Tropics of History Cuba Imagined
Tropics of History Cuba Imagined
Tropics of History Cuba Imagined
TROPICS OF HISTORY
Cuba Imagined
ALAN WEST
The author and the publisher are grateful to the following for granting
permission to reprint from their materials:
Passages from Nancy Morejón’s poems “Ana Mendieta” and “Before a Mirror”
(Summer 1994, pp. 618–22); Lourdes Casal’s “For Anna Veldford” (Summer
1994, pp. 415–16); and Dulce María Loynaz’s “Eternity” (translations by Davide
Frye) appear courtesy of The Michigan Quarterly Review.
Translations by Alan West from Dulce María Loynaz in These Are Not Sweet Girls,
edited by Marjorie Agosín (1994), appear courtesy of White Pine Press.
Excerpts taken from the works of Dulce María Loynaz appear courtesy of Dulce
María Loynaz.
Excerpts taken from the works of Nancy Morejón appear courtesy of Nancy
Morejón.
Translations by Kathleen Weaver of Nancy Morejón’s “Amo a mi Amo,” “Piedra
Pulida,” “Madre,” “Los ojos de Elegguá,” and “Elogio de Nieves Fresneda,” in
Where the Island Sleeps Like a Wing by Nancy Morejón, appear courtesy of Black
Scholar Press.
Excerpts from Alan West’s historical essays on Cuba printed in the CD-ROM
“American Journey: The Hispanic American Experience” appear courtesy of
Primary Source Media, Inc.
Translations by Alan West of Elías Miguel Muñoz’s “Vaticinios” appear courtesy
of Elías Miguel Muñoz.
Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Bibliography 201
Index 211
A Suggestion for the Reader
If you have little or no prior knowledge of Cuba before reading this book,
I strongly recommend reading the Appendix first, since it is a basic outline
of Cuban history from pre-Columbian times to the present. Even readers
somewhat familiar with Cuban history should find it helpful in refreshing
their memories. The Appendix, however, is no substitute for more complete
studies on Cuban history, and following the Appendix there is a list of
selected readings so that readers can pursue lengthier, more detailed, and
complete studies on the subject.
Each chapter on individual writers begins with an introduction that
gives an overall evaluation of the author and places him or her within the
wider context of Cuban literature and history. This should be helpful to the
reader, particularly where a small part of the author’s work is discussed, as
is the case with Alejo Carpentier, Virgilio Piñera, José Lezama Lima, and
Severo Sarduy.
Acknowledgments
This book owes a debt of gratitude to Hayden White, who in turn is equally
indebted to Vico and Kenneth Burke. His books Tropics of Discourse (which
contains a chapter on Vico called “Tropics of History”) and Metahistory: The
Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe have been valuable in
helping me understand the rhetorical strategies underlying the narratives
of history. Vico, Burke, and White have been equally important in bringing
clarity to some of my readings of José Lezama Lima (none of them, espe-
cially Vico, has read Lezama), whose highly metaphorical historical essay
La expresión americana has shaped this book in many unexpected ways.
Perhaps my greatest debt is to Antonio Benítez Rojo and his work The
Repeating Island. Even if I have not quoted extensively from it, the audacity
and scope of its imagining and questioning have made this book possible.
César Salgado was extremely helpful in making some ideas take on greater
shape. I am grateful to Pío Serrano for providing valuable information on
the Nancy Morejón chapter.
Finally, I am grateful to Ester Shapiro, who has been a loving and
rigorous editor and an extraordinary companion. With her inimitable Cu-
ban chutzpah, she has stimulated the creative and critical faculties that have
made this book become a reality.
INTRODUCTION
Cuba and its history are continuously being imagined. Both from within
and afar, by its own people and by interested foreigners, the island has
exercised a fascination that spans continents and centuries. Abetted by its
strategic geographical location, Cuba has been at different times a focal
point for Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia. The island has been a
magnet for conquerors, profiteers, dreamers, and artists. This kind of
2 TROPICS OF HISTORY
Martí’s quest for sovereignty at every level was inclusive. His national-
ism embraced an internationalist perspective which artfully mixed in the
ideas, cosmologies, religions, science, and art of Latin America, Europe,
North America, Africa, and Asia. In his vivid poetic parlance he has set a
standard for all Cuban writers, the poet-warrior, one which will probably
never again be embodied in one person. For Martí, creating a free nation
meant you had to act like a soldier and imagine as a writer.
To construct a nation implies a narrative (na[rra]tion) of what is being
built, and usually the narrative is an epic tale. Epics depict heroic deeds,
conquests, victorious wars. Their heroes can be human or divine, but even
when human they must perform divine deeds. They are the foundational
tales or myths of a nation or a culture, and these narratives are central(izing)
definitions of a country or a people. Homi Bhabha reminds us that nation
building involves a “syntax of forgetting.” The written sentence of nation
narrative is a way of sentencing other histories to oblivion. The formulaic
aspect of epic/nation narrative requires suppressing many aspects of a
country’s history: not only complex political forces but also its class divi-
sions, racial divides, or sexual differences. Cuban poet and narrator Ro-
lando Sánchez Mejías, rejecting formulaic heroism, echoes his own doubts
by saying his work does not form part of the “epico-sentimental guild” that
characterizes much Cuban writing. Poets and writers speak to the hidden
nation—a truly independent clause?—that the “syntax of forgetting”
would sentence to silence.
Martí’s greatness derived from his ability to offer an image or dream of
nationhood that wholly embraced a complex, multidimensional people and
body politic. His death (1895) before the nominal achievement of inde-
pendence (1902) no doubt helped make his subsequent iconization an even
more potent rallying point. By welding together an empowering political
discourse with an imaginative poetics, Martí founded a unique kind of
subjectivity, as well as a more inclusive definition of nationhood. Martí
viewed politics as an art form, poetry as a kind of Edenic adventure
naming/creating the world. His generosity of spirit viewed the human
subject as a crossroads engaged in an Emersonian cosmic dialogue. Poetry
as an aesthetic creative language is a nonmanipulative corrective to the
desiring, acquisitive, pragmatic exhortation of politics and science. Poetry’s
way of thinking avails itself of relatedness, ethical questioning with no
ready-made answers, and a knowledge derived from wonder, and steers
away from the realm of utility, moral certitude, and narrow cognition. Elias
Canetti said, “There should be a description of the way thoughts grow
between people.” For Martí this desire to express not only the “hope of
thought,” but the thought of hope, is perfectly embodied in the inclusive-
ness of his thinking as it grows between people in an impassioned friend-
ship from which imagination, ethics, and nationhood are collaboratively
built. Martí’s inclusiveness was expressed in these words: “not [wanting]
4 TROPICS OF HISTORY
While some of the authors spent a great deal of their adult lives outside
Cuba (Sarduy, Piñera, Carpentier), and others literally never left the island
(Lezama Lima), all six in their own way have come to understand Cuba
intimately from “afar.” The way these writers manage their closeness and
distance from the island, in itself, is used tacitly or overtly to question
notions central to Cuban nationhood and identity.
The authors’ comprehension of the island’s history is crafted through
metaphor and image. The title Tropics of History: Cuba Imagined offers an
examination of this tropical isle’s tropes of history. The sources of these
tropes are many, but to assist the reader we can distinguish four main areas:
history (Cuban and otherwise); religious/mystical thought (or its antithe-
sis, atheism, Marxism); literature (both Cuban and world); and landscape.
The sources are refracted through a poetic and personal memory, through
which, as Gaston Bachelard’s words at the beginning of this book suggest,
we make a house in history. By virtue of being poetic and personal, memory
functions not as a vehicle for nostalgia but by exploring the past through
constructed images that free us from the constraints of past and present.
The image, as in Lezama, is not a representation (an effect) but a generative
matrix. It is both original and originating. But more important, we need to
recognize that tropes are not merely artistic fantasies, not just products of
strong-willed creators, pure individualistic expressiveness. Tropes are an
intersubjective phenomenology tied to collective reality, with a lived histo-
ricity. As Richard Kearney says of Bachelard: “This phenomenological
emphasis on the originality of images leads in turn to the discovery of their
trans-subjectivity. Unlike Sartre, who saw the intentional uniqueness of each
image as implying self-enclosure, Bachelard marvelled at the mystery that
the image can be both unique to the originating consciousness, and yet
common to different subjects. . . . For Bachelard the image was revealed as a
world of dialogue between intentional subjects” (Kearney, 1991, p. 92).
Maybe the image is that hope of thought (Canetti, Martí) growing between
people, which in history is positioned from race/gender/class. This gen-
erative phenomenology of the image will allow us to explore themes such
as anti- or post-colonialism, revolution, independence, and national iden-
tity as the distinctive domain where each writer as an individual expresses
his or her common ground with Cuban history. All of the writers in this
book have lived or are still living with a direct and personal contact with
the Cuban Revolution. In many cases the work discussed does not directly
deal with the Cuban Revolution (as with Lezama, Dulce María Loynaz, and
Piñera), but nonetheless, what these authors have to say eventually inter-
sects with post–1959 events on the island. For all the writers in this volume,
history is not some remote object of study or a kind of intellectual protein
consumed to pump up the muscles of curiosity. History is a lived experience
that shapes a writer’s thoughts and art, but equally history is fashioned
through the artist’s work by virtue of its own interpretations, by the
6 TROPICS OF HISTORY
and power that are central to all aspects of Cuban history. Interpretation has
an ethical dimension (as does the imagination) and is a recognition of a
contested terrain, the shape and meaning of Cuban history, which will
acquire its truest expression through plurality. That Cuba’s history is still
(and will be) contested terrain should not be so surprising, given that the
French are still discussing the relative merits of Danton, Robespierre, and
their revolution some two hundred years after its occurrence and demise.
The following chapters make a case for different authors and thinkers as to
why their metaphors offer thought-provoking images that make us want
to explore their work or thinking more thoroughly, and through that
exploration arrive at a more complex view of Cuban history.
How are tropes useful in understanding this complexity? Through meta-
phor we see thought striving to bring together two seemingly disparate
elements, a unity-in-difference which is extremely helpful in understanding
history, a discipline fraught (and fought) with many contradictions, aims at
odds with each other, and bewildering if not murderous passions. This
implies seeing metaphor as fundamentally conceptual and not linguistic.
Metaphors and images are not just tricks or embellishments of speech, but
are integral to consciousness and knowledge. They are crucial elements of
speculative thought, in the Hegelian sense, of something positive that can
unite opposites (like the poetic imagination) by transcending the merely
sensory toward understanding. Speculative thought through metaphor
will be present throughout this book, as a way of making the history of
Cuba reveal its latent images.
A Hegelian tension between layers of meaning characterizes the use of
the word image as well. In German, bild is the word used for image, with
other associated meanings of portrait, illustration, idea, symbol, repre-
sentation, metaphor. Used in certain compound words, it can mean sculp-
tor, hieroglyph, or the face of a coin. The verb bilden means to form, shape,
cultivate, educate, or fashion, from where bildung (education, culture)
comes. Images and metaphor are (in)formative; they help shape, represent,
and configure the movements of history. They contain, by definition, dy-
namic forces of tension and reconciliation. The tropic inventiveness of
Cuba’s artists and writers helps us to understand or demystify certain
“foundational symbols of Cuban identity,” or offers alternative tropes.
Hegel’s integrative act of interpretation (speculative thought, imagistic
thinking) underlies Paul Ricoeur’s analysis of metaphor. Ricoeur points
out, “It is the conflict between these two interpretations [literal and figura-
tive] that sustains the metaphor.” Ricoeur says that there is an absurdity
involved here if we see it from the point of view of literal meaning, but it is
surpassed as the “conflict of interpretations” is worked through and
worked out. “Thus a metaphor does not exist in itself, but in and through
an interpretation. The metaphorical interpretation presupposes a literal
interpretation which self-destructs in a significant contradiction. It is this
8 TROPICS OF HISTORY
scrutiny, suggesting that the neat flow of events must be stopped and
magnified so as to be better understood and appreciated. If we were to use
a corporeal image reminiscent of Orphic myth, we could say that these
explorations are the limbs of a body that need to be detached before the
body can become whole again.
In the following chapters we will witness the figurative act of tolerance,
voices that imagine Cuba in many inclusive ways, by “creating the imagi-
native province where no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to
be understood” (Milan Kundera). This imaginative province will conjure
up metaphors that pertain to the following: national identity and personal
identity as seen through class, race, and sexual difference (Sarduy, More-
jón); gender roles (Loynaz, Morejón, Sarduy, Piñera); national liberation and
anti-imperialism (Carpentier); modernity/postmodernity; the production
of historical meaning (Sarduy, Carpentier, Lezama); religious or sacred
dimensions of lived experience (Lezama, Loynaz); notions of power and
political control (Piñera); and the manipulation of images and symbols for
the purpose of domination (Piñera, Morejón). The voices of these writers
are original, not preachy, and avoid rigid didacticism, even though they
express strongly held views, political and otherwise.
This tolerance might seem confusing, if only because it recognizes that
the past is neither an unassailable fortress with one entrance or a comforting
place of repose under a shady tree. Through art the dead are made to speak
again, and they are likely to tell us things that are perplexing, what we don’t
want to hear. Or, if a narrative explanation is preferred, it means that either
a different story is to be told, or the same story with a different plot and
characters. The art of memory, of recollection, will always yield more than
we expected, perhaps in the spirit of these words of Elias Canetti: “The past
grows in all directions through its depiction. Wouldn’t the same hold for
history? Or is historiography reductive, in contrast to memory accumulated
and shaped?” This accumulation and shaping is the bildung, the gallery of
images, the formation of history through images, and the power of those
images to shape history.
Many of the issues, themes or tropes discussed here will lend credence
to the words of Paul Valéry. History does cause dreams, and often the
dreams do turn into nightmares. But that does not mean that dreams are to
be avoided or are without meaning. History does indeed “intoxicate whole
peoples and give them false memories,” the most brutal example in our
century being the Third Reich or Kampuchea under Pol Pot. But history is
impossible without memory, especially if we consider history a people’s
memory. The “delusions of grandeur or persecution” that make nations
“bitter, arrogant, insufferable, and vain” can be brought into perspective
thanks to history. The temporal distance inherent in historical discourse
allows us to look at those passions, if not with total objectivity, at least with
a measure of compassion and, if need be, irony. We must distinguish
12 TROPICS OF HISTORY
Mario and Pío Serrano (1941– ), eventually left Cuba. Others, such as
Miguel Barnet and Luis Rogelio Nogueras, stayed on. But various
authors from the group, in the post-1968 ideological hardening within
Cuba, were marginalized from cultural life, most significantly in not
having their own creative work published. Morejón was obviously
affected by not having her poetry published, but with the waning of a
hard-line policy by the late 1970s, her Parajes de una época finally
appeared, with poems (in some cases) that were nearly a decade old.
In 1982 she published a book-length study of the work of Cuba’s
“national poet” called Nación y mestizaje en Nicolás Guillén (Nation and
Mestizaje in the Work of Nicolás Guillén).
Since then Morejón’s work has been published often: Octubre impre-
scindible (1983; Essential October); Cuaderno de Granada (1984; Grenada
Notebook); and Piedra pulida (1986; Polished Stone), one of her best
books and a source for many translations of her work. Most recently
Paisaje célebre (1993; Famed Landscape) was published in Venezuela,
after having won the finalist award in the Pérez Bonalde International
Poetry Prize.
Over the years, Morejón has worked with Casa de las Américas as
a journalist, theater critic, and more recently with the Pablo Milanés
Foundation, which was the first cultural organization formed after the
revolution not directly financed or administered by the Cuban state.
However, the foundation closed in June 1995 because of problems with
the Ministry of Culture, which had placed many material obstacles to
the publishing of its magazine Proposiciones, as well as the overall
functioning of the foundation.
Morejón’s poetry has shown different interests that have a close
relationship with the recent history of Cuba. In the 1960s and 1970s her
themes often ran to the political, with well-known poems such as
“Mujer Negra” (Black Woman), “Freedom Now,” and “Manzano de
Oakland” (Apple Tree in Oakland), this last poem dedicated to Angela
Davis. Fortunately, it was political poetry that never forgot it was
poetry, that is, it never used the language of poetry in a one-dimen-
sional, crudely didactic way. Certain political or social themes are
grappled with in Piedra pulida but are linked more to issues of gender
and are found mostly in the last third of the book. Her Paisaje célebre,
which brings together poems from 1987 to 1992, raises such themes in
a very indirect fashion, if at all. This should not be surprising, since by
the mid-1980s Cuban literature had drifted away from overtly social
commentary and/or exhortation. This was partly due to a certain
stability of the Cuban Revolution, which by 1984 was a quarter of a
century old, and was in part a rejection of a socially committed aesthetic
of the 1970s which had had a deadening effect on literary culture. It has
often been called the “gray decade of Cuban letters.” Morejón, whose
poetry kept an intense lyrical element even when it drew on historical
or political subjects, was able to evolve in a calm or measured way,
avoiding sudden turns or crises that beset other authors.
NANCY MOREJÓN 15
Nancy Morejón’s poetry and persona are direct, vibrant, and inti-
mate. She is able to capture the minute details of everyday life and
imbue them with the light of the Caribbean, yet filtered through her
poetic and historical sensibility. Drawing on her life growing up in a
working-class Havana family, imbibing the country’s rich history,
myth, and Afro-Cuban beliefs, Morejón’s work is inspired by diverse
literary traditions, as well as oral and folk cultures: “I believe in the oral
tradition as a loving source of dispersed identities spread out among
territories and seas of the Gulf. My own literary creations have drawn
from that oral tradition.” In Morejón’s embracing of that orality, we
sense a reverent listener attuned to Cuba’s living culture, a poet who
is popular and erudite, funny and philosophical, feminist and free-
wheeling.
THE STONE AND ITS IMAGES
Roads are like dreams, their invitation to journey filled with the lusty air of
freedom, but also with wonderfully strange and sometimes dark auguries.
A crossroads both centers outdoor space in a system of coordinates and yet
opens up onto vastness, the universe. A kind of expansive optimism over-
powers one as it did Walt Whitman: “Afoot and lighthearted I take to the
open road, /Healthy, free, the world before me, /The long brown path
before me leading wherever I choose” (Whitman, 1902, p. 177). But roads
have a long history, secrets, hidden paths: “You road I enter upon and look
around, I believe you are not all that is here, /I believe that much unseen is
also here” (Whitman, 1950, p. 178). In Cuba, roads and crossroads must
begin with the Afro-Cuban orisha (deity) Elegguá. Elegguá is the begin-
ning—not the beginning of creation, but the point of departure of an
imaginative faith that is one of the main sources of Cuban culture and
history.
Nancy Morejón’s poem “Los ojos de Elegguá” (The Eyes of Elegguá) is
a rich reworking of Cuban transcultured identity. The author recalls seeing
the eyes of Elegguá at nighttime. Morejón recalls it dancing, like all the
Santería orishas: “bursting out in shrieks /Elegguá leaps /imagines songs
/grazes space with a copper dagger” (Morejón, 1985, p. 67). Elegguá is the
orisha of destiny and of crossroads, and so is the orisha invoked before all
others, because he is the messenger of all the gods. Elegguá is also vitally
linked to the unexpected, twists of fate, and death. In part this is due to his
story, or pattakí. One day he found a coconut (obi) in the road giving off a
blinding light from its three eyes. He picked it up and took it home to his
mother and father. But the eyes didn’t shine (in another version of the tale,
the eyes kept shining behind the door, but it was forgotten). He threw the
coconut behind a door. Three days later he died. Soon disaster hit the
kingdom, and finally they looked for the obi behind the door; it was empty
and crawling with bugs. In its place they put an otá, a sacred stone, which
is the origin of Elegguá, and that is why it is said, “The dead one gave birth
to the saint.” Morejón is evoking this pattakí with the eyes for a reason: she
is hoping to enlist his all-seeing capabilities. Because of this, Elegguá is
known as the personification of justice, and by knowing what is best for
humankind, he symbolizes perfect balance in nature. But the poem has an
Elegguá who might be needing the powers of Olofi to keep his orientation.
This is not so strange since Olofi is the personification of the Creator and
his forces. According to one of the pattakís, it was Olofi who created the
orishas by projecting his aché (power, energy) into the otanes or stones. Still,
there is a moment if not of doubt, at least of precaution: the last stanza
begins, “If Elegguá’s eyes were to return /they would come crossing the
NANCY MOREJÓN 17
vigorous river /where the gods drew off in the distance, where there used
to be fish” (ibid., p. 67). Morejón’s poem seems to be caught between belief
and the power of aché: is it the eyes of Elegguá that give her faith, or is it the
faith that makes her see Elegguá’s eyes? Possibly a little of both, because to
see things along the dark road of life, there’s nothing better than to have
Elegguá’s eyes lighting the way, as if you were being protected by the orisha’s
headlights.
Though Morejón makes no overt references to Catholic saints, Elegguá’s
Christian counterpart is St. Anthony of Padua. The orisha is also linked to
St. Martin of Porres and El Niño de Atocha. An orisha has many caminos
(roads) or avatars, sometimes twenty, thirty, or more. St. Anthony was
noted for performing miracles and was a charismatic preacher. It is said that
he even delivered a sermon to fish, who listened in rapt attention. He is
often represented with the child Jesus in his arms, which explains his
association with Elegguá, who is often presented as mischievous and
playful, like a child. St. Martin of Porres is perhaps more consistent with
Cuban culture. St. Martin is the saint of racial harmony and social justice,
since he was so committed to helping the poor and particularly slaves. He
was a mulatto who had been rejected by his white father.
El Niño de Atocha goes back to the time when Spain was still occupied
by the Moors, who were holding many Christian prisoners in what the
Spaniards call the War of Reconquest. In the town of Atocha a child was
sent in with food (bread and water) for a few prisoners, and yet was able to
feed hundreds. According to legend, it was Christ himself that had ap-
peared in the form of a child, in order to provide the prisoners with material
and spiritual nourishment.
It is also possible to read certain historical references being made here,
although they are indirect. Elegguá’s colors are red and black, which are
also the colors of the July 26th Movement led by Fidel Castro. Elegguá is a
warrior and is considered the first in a trio of holy warriors that also
includes Ogún and Ochosi. Again, Cuba since 1959 has often espoused a
self-definition of itself as a guerrilla society, traits that include warrior
values such as courage, determination, skill, and strength. Furthermore, the
Niño de Atocha’s day is January 1st, the New Year, which is also the date
of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution (1959). Should we stretch things
further by pointing out that one of Cuba’s “sacred warriors of inde-
pendence,” Antonio Maceo (born on June 14), was named for St. Anthony
(June 13)? Che Guevara, born on the same date as Maceo, might be consid-
ered one of the “sacred warriors of the Cuban Revolution.” Whether
Morejón had these allusions in mind or not when she wrote the poem is not
the point. What is significant is how her poetry draws on different tradi-
tions, histories, literatures, and images to fashion a uniquely Cuban work.
