Catholicism. It’s a religion that is perfectly fine with pleasure and with decadence. For instance, in Cuba, if you open a bottle of rum, the first thing that you do is to pour a little bit onto the floor. Why? Because the first taste of rum is for the gods. So, this is a great image of the gods: they love to drink, they smoke cigars, they have sex with one another. It’s a religion that has pleasure at the essence of it. It’s almost diametrically opposed to Catholicism.

Dirty Havana Trilogy

One of the writers who has captured this in the most realistic way is Pedro Juan Gutiérrez. His Dirty Havana Trilogy is set in a very dark period in Cuban history – the 1990s – which the Cubans called the Special Period. From the mid-1960s to 1989, the Soviet Union was the patron of Cuba. Cuba was living off Soviet subsidies, which stopped abruptly in 1989, when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Cuban citizens resorting to horse drawn carriage for transportation (1994). Wikimedia Commons Public Domain.

Juan Gutiérrez wrote a series of stories set in this very difficult decade, in which there was no money and no food, and when people weren’t really working because they were sent home. It was a very depressing period. What’s interesting about these stories is that they almost ask a philosophical question: what remains of life if your money, your job, your transportation is taken away? What remains? The answer in these stories is two things. One is language: people continue to get together and tell stories. The other is sexuality: sexuality became a refuge for the hardship. In the 1990s, Cuban sexuality, which was already exuberant, bloomed into something even more exuberant.

Writers in exile

After the Cuban Revolution, many of the youngest and most promising writers left Cuba. Severo Sarduy went to live in Paris, Cabrera Infante went to live in London, and Reinaldo Arenas left first for Miami and then to New York City. On the one hand, it was very sad: Havana lost a critical mass of great writers, people with a great imagination who had given Latin American literature some of its masterpieces of the 20th century. But on the other hand, exile has been a constant in Cuban culture since at least the 19th century.

For instance, José Martí, an important poet of the 19th century, who is considered the father of Cuban independence, died in 1895 fighting the Spaniards during one of the independence wars. José Martí lived in exile. Cuban culture has always been a counterpoint between those inside the island and those outside the island.

The blending of two cultures

Severo Sarduy came from Camagüey, the second largest Cuban city, from a humble family. He arrived in Paris and ended up living with François Wahl, who became his lover and life partner. Wahl was the editor at Éditions du Seuil – the editor of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva and many other very important intellectuals.

So, suddenly, you imagine this young Cuban boy who arrives in Paris and the coalition of worlds – the Cuban culture, which is full of the body, the baroque and this very witty sense of humour; and, in France, Lacan, structuralism, psychoanalysis and the magazine Tel Quel. The beauty of Sarduy is that, in exile, he managed to put these two worlds together. Sarduy is the writer in exile, and that’s how that generation managed to take roots in a different culture and to blend that with what he brought from Cuba.

Cabrera Infante didn’t really take very much from London. He liked English literature, but his literature remained all Cuban. However, Sarduy actually put Cuba together with French structuralism from the 1970s.

Discover more about

Cuban literature

Gallo, R. (2014). Teoría y Práctica de la Habana. JUS.

Galllo R. (2019). Crónicas de una pequeña ciudad mexicana en La Habana. Hypermedia

A brief history of Cuban literature