They are part of the many caminos (roads, avatars) that feed her work,
18 TROPICS OF HISTORY
evoking Whitman’s “the world before me,” the “much unseen,” and “the
long brown road before me leading wherever I choose.”
In a brief poem to Elegguá, Morejón has brought together a true example
of Cuban transculturation: a Yoruba orisha, symbol of destiny, chance, and
justice, merges with the power of faith and miracles (St. Anthony), racial
harmony and social justice (St. Martin of Porres), and the total nourishment
of El Niño de Atocha. Time, mestizaje, social justice, fate, faith, and utopian
fulfillment (through faith and revolution) come together in the vigorous
imagery of this powerful poem.
In a poem dedicated to Nieves Fresneda, an extraordinarily gifted dancer
in the Cuban folkloric tradition who died in 1981, the author builds on the
images of another orisha, Yemayá. With consummate skill, Morejón brings
together history and myth, invoking the powers of fertility and the imagi-
nation. Yemayá is one of the principle orishas, goddess of the ocean, fertility,
and life that Fresneda often danced in her performances.
song of dream
Nieves
in Cuban seas
Nieves.
(Morejón, 1985, p. 69; trans. Weaver)
Morejón begins with a concrete image of Nieves that both unites her to her
Yemayá but still retains her individuality. The first verse begins with “like
a flying fish,” and seems to be inspired by Manuel Mendive’s floating
Santería-based figures. This verse not only refers to her dancing ability but
already brings her into the realm of Yemayá, for in Yoruba, Yeyeomo eja
means “the Mother whose children are the fish.” The verse ends with her
whole name, as if to underline her uniqueness as a human being.
After establishing a mythic but individual presence, Morejón immedi-
ately gives historical weight to the first images. With sea waves she men-
tions galley slaves and then “A whisper of Benin” that brings her to the
depths of Cuba. The beauty of the Yoruba cosmology is grafted onto the
deep pain of historical reality: slavery. The author makes one more historical
reference in the poem when she says “seeking out the brush” ( buscando la
manigua). Manigua is a Taíno (indigenous) word referring to a place with
dense vegetation, consisting of shrubs, bushes, lianas; a kind of natural
profusion of confusion. Curiously, it also refers to illegal card games, dice,
and other forms of gambling. Taking advantage of both profusion and
confusion, many slaves escaped into the manigua to begin a new life
(gambling with freedom?), free from the oppressive eyes of their masters.
In the nineteenth century, the expression coger la manigua (take to the
manigua) meant to take up arms against Spain and join the revolution for
independence.
Morejón deftly builds a transition from the manigua that goes to Olokún
with the verse “blazing paths.” It looks back at the manigua and goes toward
the depths of the ocean, where Olokún, one of the major orishas, is to be
found. Olokún is a mysterious and powerful orisha. Her energy can be
destructive, which is why it is said that Obatalá had her tied to the bottom
of the ocean. Olokún’s image is presented as a woman (or siren) with arms
outstretched, one holding a snake, the other a mask. She is also visualized
as a hermaphrodite. Olokún is the frightening mix of the origin (the ocean
floor, and of Yemayá), the generative principle, and the awesome power of
wrath and destructiveness. All the orishas, and particularly Yemayá, must
make sure that she is treated with the utmost respect.
The final part of the poem focuses on Nieves attaining an almost mythic
presence or substance, dancing over the water. The water imagery is central
to Morejón’s poetics, and this poem in particular draws on the many
resonances of water, as we have seen. The Atlantic passage, fertility, and the
source of life, which is part of the Afro-Cuban (Santería) tradition, derived
from Western and Yoruba beliefs. Undoubtedly other images come to mind:
20 TROPICS OF HISTORY
purity, the waters of the feminine and of reverie (Bachelard). Feminist critics
point out that water is synonymous with women’s eroticism, as it is
concerned with a blurring of rigid boundaries of hierarchy and gender, just
as water runs over, flooding distinctions with a kind of plenitude (Ostriker,
1986). Water’s mysterious depth and infinity, its movement, its enveloping
“warmth” and strangeness, bring it close to a dream state. Morejón’s poem
conjures up these forces.
Fresneda dancing over the waves maintains both the flow of water (since
she is dancing Yemayá’s steps) as well as the lightness of air. More impor-
tant, both air and water convey the sense of movement, which is a key
ingredient of the imagination. “We always think of the imagination as the
faculty that forms images. On the contrary, it deforms what we perceive; it is,
above all, the faculty that frees us from immediate images and changes them.
If there is no change, or unexpected fusion of images, there is no imagina-
tion; there is no imaginative act. If the image that is present does not make
us think of one that is absent, if an image does not determine an abun-
dance—an explosion—of unusual images, then there is no imagination”
(Bachelard, 1988, p. 1). This creates both a mobility of images and, to borrow
a well-known phrase, an “invitation to the voyage,” or, as Bachelard says:
“Perceiving and imagining are as antithetical as presence and absence. To
imagine is to absent oneself, to launch out toward a new life” (ibid., p. 3).
Morejón echoes this play of absences and presences in her poem, through
both the content (the past, Olokún, Fresneda herself who has died) and the
rhythms and pacing of the words, which stream toward the reader in little
waves. For Helene Cixous, poetry means traveling on foot: “Walking,
dancing, pleasure: these accompany the poetic act. . . . So perhaps dreaming
and writing have to do with traversing the forest, journeying through the
world, using all available means of transport, using your body as a form of
transport” (Cixous, 1991, p. 63). Why is the imagination a voyage, a move-
ment of images? Because it entails a kind of pursuit: of a transformation of
the real, traveling to the manigua of meaning, the domain of the imaginary.
In a recent talk, Morejón spoke of García Lorca’s definition of poetry as
“penetrating a jungle at night in order to hunt precious animals, otherwise
known as words” (Morejón, 1995b). This magical and perilous hunting
expedition will have the author equating dancing and writing: “dancing
with the feet, with ideas, with words, and need I add that one must also be
able to dance with the pen—that one must learn how to write?” (Nietzsche,
1990, p. 76). In this dance, Morejón choreographs the juncture of myth,
history, and the imagination of the artist.
The author has spoken eloquently about the gestation of poems such as
“Elegguá’s Eyes” and “Elegy for Nieves Fresneda” as being the humble
Havana neighborhood she grew up in. Her statement is worth quoting at
length because it offers the “lived experience” of historical and mythical
themes:
NANCY MOREJÓN 21
I was born and raised in a Havana neighborhood known as Los Sitios, where
I learned early on to relate to my city—a constant theme in my poems. Life
put me in touch with songs and rhythms which were of an anonymous
character, this being the essential root of its power. Voices in the late morning
would bring a sad melody, evoking the death of a loved one. They were the
moving coros de clave (chorus with clave rhythm), so much part of Havana, so
eroded by the dust of roads and seas, since that singing had been passed on
from mouth to mouth, coming from faraway lands. It was a wandering music
and we had no idea if it was from a patio in Andalucía or a museke from
Luanda. Truly it was a kind of combustible magic, whose smoke rose from
the plaza Antón Recio all the way to the corners of Peñalver and Manrique.
My childhood was marked by these nomadic musicians who went from
neighborhood to neighborhood sharing their music generously, out of the
simple pleasure of making themselves happy or to brighten up the threadbare
night of poverty-stricken neighbors.
There I heard ancient rumbas performed with the hands and muscles
(making the sound of drums) of those rumberos who never needed a percus-
sion instrument. These were the rumbas de cajón (rumbas played on a box).
The beats or strokes—hand against hand, hands against the chest or legs,
filled with a blessed, loving African energy, would validate the flamenco spirit
which lay dormant in the rhythms of the nation. The sounding of those rumbas
were born of those skins and improvised instruments played to accompany
the ñáñigo diablitos (little devils of the Abakuá religion) or íremes that appeared
on the street on Three Kings Day or during funeral ceremonies. The energy
of those sounds throbs in poems of mine like “Elegy for Nieves Fresneda,”
“The Eyes of Elegguá,” among others. (Morejón, 1995b)
there is no reason to abandon this view. But greater delights await the
reader. In the second stanza she mentions the eyes of someone that cause
great peace, eyes that are “the legitimate children of this song” (Morejón,
1986, p. 66). Quickly she begins a “new scene”: “The crops return to source.
It is the time /of the peacock. What slowness in supplication. /A woodcut-
ter breathes /the hollow of the valleys /And you take me away with those
eyes of unscathed water / to the monte” (p. 66). What is the time of the
peacock? Morejón seems to be indicating a profound temporal change, even
sacred. The peacock, of course, has a long association with immortality,
longevity, resurrection, as well as love. (Could this be an oblique reference
to St.-Pol-Roux’s “Le Paon” [The Peacock]?) The peacock’s feather is the
sign of St. Barbara, the supplication referred to (preces in Spanish) are
entreaties to God. In Santería, St. Barbara is syncretized as Changó, who is
often shown with a hatchet or ax, like the woodcutter. The poet is not
affixing labels, however; it is still the magic of love being awakened in
someone that is being described. But Morejón is taking the mystery and
wonder of love and linking them up to a wider net of meaning: nature,
religious sentiment (Christian and Afro-Cuban), the mesmerizing eyes that
enchant or bewitch, plus going to el monte.
The poem’s use of language is curious, combining rich, sensual details
with words that, if not arcane, are still not very common. They are by no
means disruptive or out of place, but they have a glow that is reminiscent
of a precious stone, this no small feat in a poem brimming with luminous
images. The words have a strong Castilian ring to them, which contrasts
with the island nature of the poem (sea, sand, coral). It helps contribute to
a certain lively tension that the poem has throughout, giving it a strange
atmosphere. There is an almost lazy drift of images, followed by vigorous
brushstrokes and energetic tableaux. It even evokes previous poems by
Morejón: “mar de nostalgia como mares poblándose” (“sea of nostalgia like
seas being peopled”) brings to mind the verse “el agua sin fin de la
memoria” (“the endless water of memory”) from “Nubario,” as well as her
poem about the movie “Solaris.” Despite the shafts of light that fall on many
passages, there is a feel of a “sombre, voluptuous dream,” which is how
Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande has been described. This might seem far-
fetched, but it is not, and the end of the poem even sounds like Mélisande
talking: “and an inspired enigma throws me into your arms /so as to live
with you in a star.” Debussy and Maeterlinck (whose play the opera is based
on) were both enthralled by the work of Edgar Allan Poe.
And it is Poe that Morejón quotes in a recent talk about her own poetry,
titled simply “Poetics.” After discussing García Lorca’s metaphor of hunt-
ing words like precious animals in a jungle at night, she turns to the master
of the macabre tale.
NANCY MOREJÓN 23
The other concept of poetry or of composing poetry to which I’m close to, is,
strangely enough, that of Edgar Allan Poe. I say strangely because he’s so
apparently distant from me in terms of language, race, gender, and social
milieu, and yet, his brief and extraordinary essay that accompanies his
famous poem “The Raven” moves me. It’s not by chance that Poe entitled
these reflections “The Philosophy of Composition,” whose pedagogical lumi-
nosity should serve as the guide for all teaching on the writing vocation. I was
able to distinguish two phenomena he mentions as integral to my own
creativity: the originality that flows from ecstasy as well as a unique sense of
the beautiful. According to Poe: “Most writers, poets in especial (sic), prefer
having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy, an ecstatic
intuition.” Later he adds the following: “The point, I mean, that beauty is the
sole legitimate province of the poem ( . . . ) My first object, as usual, was
originality.” (Morejón, 1995b)
everything: “Old world that I love, /new world that I love, /worlds, worlds
the two, my worlds: /Oh the sacred tortoises; /ah the algae /ah the name
of the coastal woman /anchored in the center of the world.” Loynaz’s poem
is one of loneliness, silence, solitude, and dark forebodings; Morejón,
despite retrieving certain dark moments of the past, displays an optimism
about the future which is entirely absent from Loynaz.
The house/vessel is almost free of demons because she has threatened
them into retreat, she wants a house where “good fortune reigns supreme.”
In the last stanza, she reiterates the ship or house as something that protects
her and ends: “I live in my ship live /sheltered from thunder and lightning
/My house is that grand ship [venerable vessel] /I say /over the golden
island /in which I will die” (Morejón, 1986, p. 108). The sheltering images
of the house are not merely an inward phenomenon or a place to flee the
outside world; in Morejón’s house they are the starting point to embrace
the world, to meet it head on. This is most evident in the stanza where she
refers to a slave who tells her, “Vamos a andar” (Let us stride together) and
“we both plant our legs in the earth /like unscathed tree trunks, like built
nests /embracing beneath the tempest” (Morejón, 1986, p. 107). Right after
this she says, “I think of the time of polished stone,” which is the title of the
book, an image taken up again in the final poem, also called “Piedra pulida”
(Polished Stone).
This last poem is brief and worth quoting in its entirety:
A new book,
a new day,
another brand-new city
more summers, more flowers,
that perpetual sea,
and I, now,
on polished stone,
I search for your lips,
for your eyes.
(Morejón, 1985, p. 49; trans. Weaver)
The mood of this poem is even more upbeat than the previous one, but it
retains a sense of longing, of renewed desire. Stones have a strong cosmic
resonance, as we saw in discussing “The Eyes of Elegguá.” The otá or otán
(sacred stone) is where an orisha’s aché is gathered in the Afro-Cuban
tradition. Their solidity has always been associated with immortality, im-
perishability, the indestructible element of ultimate reality. But Morejón
goes a little farther, since polished stone, aside from evoking an archaeologi-
cal term (neolithic age), also denotes something worked on, perfected,
changed, or transformed, like the poem or the aesthetic object, which can
also be polished but must be made to endure. The ending of the poem
reinforces this view, recalling the famous “stones that speak” from which
26 TROPICS OF HISTORY
the divine oracle at Delphi would issue forth. Morejón’s poem also seems
to evoke that extraordinary interview of Lezama Lima where he says: “I
remember that phrase by Nietzsche: ‘Wherever there’s a stone there will be
an image’ ” (CILCA, 1971, p. 70). And yet Morejón delivers the lines with
the intimacy that one would use in addressing a lover. The mere nine verses
achieve a synthesis of wonder, hymn to simple pleasures, self-reflexive
meditation, and love poem.
While in much of Morejón’s work race and gender are implicit sources
of resonance, they also appear more overtly in her images. Two poems in
particular illustrate this more explicitly gendered and racial historical view:
“Amo a mi amo” (I Love My Master) and “Mujer negra” (Black Woman).
“I Love My Master,” also from Piedra pulida (p. 100), is steeped in history,
and the poet puts herself in the shoes of a black woman slave talking about
her master. It is constructed as a paradigmatic situation, since neither the
master nor the slave is named as an individual. Morejón’s poem is laced
with enormous irony which begins from the first verse. Unfortunately, the
English does not retain the richness of the Spanish “Amo a mi amo,” which
feels like a palindrome. The echo effect further underlines the irony between
the verb amar (love) and the noun amo (master). Love is in this context an
act of submission. Morejón’s poem deftly exploits all the contradictions of
the situation: “I love his roving pirate’s feet /that have pillaged foreign
lands. /[ . . . ] he strummed his vihuela [ancient guitar] and /melodious
couplets soared, /as though from Manrique’s throat. /I longed to hear a
marímbula sound. /I love his fine red mouth, /that speaks words I can’t
understand. /The language I speak to him /still isn’t his own” (Morejón,
1985, p. 75). The body, music, language, everything reflects the colonial and
slave relationship, but the poem deals with gender-specific oppression as
well. Morejón’s poem has close affinities with Adrienne Rich’s analysis of
male power over women, that range from the denial of sexuality to exploi-
tation of labor, to objectification and stifling of creativity and knowledge-
seeking; but her approach is always embedded in a Cuban or Caribbean
perspective.
Morejón has the slave questioning her plight: “What’s he going to say to
me? /Why do I live in this hole not fit for a bat? / Why do I wait on him
hand and foot? / Where does he go in his lavish coach /drawn by horses
that are luckier than me?” (Morejón, 1985, pp. 75–77). And further, she
dreams of rebellion, of freedom: “I love my master but every night /When
I cross the blossoming path to the canefield / the secret place of our acts of
love, /I see myself knife in hand, /flaying him like an innocent animal /”
(ibid., p. 77). But the ending of the poem leaves the female slave at a
crossroads. Of course one’s sympathies are with the slave’s yearning for
freedom, but the poet has the dream of freedom rudely interrupted: “Be-
witched drumbeats /now drown his cries, his sufferings. /The bells of the
sugar-mill call . . .” (ibid., p. 77). This is the bell that calls the slaves back to
NANCY MOREJÓN 27
work. Will the dream become a reality? Will she heed the calling of the bells
or become a cimarrona (runaway slave)? Morejón does not take the easy way
out by producing an obvious outcome: she leaves it up to the reader to
imagine. Despite the ironic nature of the poem, the frequent “I loves” of the
slave should be taken seriously: they indicate an identification and/or love
of the master which is commonplace in the oppressor/oppressed relation.
Of course, it is a twisted love, deformed by male domination and (self)-de-
valuation of women, but the author significantly chooses to make it have
weight within the overall context of the historical situation depicted. More-
jón seems to be issuing a warning: liberation from oppression does not
mean that the past vanishes. It is a long process, an ongoing dialogue with
the forces of the past, and if we ignore it, we continue to run the risk of
bringing it back, sometimes in even deadlier forms.
In “Mujer negra” (Black Woman), Morejón revisits history again, but
in a much more rebellious spirit. Although there are references to the
Middle Passage, to back-breaking work and injustice, the poem focuses
on the resistance to the iniquities of race and class. It even draws a
historical affinity between Maceo and the Cuban revolutionaries of the
nineteenth century and the July 26th Movement led by Fidel Castro’s
guerrilla army. And it ends with considerable optimism concerning the
goals and achievements of the Cuban Revolution, with great enthusiasm
about the future. Despite the rational and thought-out nature of the
poem, the poet reminds us that writing a poem is not the same as
documentary history or the elaboration of a political manifesto. Speak-
ing of this poem, she says:
This extraordinary poem, heartfelt and tender, is also hard as nails. There
is no sentimentality at any moment, but instead a spirited and quiet heroism
that is nothing less than inspirational. Morejón comments on this poem:
“Virginia Woolf lived convinced that behind each woman writer fluttered
the ghost of her mother. I’m no exception to this. So it’s not just that my
mother is a symbol of my poetry because she engendered me, but because,
without any resources, she raised me, she gave me an education, she
instilled in me the longing for independence, and she showed me forms of
refinement to which I am still grateful” (Morejón, 1995b). Clearly her mother
has taught the author much about life, a life in the New World, quite different
from the mothers and daughters of Virginia Woolf’s imagination, yet still
recognizing a womanly solidarity in a world run by men. In an interview she
explains: “Women also have a special vision that is born of pain, and pain
smartens one up a great deal” (Behar and Suárez, 1994, p. 629).
Morejón clearly admits that her specificity as a writer derives from being
a woman and black, but she interjects a note of caution: “This doesn’t mean
I’m a strident feminist. I don’t tend to be strident about anything” (Behar
and Suárez, 1994, pp. 628–29). Morejón’s feminism is not dogmatic; it is
transcultured, where there is room for Yemayá and Kristeva, Poe and García
Lorca, Woolf and Angela Davis. It is born from the loving and stern example
of her mother, given impulse by her friendship with Cuban artists like Ana
Mendieta, and nurtured by the inclusiveneess of a host of women who have
tried to build bridges between the island and its diasporic community
(Lourdes Casal, Ruth Behar). Morejón’s words must also be understood in
the Cuban context of a revolutionary society under assault from a powerful
NANCY MOREJÓN 29
The structure of the poem is built around looking into a mirror: that of
an exile looking at new cities and countries, trying to see if they will mirror
their reality or identity. Naturally, there is a frustration, because that reflec-
tion is interfered with by the very disruption and displacement of exile. As
the poem says: “No other country, no other city is possible” (Behar and
Suárez, 1994, p. 621). The poem is in dialogue with another poem by
Lourdes Casal entitled “For Ana Veldford,” from her book Palabras juntan
revolución (1981). Casal, a writer-scholar, was one of the first Cubans in exile
who attempted to build bridges to her homeland, where she had lived the
first twenty-odd years of her life. As evidenced in this poem, it was no easy
task:
This (n)either (n)or dynamic is not strange to exile reality, and it has been a
constant preoccupation of Cuban exile writers such as Cristina García, Elías
Miguel Muñoz, José Kozer, and many others. However, it is refreshing to
see it taken up by a poet “from the other side,” that is, a writer still living
in Cuba. But even more important is that Morejón avoids the stereotyped
“revolutionary” view that they are uprooted Cubans who are on their way
to becoming deracinated Anglos with an accent. The Cuban cultural estab-
lishment did not even view this literature as Cuban for many years; this has
changed, but more out of political opportunism than anything else. Morejón
32 TROPICS OF HISTORY
sees this writing and its concerns as important to Cuban literature because
it forms part of a Cuban reality, even if it is not confined to the physical
geography of the island.
In “Ana Mendieta” (1948–85), Morejón offers a heartfelt remembrance
of the Cuban artist exiled in the United States, who met a terrible death
when she fell from the thirty-fourth floor of her apartment building. Many
claim she was shoved by her artist husband, Carl André, but he was
acquitted. Mendieta emigrated at thirteen, living for five years in an or-
phanage, an experience that marked her for life. In 1980 she returned to
Cuba and began making a series of rupestrian sculptures in the rock
formations of Jaruco. Before that she had been doing “earth sculptures,”
silhouettes of her body imprinted on soil, similar to the corpse drawings
she had done even earlier (all this work was documented in photos or
videos). At the risk of simplifying, it was clear that Mendieta’s art had a
strong link to her search for identity, that rock, earth, and soil were literally
dug into in order to affirm her identity, to combat the sense of displacement
and uprootedness. Morejón admirably deals with these themes in the poem.
She begins the poem in New York, where Mendieta lived: “Ana was fragile
as lightning in the sky. /She was the most fragile girl in Manhattan.” Soon
after, she mentions her awful demise: “Ana cast into space. Ana, our lady
of despair, /yourself sculpted in the hostile cement of Broadway. /A desert,
like the desert /you found in the orphanages, /a desert, yellow and gray,
reaches you /and holds you tight, through the air.” (trans. D. Frye in Behar
and Suárez, 1994, p. 618). But the entire rest of the poem is dedicated to
images of flying, floating, birds, and kites, as if to suggest that Ana’s art, the
most terrestrial of work, actually defied gravity, and, of course, death.
Morejón, consistent with that imagery, ends the poem in like fashion, with
a splendid mood of reconciliation, of Ana returning not only to earth but
also returning to her homeland. In her journey she was able to recuperate
her lost country and childhood.
Morejón, as can be seen from this brief view of her work, is a poet with
a vast and powerful range of themes and modes of expression. As she
NANCY MOREJÓN 33
herself has expressed it: “There’s no poetics of Nancy Morejón as such, but
several of them. The ones that I’m aware of have been forged over forty
years. What’s important for you to know is that I started to be abducted by
poetry since I was nine” (Morejón, 1995b). The opening poem of Paisaje
célebre offers a glimpse of the nature of that abduction. It begins with a
simple description: “To see the fall of Icarus from a harbor of /blues and
greens of Alamar.” The second stanza is cryptic, speaking of “a misan-
thrope wearing a hood” and a “small man, by himself, toiling above fruit
trees /until he joins a rainbow in the sky.” The poem ends with a reference
to painting and then Icarus again.
Note
A version of this essay was published in Studies in Twentieth Century Literature
20, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 181–205.
TWO
belong to the essay or historical research; the author quickly shifts gears
and parodies the gothic or romantic novel. The underlying ideological
context conjoins the Cabala, freemasonry, Marxism, psychoanalysis, exis-
tentialism, the Sublime, and eighteenth-century revolutionary thought. The
characters are often unbelievable, the temporal leaps even more so, and the
narrative turnarounds are disconcerting. Despite the careful structuring of
his novels (using musical or architectural models), Carpentier’s fiction fans
out in many directions, elusive, always pushing its formal construction to
the breaking point.
One of those centripetal elements in Explosion in a Cathedral is the tension
between political praxis and utopia. Carpentier heightens that tension
using the notion of tragedy and theatricality in order to explore the histori-
cal phenomenon of revolution.
The novel, with a wealth of detail, describes the French Revolution and
its repercussions in the New World as tragedy. But what do we mean by the
word tragedy? It has been defined traditionally as a gesture of great courage
condemned to defeat. This gesture usually is played out on a large scale; it
normally is something beyond the everyday, and since its perspective is so
extreme, it seems to go beyond history (which is why Nietzsche crucially
links myth and tragedy). The rhythm of tragedy is the rhythm of sacrifice.
Through the suffering of the protagonist, the tragic hero, there is a disinte-
gration that ends in death. However, death is not just a personal act, but a
means to cleanse others or a collective, be it a society or a smaller grouping
or community (Williams, 1966, p. 156).
In Explosion in a Cathedral some of these elements of the classical defini-
tion of the term apply, but other factors make it necessary to introduce new
concepts in order to make the notion of tragedy more complete. The very
evolution of the words tragedy and revolution brought about two things: they
were viewed as antithetical and as being apart from society. This second
point might seem puzzling, but if we look into the history of the words, the
apparent paradox will be cleared up.
According to Raymond Williams, Renaissance tragedy or drama (four-
teenth–sixteenth centuries) secularized tragedy by predicating tragic action
not as a metaphysical fault within a mythical structure, but belonging more
to a character’s behavior within a moral scheme. The hero, otherwise a good
and dignified person, commits a moral error. The human weakness of the
protagonist and his or her subsequent “fall” would elicit compassion or pity
in the spectator. Suffering was thus a consequence of error, and happiness
was the execution of virtue. The problem with this framework, Williams
points out, is not that it is superficial, but that morality is conceived in static
terms, and, more than a case of redemption (classic drama), tragedy’s
resolution becomes more of an adjustment in order to return to the natural
and moral order of things.
ALEJO CARPENTIER 39
The idea of the “total redemption of humanity” has the ultimate cast of
resolution and order, but in the real world its perspective is inescapably tragic.
It is born in pity and terror: in the perception of a radical disorder in which
the humanity of some men is denied and by the fact that the idea of humanity
itself is denied. It is born in the actual suffering of real men thus exposed, and
in all of its consequences of this suffering: degeneration, brutalisation, fear,
hatred, envy. It is born in an experience of evil made the more intolerable by
the conviction that it is not inevitable, but is the result of particular actions
and choices.
And if it is tragic in its origins—in the existence of a disorder that cannot
but move and involve—it is equally tragic in its action, in that it is not against
gods or inanimate things that its impulse struggles, nor against mere institu-
tions and social forms, but against other men. This, throughout, has been the
area of silence, in the development of the idea. What is properly called
utopianism, or revolutionary romanticism, is the suppression or dilution of
this inevitable fact. . . .
We have still to attend to the whole action, and to see actual liberation as
part of the same process as the terror which appalls us. I do not mean that
liberation cancels the terror; I only mean that they are connected and that this
connection is tragic. (Williams, 1966, pp. 77, 82)
One could not live without a political ideal; the happiness of a whole people
could not be achieved at the first attempt; . . . perhaps he had been the victim
of an exaggerated idealism; she admitted that the excesses of the Revolution
were deplorable, but great human victories could not be achieved without
pain and sacrifice. To sum up: nothing big could be done in this world without
blood being shed. (Carpentier, 1963, p. 262)
Esteban lashes back lucidly: “It’s the pious believers like you, the deluded,
the devourers of humanitarian pamphlets, the Calvinists of the Idea, who
erect guillotines” (ibid., p. 262). Esteban sees only tragedy (in the traditional
sense); Sofía, true to the epic spirit, sees blood as the sweat of revolutionary
freedom.
The most extreme example of the epic orientation is Víctor Hugues, the
exemplary man of action and prime mover in the novel. Hugues’s political
will is so potent that he is capable of roundly negating reality, as is the case
with the death of Robespierre: he hangs onto Jacobin doctrine, and, without
missing a step, tries to promote the revolution in the New World. The
tragedy of Víctor Hugues is his entrapment in the mirage of ideology and
power. Even when he is cognizant of this later on, with Esteban (chap. 28),
he continues impetuously without knowing how to stop, not unlike Mac-
beth. Hugues sees society and the revolution as machines, as Hobbes would
say. He is only an instrument in the hands of the great force of revolutionary
power. He admits as much to Sofía much later, when in Cayenne (French
Guyana): “I’m like those automata who play chess, walk, play the fife or
beat the drum when they’re wound up. There was only one role I hadn’t
played, a blind man. I’m playing that now” (ibid., p. 333).
Hugues is touching on a fundamental problem of political language and
its usefulness in trying to bring about change. Political discourse is exhor-
tative; it needs to initiate or motivate action, and in revolutionary times,
language is closely allied with forces that are not easily controlled: power
and violence. Even when this language speaks of virtue, reason, honor, and
the common good, it must face social forces that will energetically oppose
revolutionary ideas. Roland Barthes said that the Stalinist universe defined
everything in terms of Good and Evil, that every word uttered implied
naming a value (Barthes, 1973, p. 31). The distance between naming and
judgment was nil, and therefore all thought became tautological. Carpen-
tier describes a similar situation in the novel. In other words, those who are
not with the revolution are counterrevolutionaries, and if you are an enemy
of the revolutionary order, you could be sent to the guillotine (or to a work
camp, reeducation center, prison). Jean Starobinski, in a book about the
French Revolution, describes the hallucinatory spiral which ends in this
kind of dementia:
In its attempt to lend principles the force that makes them effective, language
lets itself be annexed by the violence it sought to tame. Without losing any
42 TROPICS OF HISTORY
of its brilliance, the limpid speech of principle became the trenchant words of
action. It was no longer compared with the innocent transparency of crystal
but with the cutting edge of steel. To expound the source of the law was no
longer enough; now those who opposed it had to be punished. Obviously,
there was a risk that this sort of language would wear itself out in an
ever-mounting tide of austere vehemence, anathema, and unrelenting ab-
straction. (Starobinski, 1982, p. 60)
tragedy (ibid., p. 334). Hugues not only evokes Oedipus, but surely Saturn
devouring his son, quite consistent with the references to Goya throughout
the text. And like Don Giovanni, he will sink into the depths without
repenting.
The guillotine forms one of the theatrical foundations of the novel, and
Carpentier sets the stage ingeniously and with lush detail in chapter 21,
when the beheading machine is first used in public. The people gather
around it in a kind of festive mood to witness a spectacle:
They had never seen a theater open to all, and, for this reason, the people were
now discovering the essence of Tragedy. Fate was present among them, its
blade waiting, with inexorable punctuality, for those who had been ill-ad-
vised enough to turn their arms against the town. And the spirit of the Chorus
was active in every spectator, as strophes and anti-strophes, occurrences and
apostrophes were bandied across the stage. (chap. 21, p. 150)
This public, open-air theater, with its bloody tragedy, provokes a reaction:
of wanting to shake off the terror and death, and, as a result, another
spectacle is created, the public ceremony or carnaval. Later, the guillotine
goes on the road, from town to town, like a traveling theater company (ibid.,
p. 153). When it arrives in a town it centralizes life around its awesome
destructiveness, even to the point of being the axis of economic activity (p.
151), as if it were an emblem on the stage of a baroque drama. In Calderón
de la Barca’s El gran teatro del mundo (1633), there are two emblematic globes
on stage: on one is the author seated on a throne; on the other, an emblem
with two doors on which are painted a crib and a tomb, respectively.
(Carpentier’s other baroque source for “the world as stage” image [aside
from Shakespeare, of course] is Lope de Vega’s Lo fingido verdadero.) The
guillotine announces the birth of a new world, incarnate in two documents:
the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Constitution of 1793. But it
also announces judgment, ideological vehemence, and blood. It is this
conjunction of the good bathed in blood that makes Robespierre’s words
comprehensible: “Virtue without Terror is impotent; Terror without Virtue
is malignant.”
Theater and guillotine are paired up from the start, in a chilling, two-page
description that begins the novel. It could be likened to an ironic loa, which
traditionally has been defined as a brief piece or poem presented before the
main play of the evening. Usually it was a panegyric extolling the virtues
of an illustrious person or an august event, and it was meant to grab the
audience’s attention. Its two functions were to establish a relationship
between the performers and the public and to “highlight the fictitious
nature of the upcoming dramatic representation” (Rodríguez and Tordera,
1983, p. 32). Carpentier, with this loa, sets the tone for one of the principal
themes of the novel: the apotheosis of political reason and its murderous
consequences. Furthermore, he also draws attention to the allegorical dis-
ALEJO CARPENTIER 45
course which he will employ in his novel as a means with which to meditate
on history (more will be said about allegory later on). And by placing this
narrative fragment out of chronological order—if he had followed a strict
realist approach, the loa would go just before the beginning of chapter
17—Carpentier underlines the materiality of the writing process and his
own insertion into the text as author (again, echoing the beginning of El
gran teatro del mundo). The novelist accentuates a technique, a method, that
he has adopted from the dramatic and lyric literature of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries—the emblem. In Explosion in a Cathedral, the guillo-
tine as emblem is counterposed to another emblem: the seashell that Este-
ban admires, conjuring up images of the Sublime (chap. 24).
The birth of the emblem in literature is usually attributed to the publica-
tion in 1531 of Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum liber (Alciato, 1985). The
influence of emblems on the literary arts was immense, and its visual,
didactic strengths were highly valued by preachers and teachers (Daly,
1979). In his study of Alciato, critic S. Sebastián defines the emblem as
follows:
If in the origins of culture, letter and image went together, the sixteenth
century fostered a dialectic between the two, creating the illusion of corre-
spondences that also appealed to the traditional harmonic reationship be-
tween microcosms and macrocosms. The internal harmony of the emblem is
established between its components. The emblema triplex . . . is distinguished
from other icono-verbal forms by virtue of its three differentiated parts: (1)
the inscriptio or motto, which is the emblem’s title; (2) the pictura or symbolic
image; and (3) the subscriptio, a statement or epigram at the foot of the image.
Alciato and other, later emblematists conceived the image as the body, and
the texts as the soul of the emblem; therefore, any attempt at clarification or
analysis of the emblem must take into account its representation (res picta)
and its formulation (res significans). (Alciato, 1985, pp. 8–9)
pains to indicate that his novel did not have in mind the revolutionary
transformation of his native Cuba. Here are his words in an interview
published in 1983 (after his death):
I’m not in agreement with the statement that says I have a “Saturnian” concept
of history. And I differ from the idea that no revolution has delivered on its
promises. If, in a certain way, the French Revolution failed, I couldn’t, histori-
cally speaking, show great optimism towards it. History is what it is, and can’t
be any other way. But in reference to revolutions in general, it’s enough for
me to see the results of the Cuban Revolution, its great achievements, the
magnificent changes it has brought about in the life of my compatriots, so that
I become aware that not all revolutions have to defraud those who have made
it. (Carpentier, 1989, p. 54)
These words might seem quaint and ironic to many at this stage in Cuba’s
history (reflecting how rapidly things shift), but they must be understood
within a certain context (before 1980), when Cuba was living in greater
economic prosperity and with certain social gains (health, education, close
to zero unemployment) that had universally been achieved.
Carpentier’s “method” of trying to represent revolution is a vast in-
tertextual drama placed and performed on the stage of history. It is a
conversation with Greek tragedy, baroque theater, Spanish painting and
history, Caribbean voodoo, French politics and thought, African-based
religions, German aesthetic theory and philosophy, and Cuban historians.
This intoxicating dialogue with the dead, the living (and the future) could
be called transcultured historiography. Like Severo Sarduy’s idea of retom-
bée, sometimes the echo precedes the voice. This approach to history re-
quires the determination of an archivist, the rigorous logic of a scientist, the
insight of a philosopher, the creative architectonics of a composer, and the
imagination of a poet. Perhaps this explains Carpentier’s generous mixing
of genres under the novelistic umbrella. Antillean (Cuban) realities require
a fluid, inclusive manner, aspiring to the liquid alchemy characteristic of
the Caribbean Sea.
But although we cannot attribute to Carpentier, or to his novel, a view
of the Cuban Revolution, his interpretive and historical approach in the
novel can invite such thoughts in current readers. Indeed, Carpentier’s
method of moving across vast stretches of time (from the Zohar to Stalin,
from Goya to Brecht, from Rousseau to Lenin) incites those very associa-
tions. The idea is not so simple, though, because it is not just a question of
linking up Robespierre or Saint-Just with, say, Fidel Castro, or perhaps
Esteban with Lezama Lima. That could be a fruitful and interesting exercise,
but Carpentier had larger issues in mind, such as the role of violence in
revolutionary change, or the idea of beginning anew by transforming a
society from the bottom up, or the relationship between freedom and
necessity.
ALEJO CARPENTIER 51
The hope for a new beginning, a new society, has driven revolutionaries
for the last two centuries. The French Revolution went so far as changing
the calendar, giving different names to the months. In Cuba one constantly
hears “antes” and “después” (before and after), with the implicit under-
standing that it refers to the revolution. It is as if Cuba became another
country on January 1, 1959. To a certain extent this is true; the revolution
made a radical break with the past in terms of class relations, unemploy-
ment, racism, education, health, and economic policy, not to mention a vast
reorientation of its foreign policy. But this newness harks back to biblical
times, with the Judeo-Christian messianistic impulse. But differently, it was
not a divine act which would interrupt and give a new course to secular
history, but instead an act (or acts) of men and women that would give
history a new dimension, and society a new set of rules, defined by freedom.
It is as if the revolutionary process had tried to abolish or wipe away
society’s original sin by seeking a new start and attempting to build a
utopian future. This new start must reckon, however, with the so-called
“social question.”
Hannah Arendt, in her incisive book of essays On Revolution, has traced
the inner tension of revolutionary movements since the French Revolution.
She defines as crucial the conflict between freedom and necessity, defining
the latter as a social issue (and, of course, economic, as well). Moreover, the
step from freedom to necessity becomes a crucial element in the valoration
of the necessity of violence. Says Arendt: “Thus the role of revolution was
no longer to liberate men from the oppression of their fellow men, let alone
to found freedom, but to liberate the life process of society from the fetters
of scarcity so that it could swell into a stream of abundance. Not freedom
but abundance became now the aim of revolution” (Arendt, 1990, p. 64). To
“liberate the life process,” at least in the Marxist revolutionary tradition,
means the violent overthrow of a corrupt and shallow society, because that
society will not change peacefully nor give up its privileges without a fight.
Alain Touraine adds that Marx believed in the liberation of nature, that a
classless society would be the triumph (or return) of nature (Touraine, 1995,
pp. 80–81). But this comes about through “an obsession with totality” which
does not “make allowance for the appearance within civil society of the
social actor” (ibid., p. 82). Liberating the life process leads to the corruption
or elimination of civil society, a destructive feature for any society.
Curiously, though, violence, despite its relationship to revolutions and
historical events, falls outside of politics, in the strict sense. If, as Aristotle
said, humans are political beings endowed with human speech (and both
are necessary to transact politics), violence is the exhaustion of the political,
the reign of silence. As a result, a revolutionary justification for violence
must expend time (and words) to invade or cover this silence: “a theory of
revolution, therefore, can only deal with the justification of violence
because this justification constitutes its political limitation; if instead, it
52 TROPICS OF HISTORY
pity, and “Pity, taken as the spring of virtue, has proved to possess a greater
capacity for cruelty than cruelty itself” (ibid., p. 89). Behind the selfless
devotion to “the people” can lie a vicious inclination to persecute. The
problem with this pity is its boundlessness, Arendt says of Robespierre, so
“that the evil of his virtue was that it did not accept any limitations” (ibid.,
p. 90). This limitless nature of revolution, its words and deeds, its vicious
virtue, its passion for freedom and justice, do not fall into a vacuum. They
continue to beset our century’s dreams, no matter how skeptical postmod-
ernists may be of these “grand narrative” schemes. They form the emblems
of Carpentier’s theater of history that have haunted the twentieth century
with passionate hope and bloody intolerance, revealing that if man is “a
tattered coat upon a stick” (Yeats), from its meager threads are woven the
opposites “with which there is no progress: attraction and repulsion, reason
and energy, love and hate . . . [so] necessary for human existence.”
THREE
and Diamonds), his last novel, is a kind of science fiction novel, a cross
between Camus’s The Plague and Godard’s Alphaville.
Some of his other significant plays are Aire Frío (1958), a family satire;
La boda (1957), a savage look at marriage; El no (1965); and a pas-de-deux
about fear and death, Dos viejos pánicos (1968), winner of the Casa de
las Américas Award. The latter, despite the award, was not performed
in Cuba until 1990.
Piñera spent the better part of twelve years in Argentina (1946–58),
with trips backs to Cuba either to collaborate on the staging of his plays
or for personal reasons. Though he published in Orígenes magazine, he
was never considered part of the group’s inner circle like José Lezama
Lima, Cintio Vitier, Eliseo Diego, Fina García Marruz, Julián Orbón, and
Angel Gaztelu. He was a close friend of José Rodríguez Feo, the
magazine’s financial backer, who eventually broke with them to form
his own magazine, Ciclón. Piñera was one of the chief editors and
contributors to Ciclón, whose tone was more belligerent and willing to
take on issues (Sade, homosexuality, political commitment) than
Orígenes, which its Catholicism (even if unorthodox) was less reluctant
to deal with.
Piñera returned to Cuba shortly before the revolution and stayed on
afterwards. He was put in charge of Ediciones R, a government-created
publishing firm, which also brought out his Collected Works of Theater,
(Teatro completo), featuring seven of his plays. Despite the revolution’s
recognition of his importance as a literary figure and dramatist, signs
of strain were evident early on. In the famous meeting held with Cuban
intellectuals in June 1961, in which Fidel Castro took part, Piñera stood
up at one point and said, “I’m scared. I don’t know why, but I’m scared.”
His fears were confirmed a few months later when he was jailed for one
night in a government crackdown on prostitution and homosexuality.
Nonetheless, Piñera stayed in his job and continued to be published
during the 1960s.
The hardening cultural atmosphere around the Padilla affair ad-
versely affected Piñera, as it did Lezama, and for the last ten years of
his life (1969–79) he was not published on the island. Younger writers,
gay or not, were told to avoid him, as he was viewed as “ideologically
suspect.” By 1987 a kind of “rehabilitation” had taken place, and several
books of his works (stories, plays, and poems) have been published
posthumously.
Piñera was unswerving in his view of the world as well as in his
literary style. His absurdism, dark humor, and scathing criticism of
hypocrisy and grandiosity were applied to all: young and old, conser-
vative and radical, low lifes and aristocrats, believers and atheists.
Many writers after the revolution (some with the best of intentions and
voluntarily, others out of fear or opportunism) tried to write more
popular literature, making it accessible to the masses. Not Piñera.
Perhaps that is why currently he (and Lezama) are viewed by the young
generations of Cuban artists and writers as inspirational not only as
extraordinary artists, but as human beings of unparalleled dignity,
VIRGILIO PIÑERA 57
honesty, and integrity. Piñera was unique in Cuban letters: his outra-
geous imagination was at the same time vicious, funny, and implacable.
But out of the ashes of desolation, there is an ethical core to his writing
that deeply examines Cuban society with ruthless insight.
HISTORY AND ITS DOUBLES:
THE MASTER–S LAVE DIALECTIC, OR WHAT
HAPPENS WHEN HEGEL MEETS THE
KEYSTONE COPS
History is haunted by its doubles, by specters that assail the identity of the
social, questioning the illusory ideals of collective (or individual) happi-
ness. These phantoms would turn history as epic or tragedy into opera
buffa, letting us know that outside the polis we become gods or beasts.
These spectres are memory, whose figurative energy erodes oblivion; the
body, marked by persecution disrupting the placid narrative of ideology;
and flesh-and-blood specters like servants and slaves who threaten to
become masters. And there is always the specter of the Other, always poised
to steal our enjoyment (jouissance), always beyond pleasure, haunting our
gratification: apparition, dream, shadows, imitations, a source of dread and
horror. For Epicureans, specters were images or semblances that emanated
from the corporeal. Virgilio Piñera, in a kind of Epicurean fury, showed us
how the body and its specters were the sight, the spectacle of history in all
its foldings and unfoldings. Few writers took on these doubles with such
ferocious irony as he did. Piñera was one of the most scathing political
satirists the island of Cuba has ever had, and the human and social calami-
ties his art depicted were beyond anything being written at the time (1940s
and 1950s). Remarkably, his work has acquired a prophetic tone in being
able to anticipate many of the political trends or phenomena that would
later become so evident or obvious: the fabrications of image-obsessed,
sound-bite politics, the brittle absurdity of Soviet Communism, the element
of desire and enjoyment (jouissance) that underlies different ideologies, the
visibility-invisibility of power relationships, the packaging and marketing
distortions of commodity politics.
“El Muñeco” (“The Dummy”) is one of the author’s longer stories and
is a bizarre, if not hilarious, mix of political satire, science fiction, slapstick,
cloak-and-dagger comedy of errors, and fantasy. It was written over a
period of ten years (1944–54) and was included in his Cuentos fríos (Editorial
Losada, Buenos Aires) of 1956. This short story collection was translated
into English as Cold Tales (hereafter CT) in 1988. This ten-year period, in
which the author lived in Buenos Aires, was marked by important, some-
times unspeakable, events: the Holocaust, an enormous Jewish and Nazi
Central European immigration to Argentina, the atomic bomb, the first
stages of the cold war, the hydrogen bomb, the Perón regime in Argentina
(1946–55), the Arbenz government in Guatemala overthrown by a CIA coup
VIRGILIO PIÑERA 59
that one must “extract the dummy with the dummy.” The president is
displeased, claiming that doubles are dangerous because they begin as
servants and end up as masters (CT, p. 103).
Jonatán insists that he will work by analogy, by building a doll (or
dummy) which will become extinguished instead of the president. It will
be made of rubber, will execute the president’s famous smile, have a
clockwork mechanism for the eyes which will stare for one minute and then
move on for the next minute, plus certain devices for speaking and body
movements. To ensure accuracy of representation, even a twitching left
shoulder will be included, since the president behaves that way while
attending church functions.
Convinced, the president gives the order to begin working on the project
right away, since he wants the dummy to be ready in nine days for the
celebration of his third accession to power. Despite his excitement, the
president also issues a warning: if the plan is successful, Jonatán will be a
national hero; if not, the president himself will kill him with his own bare
hands (CT, p. 106).
After several days there is a final test which Piñera describes as follows:
“The likeness was so astonishing that the President, thinking the dummy
was the President, began to give orders that he himself be expelled from the
makeshift workshop. The rubber dummy worked so effectively that it
caused a dangerous confusion: the President insulted and slapped himself,
foamed at the mouth, called himself an impostor, a bad patriot, a traitor,
and may other things” ( CT, pp. 108–9). The president has been seduced by
the striking authenticity of the dummy, a further reminder of how dummi-
fied he has become. The narrator fears the worst, but fortunately the
incident is forgotten and they proceed to the mechanical test. It is a success,
but again it almost ends in failure.
Finally, the day arrives for the dummy to make its true appearance. The
government explains to the people that the dummy will be part of the
anniversary celebration. The dummy appears at a balcony that overlooks
an enormous plaza, but the throngs are remarkably silent. They think it is
the president and demand that the dummy be brought out. The president
comes out and the masses hail him by saying, “There’s the dummy! There’s
the dummy!” ( CT, p. 111).
After this incident, cabinet ministers, advisors, and top military brass
also insist on having their own dummies. Soon the practice is extended to
all members of the government and eventually to teachers. Piñera closes
with the following: “In the end, the people whose dummies were multiply-
ing rapidly over the face of the earth retreated to those mysterious places,
the toy stores. There, registered and classified by competent employees,
wrapped in cellophane and set out on multicolored cardboard boxes, they
stupidly waited to be chosen by a child and torn limb from limb at the hands
of innocence” ( CT, p. 112).
VIRGILIO PIÑERA 61
whatever we think of any feelings it may have or may not have, is the precise
economic equivalent of slave labor” (Wolfe, 1979, p. 152). Jonatán’s efforts
are clearly within the domain of political authority and domination. After
all, the goal of the dummy is to continue the president’s rule without
annihilating him as a human being, since the problem with offering yourself
as a fake is that you become precisely that. The outcome of his experiment
is a mixed success, to be sure.
Piñera’s “The Dummy” touches on crucial elements of the master-slave
relationship, not only in terms of technology and politics, but also in a
Hegelian sense. In discussing Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, I will rely on
Alexandre Kojeve’s lectures (Kojeve, 1991), followed by a psychoanalytic
updating of the Hegelian paradigm by Jessica Benjamin (Benjamin, 1988).
For Hegel, his search began with the quest for Absolute Knowledge,
something that is possible through Universal Self-Consciousness. How do
human beings acquire self-consciousness? It begins with desire. Hegel
distinguishes two kinds of desire, however. One is animal desire, directed
at satisfying biological needs, and this produces a natural being. What
makes a desire truly human and social is the fact that the desire be the object
of another’s desire toward the same object. This object does not necessarily
have to be food. It can be biologically useless, as in the case of a medal, a
flag, a coveted symbol. For human history to exist, then, there must be a
multiplicity of desires, which will eventually lead to recognition of human
subjects by other human subjects. What does recognition entail for Hegel?
In an initial dyad we have two individuals struggling to be acknow-
ledged, and it is a fight to the death in order to establish a situation of
independence and mastery. In a desire they both share, each person wants
to impose their desire, so that they will be recognized.
In other words, man’s humanity “comes to light” only if he risks his (animal)
life for the sake of his human Desire. It is in and by this risk that it “comes to
light,” i.e., is shown, demonstrated, verified, and gives proofs of being
essentially different from the animal, natural reality. And that is why to speak
of the origin of Self-Consciousness is necessarily to speak of the risk of life
(for an essentially nonvital end). (Kojeve, 1991, p. 7)
The extremity of this situation poses a problem: the struggle for recog-
nition will result in the death of one of the protagonists of the dyad. You
cannot be recognized unless your adversary survives. This means that two
fundamentally different human behaviors are at work, that of the master
and that of the slave. During the fight for recognition, the adversary who
becomes the slave fears the other and death enough to sacrifice his or her
desire and satisfy the desire of the other (master). S/he must recognize the
other without being recognized in return. Therefore, human beings, even
in their nascent state, are never just “humans” but masters or slaves. They
are constituted by autonomous and independent existences. So, “to speak
VIRGILIO PIÑERA 63
Orloff, the prime minister, is baffled and states, “Dialectically, such a thing
is impossible . . . and yet” (Piñera, 1955b, p. 9).
Kirianin, an army general, wants to have him disappear; Orloff wisely
says he is against creating martyrs. Instead he wants Nikita’s plea to go
unnoticed. Piñera plays with Hegel’s notion of recognition in a triple sense.
The first is the most obvious, the recognition factor in setting up the
master-slave dialectic. The second is a parody of the first, in that Nikita
wants to be recognized as a slave, or serf. That recognition is, pardon the
expression, a red herring, since being a slave in the Hegelian sense is not
being recognized, it is to be considered an animal or a thing. This contra-
diction becomes clearer within the wider context of the play. Since the
action takes place in a future communist society, there are no masters and
slaves, but that precisely is Nikita’s point. He sees serfs and masters
everywhere, but no one will admit it. His agenda is to denounce the
deception of concealed exploitation and servitude under the masquerade
of equality.
Kirianin, Orloff, and Fiodor (the Party secretary) agree to ignore Nikita’s
manifesto and stick to matters of form, but are unsuccessful. When finally
confronted with his new cause, Nikita falls to his knees and begins kissing
their feet. Orloff reacts quickly. He orders Kirianin and Fiodor to kneel
down and offer their rears to be kicked by Nikita. Orloff’s prescription to
force Nikita to become a master is pure slapstick—the Keystone Cops (or
maybe the Commissar Cops) meet Hegel in trying to bend the dialectic into
an unrecognizable shape. Orloff’s scheme fails, ending the first act.
In Act Two, Piñera begins with Stepachenko, a spy, arriving at Nikita’s
house. He has read Nikita’s piece in Pravda and wants to become his master.
Nikita agrees, but lays down three conditions: (1) he won’t serve a White
Russian disguised as a Red Russian; (2) he has to be kicked in the rear; and
(3) he must be turned over to the executioner if he rebels. And yet Nikita
cautions that a serf who rebels is no longer a serf, but instead becomes a
rebel. Again, we can see Hegel’s vision of history being sardonically out-
lined. Work and finally rebellion are the motors of history. Rebellion would
be the case of the slave attaining true self-consciousness through an act of
liberation (recognition by the Other).
In the following scene, the plot becomes more complicated with the
arrival of Adamov, a master from the Ural Mountains. He is deeply trou-
bled, since he lords over four hundred serfs and is concerned that Nikita’s
audacity will blow his cover. He wants to buy Nikita from Stepachenko in
order to punish him and intimidate his serfs into not going public. Reluctant
at first, Stepachenko gives in, since this will ultimately signify Nikita’s
beheading. He and Nikita have an important dialogue in which the dialectic
of history is laid out. The master-slave condition is established with the fear
of death as the cornerstone of that dynamic. The second phase, according
to Nikita, is the serf in rebellion. It is followed by the third, which is the serf
VIRGILIO PIÑERA 65
decapitated. The fourth phase is that of the master decapitated. The dia-
logue ends as follows:
But the heroism displayed is shot through with irony, and it anticipates
a later story, “The One Who Came to Save Me” (1967), where the main
character also tries to defeat death by choosing death. Before his execution
Nikita is questioned as to why he has risen against the state, and he replies,
“So as to fall.” When asked why he wants to fall, he responds, “So as to rise
up.” Subsequent questions come up with the same answers, as if he were
aping with his words some metaphysical yoyo of history. The eternal return
is history as “a narrative of misery” (Samuel Johnson), the class struggle as
a pie fight.
Returning to “The Dummy,” we find Piñera recurring to Hegelian con-
cepts, but more subtly. The narrator, Jonatán Fernández, is in a constant
66 TROPICS OF HISTORY
The gaze, in other words, remains outside desire, the look stubbornly
within” (ibid.). Lacan defines the gaze in terms of lack: “You grasp the
ambiguity of what is at issue when we speak of the scopic drive. The gaze
is the object lost and suddenly refound in the conflagration of shame, by
the introduction of the other. . . . What one looks at is what cannot be seen”
(Lacan, 1981, p. 182).
Jonatán oscillates between the look and the gaze. When he first sees the
president in the movie theater, he is somewhat the voyeur. He seems to be
within the look, in the world of desire: desire for recognition, desire for power,
and desire that borders on erotic ecstasy. But in fact several things indicate that
his viewing of the president is not quite so simple. His identification with the
president is so intense that he describes certain things that bother him as being
“torture.” When Jonatán saw the poster he burst into tears. Piñera states the
paradox with precision: Jonatán’s looking is his empathetic recognition (not a
Sartrean objectifying look) of the president’s dilemma as a public figure. This
emotional recognition is contradicted by the impersonality of the situation
encouraged by the medium—we think we know our celebrities. Further on,
when he meets the president in person, his smile replicates that of the chief
executive. Jonatán’s astonishment is his perception of a lack within the presi-
dent. His authority, his aura, is being usurped by the dummy. His own lack is
the desire-as-recognition, to be acknowledged by the president. Jonatán wants
to create an intimacy of mutual recognition, rather than the false exploitative
intimacy of the movie star image.
These lacks are ensnared by the gaze, more specifically the gaze of power,
and here we follow Foucault, who gives the concept of the gaze a historical
dimension. In his Discipline and Punish, he describes the gaze in terms of a
visibility of the power relationship in society. More traditionally power was
exhibited as spectacle, where the powerless passively watched; as they
looked they inserted themselves into the realm of the gaze. Since the
nineteenth century, there has been a shift, where the subject/citizen is
brought out into the open, scrutinized, analyzed.
Traditionally, power was what was seen, what was shown and what was
manifested and, paradoxically, found the principle of its force in the move-
ment by which it deployed that force. Those on whom it was exercised could
remain in the shade; they received light only from that portion of power that
was conceded to them, or from the reflection of it that for a moment they
carried. Disciplinary power, on the other hand, is exercised through its
invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle
of compulsory visibility. In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen.
Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them.
(Foucault, 1977, p. 187; emphasis added)
have thought the plan I was sketching out in mente during his brief conver-
sation was the most impractical thing imaginable. I say this because I saw
in his eyes the typical psychology characteristic of all communists. That is,
I saw relativity and orthodoxy” ( CT, pp. 86–87). Piñera ends the passage
with a viciously sardonic reference to Juan’s expression going from a smile
to a grimace. It is not difficult to find in the two passages quoted here, and
in other references made in the story, that Piñera had some of the history of
the prerevolutionary Cuban communists in mind.
Founded in August 1925, the Cuban Communist Party (CP) has had
some extraordinary figures among its members: Julio Antonio Mella, Rubén
Martínez Villena, Nicolás Guillén, Juan Marinello, Manuel Navarro Luna,
and Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, to name only a few. During its first decade or
so, it functioned illegally or semi-clandestinely. Its newspaper, Hoy, began
publishing legally in May 1938. In exchange for its support of Batista (who
was not in office at the time but still a major power broker), the Cuban CP
was legalized on September 13, 1938, and was allowed to have a major
influence in the trade union movement. Batista publicly stated his praise:
“The Communist Party, as in Mexico, the United States, and France, is
officially recognized, and Communism, as a legal force and not as a source
of disorder, has become a factor in promoting democratic formulas”
(Thomas, 1973, p. 928). Communists were members of the legislature, and
some held government positions in certain ministries, usually the Ministry
of Labor. During Grau San Martín’s administration (1944–48), communists
continued to be members of the loyal opposition, with perhaps more
emphasis on the adjective rather than the noun.
When Batista engineered his coup in 1952, the Cuban CP did not imme-
diately denounce it, due in part to its relationship with the colonel and
ex-president (1940–44) and because of the apathy, corruption, and political
gangsterism under Grau (1944–48) and Prío Socarrás, president from 1948
to 1952. Batista was equally tactful and did not dismiss communists
working in the Ministry of Labor or close down Hoy. A year later, however,
things changed, and by November 10, 1953, the Party was outlawed.
Even then, communists were not persecuted as mercilessly as members
of the nascent July 26th Movement headed by a young lawyer by the
name of Fidel Castro.
The Cuban CP’s initial reaction to the attack on the Moncada Barracks
on July 26, 1953, is well known: it thought it to be an act of foolish
adventurism and “putschist” in nature. Fidel’s view was equally dismis-
sive, though as the July 26th Movement grew stronger and more popular,
the two forces began to discuss points in common.
Many Latin American communist parties were criticized in the 1960s for
attitudes and practices similar to their Cuban counterparts: they had be-
come “reformist,” “revisionist,” too legalistic, pragmatic, and bourgeois. In
70 TROPICS OF HISTORY
short, they had lost their revolutionary and utopian edge. It is these aspects
that Piñera dwells on in “The Dummy.”
If in “The Dummy” Piñera sees the CP as ineffectual, later world events
will make him more alarmed. In 1953, a then little-known Polish writer
published a book called The Captive Mind. It was a searing indictment of
Stalinist rule in postwar Poland, written by Czeslaw Milosz, who was later
to win the Nobel Prize in 1980. It is possible that Piñera read the book in
English; what is certain is that he did review the Spanish-language edition
of the book and it was published in the July 1956 issue of Ciclón. Piñera’s
review is incisive and balanced. He does not side with Milosz against the
communists or vice versa: he claims all that to be a sideshow. What disturbs
him the most is that the book deals with human beings in terms of death
instead of life. Piñera lashes out against ideological imperatives:
What does it matter that the ultimate explanation of these cruel acts be the
birth of a better world, or that the Russians justify their acts with their famous
motto: “Those who are not with us are against us”? None of that has the
slightest importance faced with the proven fact of a “will to slaughter”; it
seems that for humankind it is more profitable to kill rather than live with
one’s neighbor, and it also seems that as humankind progresses through
history, that will to kill becomes more imperious and—more horrible still!—
more mechanical. (Piñera, 1956, p. 65)
Piñera is quick to point out that the Russians and/or communists have no
patent on that “will to slaughter.” He steers the reader to another article, in
the same issue of Ciclón, in which Miguel Angel Asturias speaks of similar
atrocities being committed in Guatemala, under the guise of freedom and
the defense of private property. Piñera cautions that it is not only in the East
where humans are conceived in terms of death. The article ends as follows:
“Undoubtedly, East and West are in agreement on one essential point;
despite their differences and terrible antagonisms, in short, when it comes
to their concept of life, East and West shake hands and march arm in arm
in their concept of death” (ibid., p. 66). This should make it clear that to try
and paint Piñera as a knee-jerk anti-communist is a misleading and unfruit-
ful endeavor. Piñera was someone with a visceral dislike of all cant, rhetoric,
and ideological posturing. He saw these features present in most societies
and was equally critical of them, regardless of whether they represented
capitalist or communist values.
Returning to the representation of power in the narrative, we see how
the story depicts both kinds of power manifestations as defined by Fou-
cault, the traditional and the disciplinary. Indeed, it is crammed with
incidents that point to the visibility of meaning and power. Aside from the
previously mentioned beginning in the movie theater (“those on whom it
[power] was exercised could remain in the shade”) and seeing the poster of
the president in the street, there are other crucial moments. Toward the
VIRGILIO PIÑERA 71
Piñera, ever conscious of these dangers, plays out this structure of domina-
tion to the fullest. The dummies begin to take over and are increasingly in
demand: they become more “real” than the real thing. The president begins
to sleep in a cardboard box, and eventually the humans all wind up in boxes
in toy stores. What began as a liberating gesture (to free the president from
official duties, to cure his dummification, to make more free time for him)
turns into its grotesque reversal. The dummy, as political plaything in order
to substitute and distract the masses, becomes the embodiment of power.
The president, who was supposed to have more time to play (enjoy life,
recover his “true” self), winds up as a thing-of-play. Piñera has skillfully
74 TROPICS OF HISTORY
How does “using” an object imply, then, that it must be destroyed? For
that to happen, a subject must view the object (person, the Other) as external
and not a projection of one’s own subjectivity, therefore, this would not be
someone going through the Lacanian imaginary phase. But somehow that
externality must be assimilated, but not consumed or annihilated.
Winnicott explains that the recognition of the other involves the paradoxical
process in which the object is in fantasy always being destroyed. The idea that
to place the other outside, in reality, always involves destruction, has often
been a source of puzzlement. Intuitively, though, one senses that it is quite
simple. Winnicott is saying that the object must be destroyed inside in order
that we know it to have survived outside; thus we can recognize it as not
subject to our mental control. This relation of destruction and survival is a
reformulation of and solution to Hegel’s paradox: in the struggle for recog-
nition each subject must stake his life, must struggle to negate the other—and
woe if he succeeds. For if I completely negate the other, he does not exist; and
if he does not survive, he is not there to recognize me. But to find this out, I
must try to exert this control, try to negate his independence. To find out that
he exists, I must wish myself absolute and all alone—then, as it were, upon
opening my eyes, I may discover that the other is still there. (Benjamin, 1988,
p. 38)
What was left unsaid was that he pushed the negative so far so as to have
it go all the way through to the positive. He has reenacted the original
moment of the master-slave in order to serve the state. By declaring his
servitude, he is setting up the possibility to be recognized, not unlike Party
philosopher Nikita Smirnov in The Serfs. Even though his effort fails, it gives
us a glimpse of the internal complexity of Piñera’s characters, how they are
divided against themselves, that is, how the master-slave dialectic works
as internal, intrapsychic phenomenon as well.
Piñera accentuates this with the use of the double, thereby reinterpreting
(as well as inverting, parodying) certain concerns of the Enlightenment and
Cartesian traditions that deal with mastery and reason. That the master-
slave dichotomy was not only visible in society (between different agents
or players) but also within the individual ego can be glossed from some of
the following thinkers.
Montesquieu: “Man is composed of the two substances, each of which, in its flux and
reflux, imposes and suffers domination.”
Hume: “Reason is the slave of the passions.”
Kant: “Man needs a master.”
Rousseau: “He who is a master cannot be free.” (Kelly in MacIntyre, 1972, pp. 205–7)
Descartes, I think, broke with this when he said “To accede to truth, it suffices
that I be any subject which can see what is evident.”. . . The relationship to
the self no longer needs to be ascetic to get into relation to the truth. It suffices
that the relationship to the self reveals to me the obvious truth of what I see
for me to apprehend that truth definitively. Thus, I can be immoral and know the
truth. I believe that is an idea which, more or less explicitly, was rejected by
all previous culture. Before Descartes, one could not be impure, immoral, and
know the truth. With Descartes, direct evidence is enough. After Descartes,
we have a nonascetic subject of knowledge. This change makes possible the
institutionalization of modern science. (Foucault, 1984, pp. 371–72; emphasis
added)
For Piñera, as was true for Foucault, the body of power and the body of
knowledge are identical. The disinterested pursuit of truth is a fiction.
Piñera is aware of certain historical precedents in dealing with the body
of power and its representation in the ruler. When the president’s secret
advisor suggests that the dummy could be a wax figure, Jonatán dismisses
him by saying, “Wax is post mortem material; wax captures an historic
moment of the hero and immobilizes him there in history; the wax
dummy . . . is a funereal dummy: it has nothing to do with the terrible
vitality of the rubber dummies” ( CT, pp. 107–108). Piñera is referring to the
practice carried out with Roman emperors, who had two bodies: a human
one and a divine one. In fact, two burials/cremations were enacted: one
with the ossa (bones) culminating in the creation of a sepulcrum, and the
second with the imago, which resulted in the templum (Dupont, 1989, p. 403).
The imago was a wax mask of the deceased, and this wax dummy was laid
out for a week and given a yellow pallor to symbolize the sickness. Doctors
came every day and pronounced the dummy sicker and sicker as the week
wore on. Slaves were beside the figure to swat away flies, since the imago
was supposed to stink (ibid., p. 404). While the ossa went into the earth, the
imago went up to the sky, in order to consecrate the emperor as a god, since
the Romans did not believe in the immortality of the soul.
Piñera, drawing on this tradition, has Jonatán seem to avoid it by creating
a rubber dummy, but in reality he has tried to create a sublime body (one
that will not deteriorate or lose value), an imago, one that will not be
destroyed and “incarnate” the power of the president. But as Dupont
reminds us, the imago is not a reproduction, an image of the deceased; it is
a part of the body of the deceased. It stands in a metonymic relation to the
emperor, whereas Jonatán has created a replica of the actual, living presi-
VIRGILIO PIÑERA 79
dent. Except that the “living” president has become so “dummified” that
his dummy is more real than he is. Jonatán has created a simulacrum, or copy,
not an imago. Only the copy is left since the original has become an effigy.
Piñera drives this point home by having the cardinal mention that the
Inquisition had pioneered all these techniques. He is referring to the prac-
tice of burning heretics in effigy when they could not be apprehended
(Hroch and Skybova, 1990, pp. 149–50). In his crucial confrontation with
the president, Jonatán makes this process clear to the first executive. He tells
him that his case is different from that of a film star because a movie actor
allegedly never represents him/herself, but other personae. So, in contract-
ing a dummy, it is always of someone else and not of oneself. Jonatán
compares this dummification to icing on a cake. He continues: “You are no
longer President of our country, but dummy President of our country. I
think the difference is profound, not in degree but in substance. And the
consequences: always fatal” ( CT, p. 100)
Pinera’s fascination with doubles was not limited to “The Dummy.” It is
a central theme in La carne de René (René’s Flesh), his vivid and horrifying
account of the political body and one of the most unforgettable treatments
of desire and power in Latin American literature. In Un fogonazo (hereafter
UF), there is a story titled “El Otro Yo” (The Other Me), written in 1976. A
Mr. X, who has just turned fifty, decides to make a replica of himself. Unlike
the “The Dummy,” the narrative takes place in the future where the technol-
ogy is available, and X has the financial resources to create another self. No
sooner done, they both go out on the street “identical as two drops of water”
(Piñera, 1987, p. 57). A rivalry begins between the human X and the mechani-
cal X, since the latter has no signs on his skin of having aged. Mr. X realizes
that the mechanical X will outlive him. This point is made in a more
uncomfortable manner at a party, when the theme of death arises in conver-
sation. After the hostess, Elena, makes a flippant remark, the mechanical X
says: “I feel sorry for him. He doesn’t have much time left” ( UF, p. 60).
Mr. X resolves to destroy the mechanical X. Not with his own hands, but
by pulling out the technological plug. When he presents his request to the
technologists, they reply as follows: “We never destroy what we create. Our
creations are indestructible. You will die; he will remain, and with him, in
a certain fashion, you will. When several generations have gone by, no one
will remember that he is mechanical, and, therefore, no one will remember
you. He will remain in the infinite succession of time, always the same, and
always representing you with an overwhelmingly superhuman dignity and
beauty” ( UF, p. 60). Mr. X, furious, feels trapped. He is aware that death
awaits him, like all humans, but he is particularly enraged at the fact that
he can not inflict death “on the only thing he hated, the mechanical X, the
immortal, insufferable, and infallible alter ego” ( UF, p. 60).
On his deathbed Mr. X tries to convince the mechanical X to switch places
long enough so people will think it is the mechanical X who has died (then
80 TROPICS OF HISTORY
they will switch back). The mechanical X realizes the futility of this flimsy
gesture and tells Mr. X that dying is bad enough; why invite ridicule as well?
By then, however, Mr. X has died.
Days later, the mechanical X has an accident in which a radioactive
substance stains his skin, so that he now looks like the deceased X. Rumors
fly that it was the mechanical X who had died. Although the scientists were
chuckling in private, it was public opinion that won out. Piñera then ends
the story with: “For the mechanical X, there was no other choice than to admit
defeat: it was Mr. X who was immortal in the eyes of all. We could surmise
Mr. X’s joy in thinking that radioactivity had become his ally” ( UF, p. 62).
While Mr. X never gives a reason for wanting to construct a double, the
progression of the story gives us important clues. In short, there is a desire
for immortality (and a fear of aging) reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s The
Picture of Dorian Gray. Having children is perhaps too indirect a method,
and, besides, they too must die. An automaton is, of course, a device that
would defy both entropy and decay and death as well. In this sense it
embodies the great paradox of all technology: while we constantly build
and create things that are faster, stronger, smarter, more efficient, and that
make life easier, technology cannot escape that most singular and contin-
gent of events in our lives, death. The scientists in the story do not even
want to face the issue of death, insisting that what is created will go on
forever. As in “The Dummy,” Piñera sees the fragility in technological
solutions. Radioactivity has become a source of revenge for Mr. X. He has
outwitted death, but like the climbers in “The Fall,” the narrator in “The
Face,” and many other of his characters, it is a pyhrric victory. It is interest-
ing that the victory of immortality in “El Otro Yo” is won through a
recognition of a community of people: his friends and neighbors. Similarly,
it is the masses in “The Dummy” who do not have dummies made of
themselves. Humans are the ones who confer immortality, not technology,
nor the imperatives of any kind of system.
When Piñera has the real dummies retire to the toy stores at the end of
the story, he seems to be echoing some of the concerns that Heinrich Kleist
had in his essay “On the Marionette Theatre” (Kleist, 1989). Marionettes,
according to Kleist, have a grace or perfection in their movements because
they have only one center of gravity. Symbolically, they represent beings
with a purity and innocence that allow them to respond naturally to divine
guidance. They are almost weightless and barely touch the floor. Men,
however, are rooted in the earth and are clumsy. Their self-consciousness
means they are divided souls, that they belong to two worlds, and man’s
intellectual faculties are incapable of restoring wholeness to the human
soul. The only way to achieve that, Kleist suggests, is to pass through the
infinite and link up again with the divine: “grace likewise reappears when
knowledge has passed through the infinite, so that it appears purest simul-
taneously in the human body that has either none at all or else inifinite
VIRGILIO PIÑERA 81
Now, Piñera, unlike Wilde or Gide, does not openly address the fact of
his homosexuality in his own fiction. He does openly speak of it (but not
about himself) in an article on Emilio Ballagas in Ciclón (Piñera, 1955a). First,
he criticizes those who would avoid the issue of Ballagas’s sexuality: “If the
French write about Gide taking his homosexuality into account; if the
British do the same with Wilde, I don’t see why we Cubans can’t speak of
Ballagas as a homosexual. Or do the French and British have exclusive
rights on the subject?” (ibid., p. 42). But then Piñera criticizes those who
tried to make Ballagas’s homosexuality a rallying banner and who later
chastised him for having married and fathered a child. He defends the
individuality of the gay writer to interpret his homosexuality as he sees fit.
Some will see it as a sport, others as a necessary evil, or as psychological
disorder and seek psychiatric help. (Ballagas, according to Piñera, likened
it to original sin.)
With Piñera, it will not be a case of finding veiled references to his
homosexuality in his fiction, as if his work were merely a sexual roman à
clef, but more of understanding the homosexual as an outlaw in the area of
gender as someone who has the creative freedom to question more radically
what it means to be a man. This questioning takes place within strategies
of domination and submission; and the homosexual writer puts into place
a “transgressive reinscription” (Dollimore) that contests these mechanisms
of domination, exclusion, discrimination. Piñera’s ethical stance has the
transgressive features that characterized both Gide and Wilde, although his
humor, his probing of personas, his embracing of the abnormal would seem
to put him closer to Wilde. A pair of quotations from each author helps
underline these similarities. Compare Wilde’s “What was paradox to me in
the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion” to
Jonatán’s comment in “The Dummy”: “I confess that the slightest abnor-
mality excites me so much.” Piñera, like both Gide and Wilde, was made
more aware of different kinds of oppression (class, race, gender) by his
specific oppression as a homosexual in Cuba. Through his writing, he will
turn that oppression around by offering “perverse” solutions.
These solutions are part of what I have referred to elsewhere as an “ethics
of redemptive failure” (West, 1994). In understanding Piñera’s ethics of
redemptive failure, like Levinas, we start from the vulnerability of the body:
its hunger, pain, fears. The body as biological entity can become the symp-
tom of power relationships; the docile body wanted for social control
becomes a springboard for the imagination (doubles, becoming-animal);
the social roles within the family become inverted, questioning ethics at
large, or the social body. Or the body as psychosexual construct becomes
an arena of transgression and sacrifice. These constant transformations,
overlappings, disruptions are where Piñera puts into relief the Hegelian
blind spot of ultimate mastery, of wanting to incorporate into the movement
of the Spirit every manifestation of negativity. But even this mastery is
VIRGILIO PIÑERA 83
Dulce María Loynaz has been called “la grande dame” of Cuban letters.
It is a label that conjures up someone sipping tea in a palatial residence,
surrounded by statues of nymphs and big mahogany furniture. To a
degree, that image is accurate, but it does not tell the whole story. Born
in 1902, Loynaz’s life and literary career span almost the entire twenti-
eth century: her work is one of quiet but enduring revelations, written
in a finely chiseled, transparent poetry or prose. Loynaz comes from
the Independence aristocracy: her great uncle was Ignacio Agramonte
(1842–73), her father was Enrique Loynaz y Castillo (1871–1963), who
fought in the Spanish-Cuban-American War (1895–98) and was made
a general. His comrades in arms included Antonio Maceo, José Martí
and Máximo Gómez, three national heroes.
Loynaz’s upbringing was unusual. She did not receive formal edu-
cational training until she went to law school; she passed the bar exam
in 1927. She and her brothers and sisters were tutored in a variety of
subjects, and her mother, María de las Mercedes Muñoz Sañudo, was
a solid pianist and singer who taught them much about music. The
exposure to an artistic upbringing was significant not only for Dulce
María, but also for her brother Enrique, a notable poet, her sister Flor,
a poet and visual artist, and her other brother, Carlos Manuel, also a
poet. Enrique Loynaz did publish work during his lifetime; Flor and
Carlos Manuel’s verses remain unpublished to date.
Despite her admirable prose production, Loynaz is known as a poet.
Her literary career began early: at the age of ten she published a poem
in the newspaper La Nación. She later wrote journalistic pieces for the
same publication. Her first book of poems, Versos, 1920–1938 , was
86 TROPICS OF HISTORY
That Dulce María Loynaz was awarded the Cervantes Prize in 1992 surprised
many. Thankfully, it gave the Spanish-speaking world (one hopes that trans-
lations will follow) an opportunity to rediscover an underappreciated, rare
talent. Eugenio Montale’s Nobel Prize of 1975 falls into a similar category.
Loynaz is an institution in Cuba, in part due to her longevity (she recently died
at age 94), but also because her work has a quality that has stood the test of
time. The work’s deceptive simplicity has a beguiling effect on the reader. You
need to reread her constantly and go past what seems like plain literal-mind-
edness, a trait she also shares with Montale. In a literary world obsessed with
writing and publishing as much as you can, where the sheer output seems to
be the barometer, replacing talent and depth, Dulce María Loynaz is a refresh-
ing change of pace. In a writing career that spans eight decades, her complete
oeuvre consists of one novel, one “travel” book, a collection of essays, and
several books of poetry that fit into one not very large volume. With consider-
able concentration and energy, her work could be read in a week, which does
not mean that it should, because going hastily through her exquisitely crafted
poetry will not yield its truest pleasures.
Loynaz began writing poetry early, as is evident from the title of her first
book, Versos, 1920–1938 , which brings together about ninety poems written
over almost two decades. Not all of them have the same brilliance and depth
as “Eternidad” (Eternity), “La mujer de humo” (The Woman of Smoke),
“Certeza” (Certainty), or “Tiempo” (Time); but even the early poems show
a remarkable maturity in handling image, sound, and feeling. Versos already
contains the constants of her later work: the nature of love, the love of
nature, solitude, and a religious consciousness that at times borders on the
mystical, but is equally indebted to Unamuno and Kierkegaard.
Loynaz admirably captures the age-old tussle in philosophy between
worldly and otherworldly thinkers. The latter—from Plato to St. Augustine,
from Plotinus to Pascal—have made the familiar argument that the chaos
and flux of the world, the endless and infinite parade of sensations and
passions, will not allow us to see the good and the true to attain lasting
knowledge. At the same time Loynaz seems to latch onto any number of
things—a shell, a look, a flower, the sea—and find in their contours,
radiance, color and shape, an eternity of feelings and insight.
One of her early poems, “Eternidad” (“Eternity”), deals precisely with
the issue of the eternal as opposed to earthbound finitude.
In my garden roses unfold
but I will give you none:
no roses, for tomorrow . . .
tomorrow they will be gone.
DULCE MARÍA LOYNAZ 89
Loynaz touches on many key topics of literature that stretch back to the
Middle Ages and beyond. But principally she deals with the impermanence
of the physical world, a familiar theme in medieval and especially baroque
literature. At first, it is not clear to whom the poetic voice is addressing itself,
all the more intriguing in that the first three stanzas are punctuated by three
negations: the “I will not gives” (roses, birds, bees). In the fourth stanza,
with the use of words like “infinite” and “immortal,” it becomes a little
clearer, and in the next (fifth) stanza, the poet establishes unequivocally that
the “dialogue” is with God. Though Loynaz treats the deity with respect, it
is not mere servitude; her resolute tone establishes her own moral auton-
omy. In fact, she issues a warning: if s/he touches things in the garden,
somehow God will be tainted by the temporal and disastrously fall under
the corrupting influences of the mortal and the finite.
Slyly, Loynaz is reworking the Edenic myth of the fall, which she but-
tresses with many images of Christian iconography: the rose, the garden, the
bee, and the bird. The rose, of course, is a highly charged and rich symbol in
our culture, being at the same time something that represents heavenly
perfection and earthly passion. In Loynaz’s poem the roses unfold as mys-
tery, beauty, and grace, but are equally tinged with a short-lived voluptuous-
ness and sensuality. The rose is associated with fertility, beauty, and creation
as well as virginity. White roses, which evoke innocence and purity, are
linked to the Virgin Mary. Their thorns signify pain, blood, and martyrdom.
90 TROPICS OF HISTORY
The bird and its lovely song is equally steeped in Christian mythology,
referring to transcendence, the soul, the spirit, the ability to soar into the
heavens, and the imagination. Loynaz does not specify what kind of birds
are in her garden. Interestingly, though, she uses their flight to connote
transience and impermanence, as well as their traditional meaning (soul,
spirit). Their song is part of all the delights of the senses that the poet
enumerates in the poem: sight (rose, birds), smell (rose), touch or taste
(bees), and sound (the birds).
The bees are also highly charged with meaning in Christian theology and
art: they are immortality, rebirth, purity, industriousness, and order. Mes-
sengers to the world of the spirits, their honey is an offering to the gods.
Bees are equated with Christian vigilance and zeal since it is believed they
never sleep. Like birds they can symbolize the soul entering heaven as they
fly. Again Loynaz stresses their temporal dimension: “the sweetness of the
moment.”
One of the most oft-repeated words in the poem is garden. In both
Western and Eastern traditions the garden has been linked with Paradise,
the Garden of Eden being a prime example. Enclosed gardens have long
been the symbol of the Virgin Mary (feminine protective principle and
virginity). More important, the garden is also the symbol of the soul, where
nature, tamed and ordered, is analogous to the spirit or the soul bringing
passions and chaotic emotions under control. Gardens are a refuge from the
world, both in terms of a spiritual haven and, conversely, as sources of
delight and pleasure. Let us not forget the Roman de la rose, which is a vast
eulogy of these pleasures of feasting, love, and communal bathing, using
the garden as focal point.
Loynaz, however, takes the Garden of Eden story and, instead of the
downfall of man and woman, fashions it into a kind of warning to God. The
Garden of Delights is so seductive that even God, despite his (her) omnipo-
tence, can fall prey to its enchantments. God’s corruption would be to
become finite and mortal, to submit to the ravages of time. This passage of
time will cause much anguish and be the subject of many of her poems.
Here it is cause for sadness, and one cannot help but think of the Renais-
sance and baroque fascination with melancholy, which Loynaz’s early
verses seem to share.
In a poem such as “Eternity,” Loynaz’s use of the garden synthesizes
certain concerns, expressed in a religious language that is rooted in Chris-
tian traditions. The garden will reappear in other poems and later become
the subject and title of her only novel, Jardín (Garden), which will be
discussed further on in terms of her idea of nationhood and which will
provide the opportunity to discuss issues of race, gender, and class. But it
also lets us see how Loynaz constructs her own authorial voice, its dialogi-
cal structure, that often shares similarities with mystic writers such as St.
Teresa and St. John of the Cross. Despite those affinities, Loynaz’s poetry is
DULCE MARÍA LOYNAZ 91
not mystical in the sense that it is exclusively concerned with the ineffable
union with a transcendent being or deity. In fact, she draws on the mystical
tradition, but often within the context of earthly love and sensuality, bring-
ing out the tensions that mystical poetry insinuates.
This should not be surprising since mystical literature borrowed heavily
from traditions of courtly love and chivalry (de Rougemont, 1983). This
mystical exaltation of love derives from two major sources: (1) eros and
agape, and (2) the two different strands in mysticism: unitive and autono-
mous or “bridal.” We understand eros as a kind of infinite desire, a divine
delirium, which not only encompasses the corporeal, but also a greater
striving, a transcendence into heavenly bliss. Plato described this yearning
as a kind of enthusiasm (which literally means to be possessed by a deity).
This divine indwelling, which leads to the light and union with the divine,
means being free of the body. Platonism’s dark view of the body (tomb of
the soul) comes from Gnostic, Orphic, and Zoroastrian sources, a perspec-
tive that will be further developed and refined by Christian thought.
Loynaz’s early poetry clearly draws on Platonic precedents, but encom-
passes the multiple dimensions involved: eros as sexual passion, friend-
ship, filial duty, love of beauty, and love of wisdom. Loynaz is drawn to that
more mystical eros in a poem called “Siempre, amor” (Always, Love).
Always, love . . . beyond all flight,
all bile, all thought;
beyond men
distance and time.
Always, love:
At the hour in which the body
frees itself from its shadow . . . And at the hour
in which the shadow goes imbibing the body . . .
Always, love . . . (And these two words shipwrecked
between soul and flesh hammered against the wind!)
(Trans. Alan West)
The poem plays on several ambiguities, one being the “Siempre, amor” of
the title, which is repeated four times during the poem. On the one hand,
the author might be addressing a specific lover or loved one, although “mi
amor” would be more accurate in that context (hence the ambiguity). The
other possibility is that Loynaz is talking to love (eros) itself, somewhat
echoing the Tristan and Iseult myth of being in love with love. The siempre
(always) can also mean forever, a kind of eternity which much of the
imagery of the poem undercuts with images of putrefaction, death, and
temporality. But the love being addressed is one that transcends this finite-
ness, the eros of divine love and wisdom. And maybe Loynaz’s use of
shadows is an indirect reference to Gabriela Mistral’s “Decalogue of the
Artist.” Number 1 says “You shall love beauty, which is the shadow of God
over the universe” (Mistral, 1971, p. 37).
92 TROPICS OF HISTORY
dark /—Color of tropical women.” She compares it to the Amazon and the
Nile, and while it has neither the horizons of the former, nor the mysteries
of the latter, its beauty still compares favorably to both. The poem ends with
“I wouldn’t say it’s the most beautiful river . . . But it is my river, my country,
my blood!” Consistent with the general theme of her book, Loynaz seems
to evoke pre-Columbian as well as Egyptian-Babylonian river cultures of
the past. The latter apparently influenced Thales of Miletus’s thinking:
water as arche, as primary substance, which Loynaz, in her book, echoes
through her use of aquatic imagery. Water as primary, universal substance
is overlaid by Loynaz’s pantheism, which here takes on a patriotic flavor,
but it is an intimate patriotism, far from the bristling of swords and shouts
on the battlefield.
More typical of the book are some of her shorter poems, such as “La fuga
inútil” (Futile Flight), “El espejo” (The Mirror), “La nieve” (Snow), and “La
nube” (The Cloud). Three of them are so short they can be quoted in their
entirety.
Loynaz is without a doubt a poet who can take the infinite textures of
nature—in this case water in its different incarnations—and make them into
insightful meditations on time, creation, and memory. In “Futile Flight,
Futile Fugue,” the title in Spanish is “La Fuga inútil.” Fuga means to flee,
but it is also the word for the musical term fugue. In that play of meanings,
echoing the play of water of the whole book, Loynaz has set up her own
counterpoint: movement (time, melody) versus eternity (stasis, silence).
The fugue not only answers (echoing the subject in a different key) but also
presents countersubjects that comment on or contest the original “melody.”
96 TROPICS OF HISTORY
book Un verano en Tenerife (1958), Loynaz has a truly suggestive passage that
applies equally to Jardín: “I read somewhere, I don’t remember exactly, that
the worse prisons are those raised next to the sea. Because the sea, similar
to Tantalus, offers the prisoner the broadest of horizons, and because of the
indominable nature of the waves, is continually reminding one of the idea
of freedom” (Roberto Friol quoting Loynaz in Simón, 1991, p. 530). Though
we should not lose sight of the fact that Loynaz is here speaking of another
island, the Canary Islands, the quote is applicable to her novel, as critic
Roberto Friol has suggested. The garden is an island within an island, and
it is a prison. In this regard, the allusion to Sleeping Beauty is appropriate,
but so is the protagonist’s name. St. Barbara was a Christian martyr locked
up in a tower by her father, a prisoner of male rage. The garden is gender
defined. Bárbara is the garden, a theme that is constant throughout the
novel.
Fina García Marruz has keenly observed that Loynaz has striven to give
a new spatial metaphor in her fiction: “One speaks of the selva [jungle] by
José Eustasio Rivera, of the pampa in Don Segundo Sombra, of the plains in
Doña Bárbara, of the Great Savannah in Alejo Carpentier, but none of it is
related to Jardín from our Dulce María Loynaz. And could it not be stated,
from the very beginning, there is a common link of centering space, of
nature—our American nature—and the subsequent histories, not like a
background scenario, but like a rooting theme?” (Simón, 1991, p. 549; trans.
in Rodríguez, 1994, p. 103). Of course, these other works have been written
by male writers and the selva, the pampa, the plains, and the Great Savannah
are all outdoors, in the great wilderness, where a different kind of history
takes place. Loynaz seems to point toward an alternative historical space
that is not part of the four B’s of male narrative history: the barracks, the
battlefield, the bar, and the brothel. But Loynaz does it by turning intimate
biography into myth and, ultimately, into history.
Despite the mythical quality of the narrative, the garden itself has a
history. It stores part of the family history that Bárbara discovers in the
pavilion, the love letters that she will breathlessly pore over. By going to the
past and reading those letters, Bárbara is already marking a certain distance,
from both that very past and its stifling gender roles, with its rapacious
rhetoric of love. The letters she reads are written by a man roughly a
hundred years earlier than the action of the novel: her (and the reader’s)
reading of these letters introduces a critical dimension to the plot and to its
central character.
The letters are important because they will mark the passage between
the Edenic part of the novel, where Bárbara is restricted to the garden,
protected from the outside, and the moment where she goes out into the
world, or “the fall.” She sails off with her newfound love, and they go to
the United States and Europe, though mostly the latter. Loynaz is unequivo-
cal in how important this is in terms of Bárbara’s freedom. It is a significant
104 TROPICS OF HISTORY
gain for her, but not enough. She finds life in Europe cold and indifferent,
and long way before Milan Kundera, Loynaz has a marvelous chapter
called “Prisa” (Being in a Hurry), which is really about the virtues of
slower-paced living. Curiously, though, the novel has some Futurist mo-
ments when Loynaz describes the beauty of machines in terms that could
only be described as ecstatic. The war, however, drives her back to the
garden, but it is not exactly a triumphant return.
The novel begins with Bárbara looking through the iron bars of the
garden watching automobiles go by. She walks through the garden and sees
the moon peeking over the top of the house. Then the moon begins descend-
ing and crashes at Bárbara’s feet, its splinters flying by her face. She picks
up its pieces, wraps it in a shawl, and then buries it in the ground and plants
the branch of an almond tree over it. It is a perfect symbolic portrait of
Bárbara at the beginning, with powerful religious connotations. Aside from
the obvious garden, there is the almond and the moon. The almond is
symbolic of virginity, the self-productive principle and also sweetness,
charm, and delicacy. It also represents divine favor and approval, as well
as the purity of the Virgin. Many portraits of the Virgin are enclosed in
almond-shaped figures (the vesica piscis, or mandorla). It hardly needs re-
minding that the moon represents feminine power, but also the rhythm of
cyclic time, the universal becoming; its different phases signify perpetual
renewal and enlightenment.
The end of the novel has Bárbara in the dark accompanied by a fisherman
who shows her the way back to the garden. Here, however, Loynaz begins
to transform the Christian symbolism or iconography (including that of the
fisherman). The moon is out, of course, but unlike St. Barbara, the protago-
nist ironically dies from precisely what the saint is supposed to protect us
from: sudden death and falling objects (and lightning). Bárbara’s death is
sad, but it is not tragic. The wall of the garden helped separate her intimate,
sacred space from the outer, profane space of the world. The fact that it
crumbles could mean that their mutual exclusivity was not a healthy thing,
perhaps symbolized by the protagonist’s “sacrifice.” Speaking of Tristan
und Isolde (Wagner’s opera), Joseph Kerman said it was not a tragedy but a
religious drama. By this he means that the work’s “fundamental sense is of
a progress towards a state of illumination which transcends yearning and
pain” (Kerman, 1956, p. 195). He further adds that three other factors should
be present: “that the nature of the experience be properly religious; that this
experience is the main matter of the [work]; and the religious experience is
projected in a dramatic form” (Kerman, ibid.) Jardín meets these criteria
admirably. The novel’s rhythm has an inexorable pace that leads to Bár-
bara’s death, but her death has a certain ascent that makes it an ironic
religious drama in the form of a novel.
Why ironic? Aside from the previously mentioned reversal of the St.
Barbara legend, there is the final page of the novel. After her death, workers
DULCE MARÍA LOYNAZ 105
from the Iron Workers Union are digging through the debris of the garden
and find a concave, but round metal disc. It is the moon that Bárbara
interred at the beginning. The worker picks it up, thinking that if he cleans
it up he can use it as a plate, but decides against it and throws it away. It is
as if at the end of Tristan und Isolde, with the lovers still embracing, the
stagehands began walking on the set to clean up for the next performance.
And yet . . . the last line of the novel reads: “Bárbara, from behind, from
above, from below, everywhere, always . . . , places her pallid face against
the iron bars . . .” Loynaz, 1993d, p. 247).
None of this necessarily invalidates seeing Jardín as a “transparent
picture of national deterioration,” but more important is how Loynaz has
remained true to her tropes. Despite the garden crumbling and killing her
protagonist, the garden’s iconic importance remains, not just as a Garden
of Eden image, but as alternative historical space that values the gar-
den/women’s lives as historically important and necessary. But even be-
yond that is the steadfastness of her character to return to the garden
(home/nation) and stick it out, no matter what. In this the name of the
character is well chosen: St. Barbara’s faith was so great that she risked her
life. It was her father who beheaded her, but he was subsequently struck by
lightning, which is why St. Barbara is eventually syncretized with Changó
in Santería. This steadfastness is seen in Dulce María Loynaz’s life (she
never left her home in Cuba, even though there were plenty of reasons for
her to do so) and her work. Each word stakes out a plant, flower, or tree in
the battered and unforgotten garden of Cuba’s history. Like quiet warriors,
they preserve the garden with the sturdiest of roots. This garden houses the
secrets and treasures of the country: its yearnings for independence, its
strivings to establish a unique culture, its hopes for overcoming the violence
of class warfare. It is the house where the nation dreams.
FIVE
“He is the only one among us that can organize discourse as if it were
a medieval hunt.” These words of Cintio Vitier on the writing of José
Lezama Lima evoke rich, densely figured tapestries, with animals,
unicorns, lush vegetation, vivid colors: such was the verbal wizardry
of this extraordinary poet. José Lezama Lima (1910–76) was one of the
key figures of Cuban literary life in this century. Starting with the
publication of one of the most startling poems published in the Spanish
language, “La muerte de Narciso” (1937), Lezama was a constant
presence in Cuban letters for almost the next forty years, as well as an
unusual kind of compass for current writers and artists. Whether in the
form of essays, poems, articles, or narrative fiction, everything he wrote
had an unmistakable poetic enchantment to it.
Lezama founded several magazines, but it was Orígenes (1944–56)
that was the most influential of all, and not only in Cuba. Octavio Paz
called it “the best magazine in the Spanish language.” It published forty
issues and sponsored the publication of twenty-three books; it opened
its pages to the finest of local and international talent. Among the
Cubans were Cintio Vitier, Eliseo Diego, Fina García Marruz, Gastón
Baquero, Lorenzo García Vega, Lydia Cabrera, Virgilio Piñera, and
Angel Gaztelu. With excellent translations, they published Valéry,
Joyce, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Spender, Virginia Woolf, Camus, Heideg-
ger, and others. Its covers were designed by distinguished artists such
as Wifredo Lam, René Portocarrero, Mariano Rodríguez, Rufino
Tamayo, and José Clemente Orozco.
Long-deserved recognition came with Lezama’s novel Paradiso
(1966; trans. 1974), which caused considerable controversy when it first
108 TROPICS OF HISTORY
so poignantly expressed in a poem: “The violet sea longs for the birth
of the gods/since to be born here is an ineffable celebration.” Lezama
combines in these few words the importance of nature in establishing
a cosmic and mythological presence that seems to equate Cubanness
with the continuous birth of something miraculous. The medieval hunt
has become a creation myth, a numinous sign, the world opening in
our hands.
DRAGONS AND THEURGY: LEZAMA’S IMAGES
OF HISTORY
Lezama was not traveling on new terrain: there were many precedents
for these types of reflections, such as Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s Seis ensayos
en busca de nuestra expresión (1928); Alfonso Reyes in Visión de Anáhuac (1917),
La Ultima Tule (1942), or Letras de la Nueva España (1946); Mariano Picón-
Salas in his De la conquista a la independencia (1944); and Radiografía de la
pampa (1933) by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada. In Cuba the most significant
precedent would have been Fernando Ortiz’s work, especially his Con-
trapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940; Cuban Counterpoint, 1947/1995).
Lezama’s originality lies in the way he interprets myth and history, the
particular weight and ethos of his baroque aesthetic, and the ethical dimen-
sions of the historical figures he highlights such as Fray Servando Teresa de
Mier, Simón Rodríguez, and José Martí. In his search for “la expresión
americana,” Lezama topologically describes it as “an open gnostic space”
(“un espacio gnóstico abierto”). But before we turn to “imaginary eras” and
“open gnostic spaces,” we need to examine some of the terms Lezama uses
to speak about the cultural hybridity of Latin America.
When Lezama refers to “la expresión americana,” he is not trying to
derive an “essence” of the American, an ontological grounding that would
lend itself to a kind of nationalist or even continental expression of either
spirit or character. Lezama, despite his poetic and mythological bent, is very
much a historicist who did not believe in the static nature of lo americano.
For Lezama it means trying to configure a historical narrative of the
American imagination. Narrative is used in a free and playful sense, since
the way Lezama fashions his historical narratives, as we shall see, is a heady
mix of commentary on paintings, philosophical musings, florid poetic
descriptions, careful textual commentary, and suggestive metaphor. They
are closer to fiction than what would normally be acceptable for standard
historiographical prose. For Lezama the imagination has not only an aes-
thetic weight, but a philosophical, religious, and ethical dimension with
deep resonance for the understanding of history. Central to this under-
standing of history is the ability to produce and recollect images, which
implies that the imagination is an ideal instrument in the creation of
knowledge. Lezama would understand la expresión americana,” then, to be
a speculative journey of becoming that seeks to understand poetically and
reenact Latin American cultural production as immersed in a still living
historical imagination. (I use words with Hegelian and Platonic resonances
to set the stage for their elaboration further on.)
Julio Ortega, among others, has pointed out that Lezama uses a “fictional
treatment of the tradition, its free use as a form of language. Tradition is
seen as a changing present and the critical perspective as instrument which
reorders that dialogue” (Ortega, 1991, p. 245). Lezama treats the Western
tradition as another culture, not the culture, and by doing so he clearly is in
the spirit of Borges. It is important to keep this in mind as we examine the
beginning of Lezama’s essay, since its discussion of European painting and
112 TROPICS OF HISTORY
the I Ching seem to place its concerns at a great remove from Latin American
history. But in these first few pages Lezama offers us a glimpse of his
approach to history, which he describes as an “animistic counterpoint.” Like
Hegel’s dialectic, it is a method that is not a method, “but a name for
ingenuity, for ingenious activity itself, which takes a continually varying
shape depending on the content before it . . . struggling [with] the limitation
of the image, the production of the unseen” (Verene, 1985, p. 11).
Lezama begins by speaking of the difficulty of historical sense and vision
precisely because the meaning of history consists in “the production of the
unseen.” Cleverly, and with great dialogical skill, Lezama brings together
examples of visual representation: five paintings from the Middle Ages and
early Renaissance. It is as if Lezama were saying let us travel to the heart of
the visible to make the invisible shine forth. The five works of art are:
September by the Limbourg brothers (finished by Jean Colombe), a manu-
script illumination from the early fifteenth century; The Corn Harvest by
Brueghel (1565); The Last Judgment (in which Chancellor Rolin is depicted;
1443–51) by Rogier Van der Weyden; The Madonna with Chancellor Rolin by
Jan van Eyck (1435/37); and Guidoriccio da Fogliano on Horseback by Simone
Martini (1328).
First Lezama compares September with the Brueghel painting, principally
because of what they depict: peasants working in the fields. But in drawing
the two together there is a historical distance that must be accounted for. In
the illuminated manuscript there is still a strong hierarchical relationship
manifested by the castle and its dominance over the lives of those working
in the fields. The height of the castle piercing into the heavens only rein-
forces the importance of the bond between lord and serf. But in its use of
color and disposition of form, there is a certain magic to the scene, under-
girded by the links between the human, the natural, the social, and the
divine. The Brueghel painting, The Corn Harvest, already indicates a world
not governed by feudal lords but of nascent capitalism. The town is far in
the distance; a church is closer, partially obstructed by a tree and other
vegetation. It is August: among the heat and intense labor, some peasants
are having refreshments or reposing; others are still working. The suste-
nance provided by the harvest underlines the rich depiction of nature. As
Lezama points out, the former (September) is marked by a kind of magic
spell, the latter by “the cantabile of its own joy” (p. 50). Without skipping a
beat, Lezama moves on to two different portraits of Chancellor Rolin. The
Van Eyck (with the Virgin) is the earlier of the two and an extraordinary
work that handles space with consummate skill. The Van der Weyden is a
more austere portrait, with dark colors, and Rolin looks more like a monk,
not like the powerful and wealthy man he was. In contrast, the Van Eyck
painting is sumptuous with lush color and is a vivid portrayal of the
temporal power of the earthbound recognizing the infinite power of the
divine. For Lezama, the key element is the baby Jesus, which gives the
JOSÉ LEZAMA LIMA 113
Homer’s poetry brings out one fundamental fact: that all culture starts with
the creation of an aristocratic ideal, shaped by deliberate cultivation of the
qualities appropriate to a nobleman and a hero. Hesiod shows us the second
basis of civilization—work. The later Greeks recognized this when they gave
his didactic poem the title of Works and Days. Heroism is shown, and virtues
of lasting value are developed, not only in the knight’s duel with the enemy,
but in the quiet, incessant battle of the worker against the elements and the
hard earth. It is not for nothing that Greece was the cradle of a civilization
which places work high among the virtues. (Jaeger, 1945, p. 57)
Whatever the motivation, these themes will come up during the rest of the
essay, whether Lezama is discussing the Popol Vuh, the gauchos in Argentina,
the corridos in México, or the importance of rural life and nature as part of
Latin American culture.
Other questions persist: why did Lezama make no reference to the
historical circumstances of the Martini painting? It was commissioned to
celebrate a series of castles captured (and previously lost) by Siena and has
an undeniably civic and political purpose—the “heraldic pose” of the horse
reinforces this civic message by the juxtaposition of animal and landscape.
Or why didn’t he choose Van der Weyden’s St. Luke Drawing the Virgin,
visually almost a mirror image of the Van Eyck, and which it obviously has
paid hommage to? Or, sticking to the figure of the chancellor, why isn’t there
more about Rolin as historical figure or icon? Lezama’s analysis (and
omissions) reveal much about his historical “method.” His approach to
history shows a remarkable indifference to the facts and, like Spengler, is
more attuned to metaphor or to a startling image which can capture both
commonality and difference, sometimes stretched over what looks like a
temporal abyss. Even the most obvious is up for grabs, and Wilde’s chal-
114 TROPICS OF HISTORY
lenge undergirds his comments: “The mystery of the world is the visible,
not the invisible.”
More than a baroque fascination with painting and écriture, Lezama is
providing both a model and critique of representation and how it embodies
the historical. Later we will discuss the role of images in recollection
(Hegel), but for the moment let us explore the ontology of painting. Before
photography, visual documentation of the historical centered on painting
(or sculpture). Painting’s ability to capture the likeness of the human figure
(or objects) is legendary: thus we have paintings of battles, famous scenes,
coronations, funerals, portraits of kings, nobility, thinkers, and other artists,
as well as still lifes, landscapes, and the like. Religious painting has often
been able to capture the relationship between the human and the divine, as
in Van Eyck’s The Madonna with Chancellor Rolin. Lezama is astute in his
choice of the five paintings because they exhibit a wide range in the sense
of depicting nature, peasants at work, worldly power and politics, the
supernatural, humans, animals, vegetation, and even angels. There are
moments which gather the cosmic rhythms of the earth, flashes of the
divine, the flow of time, and the humble movements of humans at work.
And yet this great power of resemblance makes Lezama want to tease
out the age-old distinction between seeing and knowing, not only a gradual
unveiling of the invisible, but a radical examination of what is in the visible.
In this sense Lezama agrees more with the philosopher Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, who thought that painting expresses what exists, than with Sartre
(who said that painting expresses what does not exist). Given Lezama’s
Catholicism, one cannot help thinking of the ancient polemic with the
Iconoclasts, arguing over the import of divine, natural, and artificial im-
ages. Lezama obviously would not side with the Iconoclasts, but would
instead agree that archetypal images are a product of the mind, images of
the mind which brought them forth. And “for this reason Philo calls the
Logos, which is the pleroma of Forms, the Image of God, which in turn is
the archetype of all else: as God is the Father of the Image, the Image is the
pattern of other beings” (Sheldon-Williams in Armstrong, 1970, pp. 506–7).
Lezama would agree with Philo’s statement, since it pertains to the truth-
fulness of representation. Vico’s statement about the truth was probably not
far from his mind: “Divine truth is a solid image like a statue; human truth
is a monogram or a surface image like a painting” (Vico, 1988, p. 46).
Lezama’s poetic exploration of history is a conversation between the statue
and the painting in the spirit of Plotinus, who said: “The wisdom of the
gods and of the blessed immortals cannot be expressed in words, but only
by beautiful images” (as quoted in Huyghe, 1962, p. 4).
Painting as representation bears on representation in history. Lezama is
not a realist in matters painterly or historic. His understanding of history
comes by way of poetry and the ability to generate images and metaphors.
It is the imago’s participation in history, he argues, that can bring about an
JOSÉ LEZAMA LIMA 115
How does this relate to (Latin) American history? Lezama mentions three
pre-Columbian societies that were imaginary eras: the Incas (Fortresses of
Stone/The Flood), the Aztecs (The Cult of Blood), and the Mayas (perhaps
a combination of the previous two). He even hints at the formation of
possible new imaginary eras in post-Columbian history, centered around
his notion of a baroque Counter-Conquest exemplified by Sor Juana Inés
de la Cruz, the Andean artist/architect Kondori, and the Afro-Brazilian
architect Aleijandinho, or what he calls the era of “infinite possibility”
inaugurated by José Martí, only to be continued by the events of the Cuban
Revolution in 1959. Lezama was tentative here, suggesting that Cuba’s
insurrection might lead eventually to the creation of an imaginary era. It is
doubtful that Lezama would still entertain that thought if he were alive
today.
A step down from the concept of imaginary era is what Lezama called
“great choral groups,” whose importance or ability to create certain asso-
ciations and/or images throw a dazzling light on history. Examples
abound: the retreat of Napoleon’s Army, the Holocaust, the storming of the
Winter Palace. They function as “hypostasized metaphors” and again are
not limited to a simple-minded causality. To a degree, these “great choral
groups” are emblems that might signal the beginning or end of an imagi-
nary era, or of one of its phases. But they are emblems with historical
specificity. They do not have the millennial intricacy of an imaginary era,
but they do contain a lightning-bolt intensity that makes us profoundly
question our most cherished notions. A twentieth-century example will
suffice: after the Final Solution, it is no longer possible to look at trains as
unalloyed tokens of human and scientific progress. With these definitions
in mind, we can return to the paintings and see what more they reveal about
Lezama’s thinking about history.
Is the opening door (soul-body) the only link between five European
paintings and the Chinese I Ching? Lezama gives us the clue in another
essay titled “La biblioteca como dragón” (The Library as Dragon), from
1965, published in a book of essays, La cantidad hechizada (1970). In his essay
about Chinese culture and Taoism, Lezama recalls a saying by Goethe along
the lines of “Whenever a threatening cloud seems to hover over the world,
I obstinately seek refuge in that which is most distant (or remote) from us”
(Lezama, 1971, p. 219). Goethe’s remarks were made in relation to China,
and Lezama picks up the cue and adds that for the Chinese distance or
remoteness is paralleled by the sacred kings who embody that remoteness.
Furthermore, Lezama claims that distance is productive and creative, that
it is an image. It is linked to the rule of Fou Hi, who embodied certain
fertility traits, with a double identity of earthiness, of being a peasant deity,
and a heavenly, more mysterious force. Lezama attributes to the Chinese,
three thousand years before Christ, a separation of the earth and the sky,
and says that its subsequent history is the attempt to bring the earth back
JOSÉ LEZAMA LIMA 117
a house you had been to, an object broken in two that would be rejoined
many years hence in act of recognition and homecoming (Gadamer, 1986,
p. 31). Analogy can work in different ways: through morphology, content,
archetype, function (meaning), or, in Lezama’s case, “animistic counter-
point.” He rejects a morphological account of analogy, indirectly criticizing
Oswald Spengler’s approach. He offers the example of comparing the
shape of a bull’s horn and a Byzantine tiara; one of Spengler’s more famous
morphologies is the comparison between Rembrandt’s browns and
Beethoven’s string quartets. Lezama was certainly sympathetic to
Spengler’s poetic side, but felt that his morphologies were limited to the
more obvious or overtly visible of analogies. Lezama goes one step further:
his “animistic counterpoint” avoids what he calls the barren comparisons
of Spengler, whose objects of comparison remain frozen in their respective
domains. By animism Lezama seeks to give the relationship between two
distant realities (or images) a live and animate “relationship.” The relation-
ship is, in effect, metaphorical, for several reasons. Like any analogy, a
metaphor sets up a field of identity and difference. Second, it is figurative,
in many senses, first by transcending the literal and then having a “pro-
phetic” (Auerbach) quality that “works” in the past, while projecting to-
ward a future point. Third, analogy carries a historical specificity. This is
why Lezama says that what avoids the “frozen-ness” of Spengler’s ap-
proach is the sujeto metafórico, the metaphorical subject. Is this subject a
person, a cogito, a Spinozan substance, or some type of Kantian transcen-
dental ego, a kind of philosophical metasubject? Well, yes and no. At one
level, Lezama is referring to himself and his own particular way of writ-
ing/interpreting history, but at another he seems to be referring to a
method, but it is a methodless method in that it changes according to the
content of what it discusses. It is not a device applied externally to the object
under consideration. It is a synonym for ingenuity, as Donald Verene says
about Hegel’s dialectic. And, as will be discussed later, ingenuity is the
ability to compare, form analogies and metaphors. Metaphor is central to
Lezama’s thought and creation, integral to the narrating and comprehen-
sion of history. As Aristotle reminds us: “But the greatest thing by far is to
be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others;
and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive
perception of the similarity in dissimilars” ( Poetics, as quoted in Verene,
1981, p. 173). Metaphor is more conceptual than linguistic, which is why it
can “tell us something new about reality” (Ricoeur).
The metaphorical subject engenders the animistic counterpoint, and it is
by way of counterpoint that we can configure an imaginary era, or more
modestly comprehend the slippery dynamics of history. They (the meta-
phorical subject/animistic counterpoint) bear an uncanny resemblance to
what Merleau-Ponty called “the flesh.” The French philosopher was fond
of quoting Cézanne, who said, “The landscape thinks itself in me and I am
JOSÉ LEZAMA LIMA 119
its consciousness.” He was equally fond of Klee’s saying: “In a forest, I have
felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days
I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me. . . . I was there
listening. . . . I think that the painter must be penetrated by the universe and
not want to penetrate it. . . . I expect to be inwardly submerged, buried.
Perhaps I paint to break out” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p. 167). These quota-
tions, aside from indicating the animism that Lezama referred to, will also
be important when we discuss Lezama’s views on nature, specifically as it
relates to “an open gnostic space.”
But they also illustrate Merleau-Ponty’s view of flesh as involving a
reversibility, a chiasmic intertwining which is central to his aesthetic views.
Like Lezama, Merleau-Ponty wanted to steer a course between naturalism
(empiricism) and intellectualism (rationalism) and tried to develop a theory
of artistic creation that would be “a fusion of self and the world, not
imitation of the world as object by the painter as a subject, nor a subjective
projection of the world by the artist’s imagination” (Johnson, 1993, p. 13).
This fusion of the self and the world is not a blurring or total identification
of self and world, but an ongoing dialogue between the two that avoids the
twin dangers of dualism, objectivist or subjectivist. The lessons for history
are clear: to write or think about history cannot seem merely a process
whereby the historian is a subject examining history (the object), nor can it
be entirely the subjective product of the historian’s mind. Otherwise, it
becomes autobiography at best, solipsism at worst. Merleau-Ponty’s bodily
perception, his idea of flesh, can be useful at this point.
Flesh is not just matter, molecules of meat, if you will. In trying to explain
its enigmatic comprehensiveness, Merleau-Ponty says the following: “The
flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should
need the old term ‘element’ in the sense it was used to speak of water, earth,
air, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the
spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that
brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being. The flesh is in
this sense an ‘element’ of Being” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 139). His definition
comes in the context of seeing and painting, where the seer is caught up in
what is being seen, claiming that the body offers a kind of “natural reflec-
tion.” Vision implies that the body is both transparent (a window) and
reflective (a mirror). Galen Johnson sums up the importance of these traits:
“Flesh and reversibility are notions meant to express both envelopment and
distance, the paradox of unity at a distance or sameness with difference,
finding a new ontological way between monism and dualism” (Johnson,
1993, pp. 47–48). Lezama’s ontology, with Christian and Platonic overtones,
also carries pre-Socratic themes as well, echoed by Merleau-Ponty’s defini-
tion of flesh as being an element. Perhaps he had Anaxagoras in mind, who
thought the basic elements were made up of an infinite amount of qualita-
tively different seeds, captured in the suggestive phrase, “I call the world
120 TROPICS OF HISTORY
detail here but must be limited to what seems germane to Lezama’s notion
of recollection and how it relates to his historical thinking.
The process of recollection is not merely recapturing a past moment,
intact and exactly how it occurred. It is not going back and recognizing that
which is already known, but is equally a confrontation or a warm encounter
with the unknown. Gadamer, following Plato, observes that in anamnesis
you grasp the essence of what is recollected, not just the contingent ele-
ments, which is why he says: “The joy of recognition is rather the joy of
knowing more than is already familiar” (Gadamer, 1993, p. 114). This is
reminiscent of Heidegger’s comments cited earlier. For Plato “considers all
knowledge of essence to be recognition.” A work of art’s recognition also
produces this knowledge of essences, which is why Aristotle in his Poetics
said: “Poetry, therefore, is more philosophical and more significant than
history, for poetry is more concerned with the universal, and history more
with the individual” (Aristotle, 1968, p. 17). Lezama’s memory produces
that kind of recognition that Plato spoke about, allowing him to reconstruct
imaginary eras, his poetics of history.
Knowledge, then, is not what has passed, but points toward the future.
Lledó underlines two essential points: anamnesis is linked to learning/un-
derstanding (mathenein) and searching (zetein). What this implies is that the
learning-understanding-searching axis is drawn to an unknown. The psy-
che extends itself toward what it does not know, and often the object of our
search is not known. The essence of knowledge comes not so much from
the plenitude of an answer but in the possibilities brought about by ques-
tioning. It is the Socratic method of questioning and response, its dialectic,
that can bring about the speculative nature of consciousness and recollec-
tion.
What is the basis for this recollection? According to Lledó (and Gadamer
as well), it is the logos. It is language which makes dialogue possible, as well
as recollection, because logos is not only enunciation but also reason or cause
(Gadamer, 1991, p. 34). Of course it also means discourse, speech, as well
as narrative, argument, a true account (as opposed to mythos). But for
Lezama, perhaps Heraclitus is closer to the heart, who by definition saw
the logos as the all-pervasive formula of organization which is divine
(nomos). Or better still, the logos can be seen as an active force in the universe,
generative (logoi spermatikoi), material, and associated with fire. This rich
welter of divine, creative, fiery, and erotic associations is consistent with
Lezama’s own views, his own logocentric ethos. Aware of the kind of word
magic that accompanies mythological consciousness, Lezama skillfully
recreates that “magic” when he visits the imaginary eras he is so fond of
(Orphics, ancient Egypt, Taoism). But even when he is not directly address-
ing the issue of imaginary eras, Lezama seems to exemplify George
Steiner’s image of history: “History, in the human sense, is a language net
JOSÉ LEZAMA LIMA 123
Despite his essays on his poetic system or imaginary eras and his
voracious philosophical appetite, Lezama never claimed that he was a
systematic philosopher. But his ability to think through combining a series
of startling images and metaphors, his skill in exploring certain myths,
despite their complexity and heterogeneity, do reveal common themes and
concerns in his thinking. But it is a unity that emerges from the sacred,
admirably expressed in the following phrase: “Nothing is incoherent since
everything has a sense of the marvelous” (quoted in Molinero, 1989, p. 101).
This thinking in images brings us to Hegel’s notion of recollection, as
developed in his Phenomenology of Spirit. We have mentioned in the intro-
duction how the word Bild in German (image or picture) is the basis for the
words education, culture, formation, shaping (Bildung). It forms the back-
ground of Hegel’s writing about recollection (Erinnerung). In what follows
we rely on Verene and how he interprets pictorial thinking, recollection, and
the concept in Hegel (Verene, 1985, pp. 1–13).
Why is Erinnerung so important to Hegel? According to Verene, it is the
name given by Hegel for the power of consciousness to have speculative
knowledge of its own activity. As we will see, speculation has no negative
connotations for Hegel; it implies going beyond the merely sensory, and by
doing so makes what was initially subjective, objective. It is like the imagi-
nation in being able to unite very different thoughts and things, but unlike
it, has a conceptual basis. “Here Hegel says that the forms of spirit in their
contingency are history and in their conceptual organization are the science
of the coming into appearance of knowing, and that both together are
conceptual history or recollection” (Verene, 1985, p. 3). Verene shows how
important metaphors and images are to understanding the Phenomenology
of Spirit, for the comprehension of Hegel’s subject itself, which is the
speculative understanding of history, reality, and spirit. Recollection is a
process by which we form images and bring them to our consciousness. It
is “the form through which recollection works” (Ibid., p. 4). There are four
stages of recollection: a first stage in which the subject, overcoming the
mindlessness of nature, remembers a series of self-images. It is followed by
a recognition of recollection’s systematic power, an internalization which
Hegel underlines by hyphenating the word (Er-innerung). This ability to
internalize the image is what makes recollection give way to the possibility
of absolute knowing (third stage). Finally, the fourth stage “is the realization
that recollection in both its sides—in its power to call forth images and in
its power to know them, to organize them into a totality—is conceptualized
history” (ibid., p. 5). Hegel’s mapping out of this process is driven by the
concept, which is where Lezama would part company with him, though it
should be said that concept for Hegel is not some arid intellectual construct,
but something that can gather within its realm the amplitude of experience,
be it empirical, emotional, religious, or spiritual.
JOSÉ LEZAMA LIMA 125
through and through, even if unconsciously so. The aim is a more modest
one: it is hoped that the convergences (confluences, Lezama might say) in
their thinking will yield new grounds for understanding Lezama, another
twist (or melody?) in the “animistic counterpoint.”
In La expresión americana, Lezama makes rather pointed references to
Hegel and his views on America, engaging Ortega y Gasset on the way.
Many critics have used La expresión americana as a way of pointing out
Lezama as an anti-Hegelian. But as several contemporary thinkers have
shown—Derrida, Adorno, and William Desmond, among others—the
temptation in thinking we have “surpassed” Hegel is illusory at best and
in the case of Lezama, pernicious.
It might seem foolhardy to affirm this, especially when Lezama has
soundly taken Hegel to task in his essay. With reason Lezama criticizes
Hegel’s Eurocentric bias in viewing world history as he does, particularly
his understanding of Africa (as not being part of history), or his dismissal
of the western hemisphere by including it in his geographical review,
thereby defining it as part of nature (but again, not part of history). Lezama
says these mistakes “show a scandalous incomprehension,” and undoubt-
edly the Cuban is correct in pointing out these errors. In a more religious
vein, he criticizes “the closed pessimism of Hegelian Protestantism,” also
pointing out Hegel’s anti-Catholic prejudices in trying to explain Latin
American underdevelopment. Lezama would probably agree with Ortega
in claiming that Hegelian thought contained a “certain blindness to the
future,” expressed with particular vehemence regarding America. Accord-
ing to Ortega y Gasset, the future alarmed Hegel because it represented the
irrational (Ortega, 1981, p. 88). Hegel says that America is the land of the
future and that at some distant time it will become important. Hegel says
the following: “What has taken place in the New World up to the present
time is only an echo of the Old World—the expression of a foreign life; and
as a Land of the Future, it has no interest for us, here, for as regards History,
our concern must be with that which has been and that which is. In regard
to Philosophy, on the other hand, we have to do with that which (strictly
speaking) is neither past nor future, but that which is, which has eternal
existence—with Reason; and that is quite sufficient to occupy us” (Hegel,
1956, p. 87).
Notwithstanding Hegel (and Lezama’s) blind spots, it would be fruitful
to keep in mind Ortega’s metaphor about Hegel: “In his errors, as does the
lion with its powerful bite, he always manages to get in his teeth a big chunk
of the palpitating truth” (Ortega, 1981, p. 88). Let us examine some of
Hegel’s and Lezama’s bites, so we can see where they come together on
issues of history and art.
In his Philosophy of History, Hegel says “the History of the World is
nothing but the development of the Idea of Freedom.” This strikes us as
obvious nowadays, but before the Enlightenment this was not necessarily
JOSÉ LEZAMA LIMA 127
belief in resurrection and divine causality, does not reject change, nor does
he stray from having a dynamic image of history. For Lezama, history is a
reflection of the image through time, somewhat similar to what Plato said
about time being a moving image of eternity. There is a large component of
the eternal or the absolute in Lezama’s definition of the image, which is
similar but not identical to Hegel’s Absolute Spirit. According to María
Zambrano, it was Hegel who “discovered that history was an inexorable
vicissitude of the spirit.” But spirit changes, evolves, negates, and surpasses
itself, its content is highly historical, and in its philosophical journey arrived
at some not very Christian outcomes: “Reality cannot be nature as created
and made forever, but that other reality which man is the bearer of, of which
the individual is the mask which both expresses and contains it [that other
reality]; a mask which sacrifices itself reciting its part, only to be later
stripped away. His [Hegel’s] Christianity had to conclude in an idea which
is quite un-Christian, so pagan, that the individual is the mask of the logos”
(Zambrano, 1993, p. 14). The tragedy of humankind is not being able to live
without the gods, and in that vein Zambrano concludes that for Hegel
history thus takes the place of the divine.
At the same time, though, both Lezama and Hegel see history as a
theodicy, that is, as a justification of the works of God, understood in a way
that does not oppose faith and reason. Given the follies and absolute
depravities of history, a theodicy tries to explain the nature of evil as
meaningful rather than absurd or senseless. This in turn brings up questions
about necessity and freedom. In Hegel’s words:
Our intellectual striving aims at realizing the conviction that what was
intended by eternal wisdom, is actually accomplished in the domain of the
existent, active Spirit, as well as in that of mere Nature. Our mode of treating
the subject is, in this aspect, a Theodicy—a justification of the ways of God . . .
so that the ill that is found in the World may be comprehended, and the
thinking Spirit reconciled with the fact of the existence of evil. Indeed,
nowhere is such a harmonizing view more pressingly demanded than in
Universal History. (Hegel, 1956, p. 15)
For Hegel, harmonizing the divine or providential with the passions of the
world requires explaining a disjuncture between what men attempt to do
and the ultimate consequences of their actions, a kind of double which
manifests itself within and behind those passions. That double, in Hegel’s
vocabulary, goes by the name of “the cunning of reason,” where transindi-
vidual elements are expressed. Here universal goals and particular inten-
tions meet. Providence becomes in Hegel the cunning of reason, and the
interpretation of Christianity becomes the province of speculative reason.
To speculate is not mere contemplation, seeing, or conjecture, but also by
way of its mystical side it takes us to a mirror metaphor, so dear to Lezama.
In an interview, Lezama linked his faith in resurrection with a specular
JOSÉ LEZAMA LIMA 129
trope, which by way of the image can recuperate its lost similarity (with the
Creator): “Image for me is life. In this I have roots back to St. Paul; we see
through mirrors in an image.” Nicholas of Cusa, among others, said that
God could not be known directly, only by his effects (nature, etc.), which
were partial mirrors of the divine. To speculate, then, means to go beyond
the sensorial and arrive at the supernatural. In this regard we can speak of
Lezama’s historical thought (or his poetic system) as being speculative.
Hegel sees speculation as a conceptual process, not necessarily linked to a
mirror metaphor, even though his thoughts on reflection invite that kind of
association. More important is speculation’s ability to (re)unite elements,
things, and concepts which seem opposed or disparate, and, in contrast to
analytic thinking which leads to understanding, speculative thought is
closer to the poetic imagination. However, it goes beyond the poetic by
being conceptual and presupposes the work of understanding. This is close
to the eros cognoscente (erotics of knowing) seen in Lezama’s poetry and
essays. With his baroque theodicy, laced with Platonic echoes, Lezama
defines it as such: “Man strives for God, but man enjoys (savors) all things
in a banquet whose finality is God.”
Speculation as gift of the imagination takes us directly to what Hegel
said about historical writing and aesthetic consciousness. For him, histori-
cal writing was a verbal art, closely linked to poetic expression. Just like
Vico, he characterizes poetry as a form of knowing, with which Lezama
would be in complete agreement. This knowledge is tropological, a meta-
phoric process. Similarly, both would coincide with the ancient Greeks in
seeing a close relationship between poetry, history, and philosophy. The first
philosophers wrote in verse and called their work histories. It is not sur-
prising, then, that the word “history” in Greek comes from the root of the
same word, eidenai (to know by seeing) that is also the root for the philo-
sophical terms form and idea (Gillespie, 1984, pp. 1–4). History is what one
had seen or witnessed, a key concept that early Christianity reworked to its
advantage. For Christians it was crucial to be a witness of the divine, and
it is that witnessing that gave the apostles their subsequent authority as
bearers and transmitters of the new doctrine.
Both Hegel and Lezama would agree with Aristotle in seeing poetry as
more philosophical than history, by virtue of not being encumbered by the
inessentials, allowing it to go to the marrow, to the universal. It draws
humans closer to intelligibility, and as a result Hegel assigns art (along with
religion and philosophy) a special place in the realm of Absolute Spirit. This
does not mean that art is uprooted from history. On the contrary: “Art is
not anti-historical or a-historical. It is rather an imaginative appropriation
of one of the essential strivings of historical man” (Desmond, 1986, p. 61).
Among the characteristics of a work of art relevant to history are, Desmond
says, “its concrete uniting of spirit and sensuousness; its dialectical whole-
ness; its attempts to make present a unification of freedom and necessity
130 TROPICS OF HISTORY
An example will show how important the figurative is for Lezama, since
its connotations are rhetorical, religious, philosophical, and historical. In “A
partir de la poesía” (Starting from poetry), Lezama speaks of a last imagi-
nary era, that of infinite possibility, incarnate in the figure of José Martí
(1853–95). “Feeling oneself poorer is to penetrate into the unknown, where
the advice of certainty became extinguished, where finding a shaft of light
or a vacillating intuition is paid in kind by death or a primordial desolation.
To be poorer is to be surrounded by the miraculous, to fashion the animism
of each form; it is a form of waiting that becomes creative, born of the
distance between things” (Lezama, 1971, p. 179). This creativity of absence
is like that of death and grief, where restoring the lost plenitude requires
creative imaginative leaps. Memory, or recollection, might be the grieving
of history, but instead of restoring a lost plenitude (an impossibility), it
allows the past to speak (sing?) to us from the vantage point of the future.
Perhaps that explains Lezama’s phrase “death engenders us all anew.”
This description of poorness becoming infinite possibility also reads like
a version of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. At first, the slave is nothing, and
the master’s initial recognition is not true recognition since it recognizes a
nothingness, or more accurately a nobody. From that nothingness the slave
acquires (self-)consciousness through work and eventually becomes a his-
torical subject. From an initial defeat, there is an eventual defeat of the
master and servitude. In this essay, Martí prefigures the historical events of
the Cuban Revolution; in La expresión americana, Lezama analyzes Martí as
a culminating figure of nineteenth-century libertarian struggles. The figu-
rative element of Martí’s life and thought (as realization or as portent),
central to Lezama’s concept of imaginary eras, forms part of the speculative
economy of the Hegelian term aufhebung (annul, conserve, elevate). And it
shows a strong affinity to figura as employed by Eric Auerbach, whereby
there is a story (literal sense), embodied by a figure which is fulfilled in the
future (veritas). The figura holds the veritas within, veiled, and only its future
realization unfolds the truth. The figura is not a symbol or an allegory; it is
fulfilled in history. Its prophetic value is related to historical interpretation,
which is why Auerbach says, “Real historical figures are to be interpreted
spiritually, but the interpretation points to a carnal, hence, historical fulfill-
ment—for the truth has become history or flesh.” (Auerbach, 1959, p. 34).
Lezama remolds that figurative interpretation, which received its maxi-
mum use in the Middle Ages, and he makes it function within his poetic
system, his imaginary eras, as part of an endless wave of analogies that end
in the image. He allows us to see history as the flesh of truth, from eternity,
which for Lezama was the eyes of faith, for Hegel the eyes of reason, equally
eternal.
One of Lezama’s most important departures from Hegel is captured in
his phrase “an open gnostic space.” On several occasions in La expresión
americana he makes use of the term as a description of America’s unique-
134 TROPICS OF HISTORY
Orphism; the other two are on Taoism and Egypt (all in Lezama, 1971). And
both are essentially stories of origins of the cosmos, which recall Lezama’s
paraphrase of Nietzsche: he who goes back to the origins will find new
origins. Going to the origins is a germinative act, a new beginning, piecing
together the dismembered body of Orpheus. For Francis Bacon, whom
Lezama read attentively, Orpheus is the paradigm of a new kind of wisdom
or knowledge. With his lyre, he held all of nature in rapt attention. He
conquered through harmony, not through strength, like Hercules (Briggs,
1989, pp. 1–3). This relationship between art (music) nature, and knowledge
perfectly describes Lezama’s phrase about the “open gnostic space.” It is a
space of desire as well, exemplified not only in nature images, but also in
our previous discussion of paintings: “Sight opens all space to desire, but
desire is not satisfied with seeing” (Starobinski in Leppert, 1996, p. 101). For
Lezama, desire is the shadow cast by seeing when it seeks out history. And
what the shadow gathers in the visible, as well as what it un-conceals from
the invisible, forms an an “open gnostic space.”
This space, as noted, is open to different cultures and voices, but not in
a passive way. It is transformative, creative, transculturating, whereby the
imagination takes a utopian dimension, but not in a prescriptive way. This
act of historical imagination is described by Paul Ricoeur:
Like few writers or thinkers, Lezama truly saw the imagination as an act
of faith, as a kind of primary fire that can warm up and light up the universe,
or at least the island of Cuba, or perhaps as a dragon that can piece together
the sundered elements of its history. Lezama’s optimism was legendary,
always seeking out a positive interpretation of events. In La expresión
americana it shows up time and time again, in the figures of Sor Juana, Simón
Rodríguez, and Fray Servando. Even a troubled thinker like Pascal becomes
a springboard for transformative images. Pascal has been described as
138 TROPICS OF HISTORY
“uneasy, burning, greedy for the absolute.” How unlike Lezama, who
approached the absolute with the innocence of a lamb, lapping at its shores
with a tranquil, sensuous joy.
It is this redemptive nature of the imagination which can bring important
insights into the historical process. No one reads Lezama for an empirically
based understanding of history, but his images and tropes do trigger a series
of paths that can be examined. Imaginary era, a baroque of Counter-Con-
quest, metaphorical subject, animistic counterpoint, great choral groups,
open gnostic space, are all expressions that when explored begin to yield a
way of approaching history, culture, even politics, with a different perspec-
tive, capable of resisting monistic or mechanistic explanations. And should
we think that Lezama’s poetic understanding of history is naive, we would
do well to remember that for Christian thinkers the Book of Daniel exercised
an enormous power over their conception of history for more than fifteen
hundred years. Unbelievably, Daniel’s four stages of history came from the
interpretation of a dream.
Let us return to Lezama’s opening statement: “I am ravished by being
able to see words like fish in a waterfall.” The image of fish brings to mind
several different associations: Christian, alchemical, gnostic, Yoruba, even
Taoist. Fish are linked to fecundity, procreation, the powers of water as origin,
with lunar deities. In Christianity fish are inextricably coupled with baptism,
immortality, and resurrection. It is also a eucharistic food, and the apostles
were called fishers of men, as was Orpheus. For alchemists it is the archane
substance; for the ancient Egyptians it is the phallus of Osiris; for the Chinese,
abundance, wealth, regeneration and harmony. In Afro-Cuban lore, Yemayá
is “the mother whose children are the fish,” the life-giving force.
For Lezama, words have that generative capacity, which is one of the
meanings of poiesis. They are the basic elements of a kind of theurgy, which
is the ability to manipulate the gods through their occult tokens, most often
in natural objects, statues, and so on, based on the notion of cosmic sympa-
thy. As said before, Lezama’s logos are like those “momentary gods,”
especially if we keep in mind what Frye said about Homer, that gods were
ready-made metaphors (Frye, 1983, p. 7). In Lezama’s discourse the blocks
of images shift around, collide, explode, shimmer like gods.
The waters are the amniotic fluid of the imaginary eras. The metaphorical
subject is that fisher of men or words, seeking the realm of the image, the
secret soul of the logos. The waterfall is stopped or transformed by the fish
in animistic counterpoint. The desire born of that longing, the shadow of its
memory, is the dragon of history colliding with and eluding the net of
language.
NOTE
1. References with only a page number apply to Irlemar Chiampi’s superb
critical edition of Lezama’s La expresión americana (1993).
SIX
Reading the work of Severo Sarduy is like walking into your favorite
pastry shop: your whole body inhales the intoxicating, delectable
sweetness, then your fingers and tongue take over like hungry serpents.
He was not Cuba’s first gay writer, nor the first Cuban author to deal
with homosexuality. What he managed to do was make his gayness a
celebratory, erotic affirmation, a mix of baroque theater, rumba wiggle,
postmetaphysical philosophy, religious mysticism, all performed as a
kind of writerly “voguing.” Sarduy was born in 1937 in Camagüey,
Cuba, and as a young writer was linked to the iconoclastic writers
around Ciclón magazine such as Virgilio Piñera, José Rodríguez Feo,
Antón Arrufat, and Fayad Jamís. Sarduy went to Paris in 1960 on an art
scholarship and never returned. He was close to the thinkers and
writers of Tel Quel magazine such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida,
Philippe Sollers, and Julia Kristeva and worked for Éditions du Seuil,
where he published the works of the Latin American boom writers such
as Fuentes, García Márquez, and Cortázar. Sarduy was equally brilliant
as novelist, poet, and essayist. His first novel was Gestos (1963), but
Sarduy’s critical success began with De donde son los cantantes (1967;
From Cuba with a Song, 1972, 1994), an unorthodox exploration of Cuban
identity. Sarduy’s work grew more experimental with Cobra (1973; Eng,
trans. 1975, 1995) and Maitreya (1978; Eng. trans. 1987, 1995). He pub-
lished three more novels in his lifetime. Colibrí (1984) is a parody of
jungle novels and of boom writers such as Vargas Llosa, Carpentier, and
Fuentes. Cocuyo (1990) describes the rite of passage of a picaresque,
grotesque child, and Pájaros de playa (1993), an island where a group of
young people are ravaged by a terrible affliction, is Sarduy’s rueful,
140 TROPICS OF HISTORY
Yemayá gave the twins little magic drums. These they played until the Devil
became tired, but as long as they kept drumming, the Devil kept dancing.
This continued until the Devil was exhausted and agreed to withdraw the
traps. Similarly, Auxilio and Socorro play their metaphoric drums, either
by evading the traps of patriarchal and monocultural identity or exhausting
through parody traditional and canonical texts.
In part two, “By the River of Rose Ashes,” Mortal Pérez, a blond Spaniard
who begins the novel as an old general, desperately pursues Lotus Flower,
an actress in a Chinese burlesque opera house in Havana. In this section the
language is highly metaphorical and figurative, in tune with the constant
(un)maskings and carnivallike atmosphere, a saucy parody of Lacan’s
concept of desire. Pérez’s lust turns to murderous rage, as he finally sends
Lotus Flower a watch with blades that will cut her wrists. He moves across
the street from the theater where she performs . . . and waits.
Lotus Flower is also a transvestite, but Mortal Pérez does not seem to
know. Everything he seeks seems to evaporate, an endless procession of
signifiers which seem to echo Lacan’s views on desire and language.
According to Lacan, desire is not biological: “Thus desire is neither appetite
nor satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference which arises
from the subtraction of the first from the second, the phenomenon of their
splitting” (Lacan, 1977, p . 287). Desire, though, is based on a lack that is
never satisfied in the physiological sense. It arises from a splitting of the
subject, in wanting to recover a lost object, the pre-oedipal mother. More
important, this desire cannot be truly spoken. As Judith Butler says: “Desire
then appears as a gap, a discrepancy, an absent signifier and thus only
appears as that which cannot appear. The speaking of desire does not resolve
this negation. Hence, desire is never materialized or concretized through
language, but is indicated through the interstices of language, that is, what
language cannot represent” (Butler, 1987, p. 193). Of course, Pérez desires
Lotus Flower in the appetite sense, but it is precisely this element that
Sarduy parodies, since the Spaniard conflates the two (desire, appetite).
And so Mortal Pérez is constantly chasing a phantasm, which Sarduy
embodies in a gender difference. When Mortal goes to Lotus Flower’s
dressing room, a bald Chinaman wearing a guayabera and slacks, with a
grapefruit on a tray, walks out: the “real” Lotus Flower. Toward the end of
the chapter the narrator asks: “Where do all the objects come from, where
has the preceding scene unfolded?” ( From Cuba with a Song, 1994c, p. 55).
Sarduy, echoing Lacan, would say from that split in the subject who must
constantly try to name his desire and endlessly, metonymically spins out
signifiers to cover over that void. This is driven home by Auxilio and
Socorro, who say to Mortal Pérez in unison: “Ming [Lotus Flower] is pure
absence, she is what she is not. There is no water for your thirst” (ibid., p.
38). This is a perfect expression for desire. If we set up an equation, we could
say that Demand minus Need = Desire. It is the irreducible residue between
SEVERO SARDUY 143
need and demand that also transcends them both. Desire, therefore, can
never be satiated “since it always refers to a repressed text” (Ragland-Sul-
livan, 1987, p. 77). This repressed text is the Other or (M)other, who is the
infant’s primordial originating figure of unconditonal love, total union of
subject and object. Many others will surface in a person’s life, but they will
be signifiers twirling about the repressed text or void. In From Cuba with a
Song, we see various efforts at quelling that void: (1) through transcendence
(Auxilio and Socorro searching for God); (2) through sexual union (Mortal’s
attempts with Lotus Flower); or (3) through power and social positioning
(Dolores with Mortal). All, of course, ultimately fail.
Sarduy also plays on Eurocentric notions of Oriental eroticism, the
exoticism of the Other during this sequence. That this desire is a quaint,
outdated notion is belied by David Cronenberg’s recent film M. Butterfly
(1992/93), about a French diplomat who falls in love with a woman from
the Chinese opera. When he first hears Song Liling performing an aria from
Puccini’s famous opera (set in Japan), he is captivated by her mesmerizing
voice. But soon he enters a world of mistaken identities, sexual bewilder-
ment, political intrigue, betrayal, spying, and ultimately death. The diplo-
mat, appropriately named Gallimard (also the name of an important
publishing firm in France), is unaware that men sing women’s roles in
traditional Chinese opera. He, like Mortal Pérez, has constructed a fantas-
tical object of desire, as well as a model of femininity based on the exotic
other: a docility of character, beautiful, silky clothing, an erotic modesty
with a long tradition, and so on. The amazing thing is that Gallimard falls
for Song Liling (John Lone) during the time of the Cultural Revolution
(1966–76), when the Chinese Communist Party would view all of this
behavior as decadent, bourgeois, as a hangover from a humiliating past.
The film not only depicts sexual duplicity, but political treachery as well.
Gallimard’s lover is also spying for the Chinese government. Oblivious to
this reality, Gallimard lives for the erotic body or the body of desire: fantasy
becomes more real than the “real body.” This comes to a head at the end of
the film, when Gallimard and Song Liling are in a police wagon on the way
to jail. Gallimard has just been tried in court for treason (and Song Liling
for spying), with the added shock of finding out that his lover is “really a
man.” Song strips and offers “himself,” his real body, telling Gallimard to
touch him since it is the same skin. Gallimard refuses, since, as Slavoj Zizek
says, Song Liling is now out of his fantasy frame of desire (Zizek, 1995, p.
107). The real is not only prosaic, but becomes destructive.
This gives rise to guilt, and in Gallimard the guilt becomes so extreme
that it produces a psychotic identification with Butterfly, which he reenacts
in prison (dressing as Cio-Cio-San), ultimately committing suicide. Zizek’s
interpretation is compelling (he even claims the suicide is an ethical choice,
also echoing the original opera), but not entirely satisfactory. One could
equally argue that desire and identification, though related, are not the
144 TROPICS OF HISTORY
ture, that is, Santería, asides on rhetoric and narrative, plus a savage parody
of Cuban political life of the 1940s and 1950s.
Santería has been described as a syncretic blending of European Catholi-
cism and West African Yoruba philosophico-religious beliefs. In fact, it is an
example of Ortiz’s transculturation. Earlier we spoke of the ibeyes or twins
fatiguing and outwitting the Devil. The term devil already implies transcul-
turation, since the Yoruba pantheon has no orishas (deities) that are solely
the incarnation of evil. Orishas can do good as well as evil. The “Dolores
Rondón” section features many references to orishas such as Ochún,
Obatalá, Ogún, Changó, Elegguá, and Yemayá, aside from the already
mentioned twins. In fact, Dolores’s downfall is attributed to the fact that
she does not render tribute to the orishas as she ascends in social position
and power.
Let us begin with the twins, or ibeyes. As said previously, they are
associated with supernatural forces in many cultures from around the
world. In Central American mythology there are numerous examples of
sacred twins, the best known being Hunaphú and Ixbalanqué from the
Mayan Popol Vuh. In Japan, Izanagi and Izanami are a brother/sister pair,
part of a creation myth, as are Osiris and Isis in Egyptian lore. More
importantly:
Twins are strongly charged with taboo, valencies of interdiction and persua-
sion. Their baffling power lies in their ambiguity and the generative force of
their off-balance bonding, taken . . . as a sure mark of the Sacred. In fact,
nowhere is sacred ambivalence more deeply and vividly embodied than in
the archetype of the twins. This ambivalence is what allows it to operate,
alternately, as a wounding and healing influence, as that which generates
order or disorder as if by caprice. While the modern, rational mind wants to
resolve this terrible inconsistency of the Sacred in a final closure or an
all-encompassing aim, both ancient and aboriginal peoples prefer to accept it
as it is, without looking for a way to bargain ourselves out of the dilemma.
(Lash, 1993, p. 8)
In Sarduy we will see how the inconsistency, the healing and wounding,
the generative ambiguity relate to issues of identity, culture, and writing.
Some places in Africa attribute evil to twins and at one time would kill
twins if borne by humans. But in Yoruba culture they play a positive role,
and in Cuban Santería, the birth of twins is seen as a mark or sign from
heaven. They are often linked to deities of water, also true in other cultures.
For example, the mother of Romulus and Remus, Rhea, was a river goddess,
and Leda, the mother of Castor and Pollux, was a daughter of an ocean god.
In Santería, their adoptive mother was Yemayá, mother of life and of all the
orishas. She owns the waters and represents the sea, primordial source of
life. In alternative renderings of the story of the twins, they are the offspring
of Oshún, orisha of the rivers, Yemayá’s sister. Dolores Rondón at one
146 TROPICS OF HISTORY
the head, both thoughts and dreams. White is his color as he is the orisha
of purity, harmony, and reconciliation. Since all the orishas respect her, she
often mediates in disputes between bickering orishas. Sarduy’s inclusion
of Obatalá completes the four elements since Changó (fire), Oshún-Yemayá-
the twins (water), and Oyá (wind) all figure prominently in this section.
Oyá is linked to the dead and inhabits cemeteries. Since Obatalá wears
white, and Dolores claims to meet her maker wearing Obatalá’s white robes
(aside from the references to Oyá), González Echevarría assumes that white
is linked to death in Santería. This is too narrow an interpretation. There is
nothing in Santería that links Obatalá (or the color white) exclusively with
death. If Dolores is wearing white robes, it is for the same reason that
babalaos (Santería priests) do, because of purity. The twins (or ibeyes) also
wear white. Santería, as a transcultural phenomenon, is too rich and com-
plex to be so statically viewed, more so within a text by Sarduy, where the
transculturation undergoes further metamorphoses, as when Auxilio turns
into Ella Fitzgerald to say her last few lines. Sarduy draws on Afro-Cuban
beliefs, but does not make it the “master signifier” of the chapter. Instead
he plays it off the baroque décima used in epitaphs, poststructuralist theory,
and political discourse, in order to create a rich, polyphonic, and hilarious
buffo representation. Sarduy’s textured “staging” has semiotics, politics,
and the divine crash together, teasing out all the ramifications and layers of
the plot.
Obatalá is also the semi-visible presence behind the last segment of the
book, “The Entry of Christ into Havana.” Many of his/her avatares or
caminos (avatars, paths) relate to the figure of Christ (Olofi is also syncret-
ized as Christ, being the mediator for Oluddumare, the All or godhead
figure). Obatalá is also from the mountains, and the stones placed in tureens
to make offerings to him/her are called oké (de la loma: from the mountains).
This plays nicely into the “Son de la loma” by Matamoros, the guiding
metaphor of much of the novel. In his Igbá-Ibó path, Obatalá is linked to
the all-seeing eye of Providence. This derives from Assyrian-Babylonian
mythology, and by the Middle Ages in Europe it was represented by the
Eye within a triangle. There are many direct and indirect references to eyes
and seeing in this last part embedded within a mystical-baroque visual
culture. Obatalá’s powers are supposed to come from male and female
attributes, which is not unusual in Santería, where many orishas are women
and where avatars of an orisha can be male or female. This is an important
consideration in Sarduy, whose notions of culture and the sacred are closely
enmeshed with his irreverent attitudes toward gender.
Before moving on to this last part of the novel, let us turn to Sarduy’s
parodying of Cuban politics of the 1940s. In one page, he draws on Jakob-
sonian linguistics, Columbus’s diary, classical rhetoric, José Martí, and
Afro-Cuban religious terminology. Written like a play, as different charac-
ters speak, Sarduy adds stage directions in parentheses, usually describing
148 TROPICS OF HISTORY
the emotion or tone of the character. These are often references to opera,
cinematic personages, or popular song. The mix, of course, is incongruous
and jarringly funny and points to several elements in Sarduy’s narrative
style: its lack of realism, its refusal to latch onto fixed identities (either for
the “characters” or in terms of a coherent stable “message”), its ability to be
in constant metamorphosis through code-switching, cross-dressing, and
plain outrageousness.
The final segment, “The Entry of Christ into Havana,” starts in Spain
with Auxilio and Socorro looking for a vanished young lover (Mortal
Pérez). The two return to Cuba, where they are seduced and “Cubanized”
by a mulatto. In Santiago (eastern Cuba) they find a wooden Christ who is
the incarnation of Mortal. They rejuvenate him and take him on a proces-
sion to Havana where a snowstorm has blanketed the city in white. As the
wooden effigy disintegrates, the twins and the crowds are sprayed by
bullets from helicopters. Christ’s entry has at least a double reference: Fidel
Castro’s victory over Batista (1959) and James Ensor’s “Christ Entering
Brussels” (1898), though the ending itself bears an uncanny resemblance to
Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel (1962). Sarduy’s snow imagery could be a
reference to Cuban writers’ fascination with snow, epitomized by Julián
Casal’s (1863–93) book of poems Nieve (Snow).
The hail of bullets and the snow blanketing Havana could be interpreted
in rather apocalyptic terms, of nothingness, of blankness, of death, but I
think that the twins picking up the pieces of the wooden Christ and saving
them in their handkerchiefs is only the beginning of a new cycle of transcul-
turation and transfiguration. Let us not forget that in Islamic mysticism
snow is analogous to sand in being a great unifying peace, which dissolves
the anxieties of existence. And Obatalá, whose color is white, is from the
mountains. In Tibetan Buddhism the mountains with their snow are the
locations of their sacred monasteries (this is more the case in Cobra and
Maitreya). When Fernando Ortiz uses the term transculturation, he says that
deculturation often is the first step, followed by acculturation; these steps
precede a more even give-and-take between cultures. Transculturation is
not some wonderful and smooth synthesis, but a historical process fraught
with conquest, resistance, and bloody class and ethnic conflict. The meeting
of East and West in Sarduy’s work is often violent, disruptive, and calami-
tous. But then there is a suggestive phrase, a proliferation of language and
image that is close to hope, but tempered by a wily aversion to the great
metanarratives. And as a chastened bricoleur, he picks his way through the
shards and ruins of philosophical and religious systems in order to piece
together not a paradise through language but a heterotopic burst of erotic
search and expenditure.
Though Sarduy begins this segment in Spain, it is peppered with refer-
ences to its Arabic past. Sarduy has an entire scene that takes place at the
tenth-century Madinat al-Zahra, a city-medina built by Abd Al-Rahman III.
SEVERO SARDUY 149
Paz’s Conjunctions and Disjunctions (and his poem “Blanco”), Spanish ba-
roque painting, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Lacan, Derrida, and even his
very own From Cuba with a Song. Long before critics and writers were using
terms like “writing with (or on, from, of) the body,” Sarduy had published
a book of essays called Written on a Body (1969; trans. 1989), in which he
develops an erotics of writing close to Barthes’s Pleasure of the Text. Both that
book and his Barroco (1974) should be read as companions to Cobra, since
both speak eloquently to Sarduy’s aesthetic concerns and his philosophy of
writing or écriture. Salvador Elizondo’s Farabeuf o la crónica del instante (1967)
is also a text that is close to Sarduy’s in terms of valuing the ideographic
nature of the writing process.
Cobra, the main character(?), is incessantly transforming his/her body.
S/he is a transvestite dancer in the Lyric Theater of the Dolls in 1960s Paris,
is also a member of a motorcycle gang, part of a group of Tibetan lamas that
dress like hippies (or vice versa), has a dwarflike image of herself called
Pup (also a reference to astronomy), is also, well . . . you get the idea.
Cobra’s ever-changing body is the metamorphosis of the text, its delirious
language constantly remaking the characters and other texts. Part of this
ongoing process is the constant use of drugs, remedies, poisons, cures,
operations, and so on, all linked to the notion of writing. Many critics have
pointed out the similarities with Jacques Derrida’s essay “Plato’s Phar-
macy” in his book Dissemination (1972; Eng. trans. 1981). Though the book
was published the same year as Sarduy’s novel, “Plato’s Pharmacy” was
published in two parts, in the Parisian magazine Tel Quel in 1968.
Derrida focuses his discussion on Plato’s Phaedrus, performing a close
reading of the words pharmakos, pharmakon, pharmakeus, pharmacia. They
come up in a discussion of writing: the different words, from the same root,
can mean remedy, drug, cure, poison, charm, spell, magician, and scape-
goat. Needless to say, such a rich association of meaning concerning writing
was highly stimulating to Sarduy. But it also refers to makeup and the
painting of the body. Derrida sums it up admirably:
The magic of writing and painting is like a cosmetic concealing the dead under
the appearance of the living. The pharmakon introduces and harbors death. It
makes the corpse presentable, masks it, makes it up, perfumes it with its
essence, as it is said in Aeschylus. Pharmakon is also a word for perfume. A
perfume without essence, as we earlier called it a drug without substance. It
transforms order into ornament, the cosmos into a cosmetic. Death, masks,
makeup, are all part of the festival that subverts the order of the city, its smooth
regulation by the dialectician and the science of being. Plato, as we shall see,
is not long in identifying writing with festivity. And play. A certain festival, a
certain game. (Derrida, 1981, p. 142)
makeup, as body painting: Cobra takes six hours to get made up every night
for her show in the Lyric Theater of the Dolls. Mixed in with his/her
routines are quips about writing: “Writing is the art of ellipsis” (1995, p. 5);
“Writing is the art of digression” (p. 6); “Writing is the art of recreating
reality. Let us respect it” (p. 7); “No. Writing is the act of restoring History”
(p. 7); “Writing is the art of disorganizing an order and organizing a
disorder” (p. 9); and “Writing is the art of patchwork” (p. 12). These
numerous statements refer to Sarduy’s own aesthetic (particularly the one
about ellipsis), but also something he questioned all the time (writing is the
art of recreating reality). Sarduy would agree with this last comment if it
does not imply a kind of simple-minded realism, that is, writing as mimetic
device. However, if we read it so that recreating is meant as an act of creating
reality anew through the word, then perhaps the phrase might not seem
ironic. If for the Islamic world calligraphy “provides the external dress for
the Word of God,” Sarduy’s ideographic passion would lead him to dress
up the Void with his incandescent words. Void or emptiness in Buddhism
is not the equivalent of nothing, but a nonduality of perfect gnosis.
In a sense, then, Sarduy claims (and not only here) that writing is a kind
of transvestism. What does this mean? On an almost literal level, it means
that writing is not what it appears to be, that is, it is a kind of linguistic
makeup that hides a certain practice. This would be the equivalent of saying
that writing is a kind of fetishism. Writing is a way of disavowal of a lack
that is constantly affirmed and denied at the same time. In Freudian and
Lacanian theory the lack fetishism tries to conquer is the absence of a
maternal phallus. The child sees that nothingness and as a result makes
substitutes for it, which simultaneously deny and affirm that lack (e.g.,
shoes, raincoats, gloves). Literature fetishizes desire itself (in part because
it uses words, signs that always point to, but are not what they designate,
so it mimics the desiring process), and Sarduy takes this to an impossible
extreme. One could say that “Fetishization functions in analogous fashion
to the process of hysterization: both make a part or a whole of the body a
phallus. They eroticize, even give a genital meaning to non-genital parts of
the body” (Wright, 1992, p. 117). Sarduy eroticizes language, but not in a
phallic or logocentric fashion. In Cobra, this is incarnated in the lead char-
acter’s castration at the hands of Dr. Ktazob.
As Enrique Márquez has pointed out, Cobra’s castration is not such a
bad thing. In fact, the phallus is like an injunction or a prohibition, and
without one Cobra is not marked by a fixed cultural and gender identity,
and thus his sexual gratification is limitless. The erotic movement, or better
yet, erotic figuration, dismantles binary oppositions: “Reality and desire,
taboos and norms, the lived and the expected, the body and its phantasms,
all would be one . . . even the death-desire split would be harmonized and
eliminated” (Márquez, 1991, p. 304). This is further driven home by the fact
that his rival, a female transvestite, Cadillac, has an operation whereby a
152 TROPICS OF HISTORY
ment, he was a writer that pushed gender issues to the fore. And for Sarduy
it was not merely a matter of characters dressing up in drag; they truly
transform themselves into new beings, demigods, singers, entrepreneurs,
mystics, prostitutes, Buddhists, orishas, poets, hustlers, incarnations of the
Buddha, like the cook Luis Leng in Maitreya, which means the Buddha of
the future. None of the identities, moreover, is exclusive. In Sarduy the drag
queen not only looks and pretends to be someone else but is someone else,
refashioning oneself into a vaster collective self which is at the same time
social, erotic, cosmic, and sacred. In “realistic” drag, the queen is someone
else until the show ends. With Sarduy, the show never ends: there’s no
turning back (or straight, for that matter).
Moreover, Sarduy’s textual practice is one of the most radical attempts
in Caribbean discourse to dismantle the patriarchal, centered voice of a
writer who seeks to impose his authority, by either reinterpreting or creating
his own canon. Often we ask ourselves while reading some of Sarduy’s
more experimental texts: who is narrating or more so, what is narrating?
Whoever or whatever, it affects you viscerally, it goes into your blood-
stream, which brings us back to Derrida’s reading of Plato: writing is magic,
a cure, poison, a cosmetic, or perfume that transforms the dead letter(s) of
tradition (other texts) into a carnival, a dancing theater of passion. For
Sarduy the magic is the way a text can transfigure itself, like a shaman, not
some kind of folksy magical realism. The cure or poison is an altered state,
the handling of a substance that is so potent that it can heal or enfeeble. It
literally can affect the body. The perfume or cosmetic adorns the body
(textual and otherwise) to disguise its demise. Characters dissolve, die, are
reborn, countries and continents are bounded in a couple of sentences,
centuries are traversed in a flash, cultures are crisscrossed and rewritten
with a reckless, poetic jouissance. In a way, Sarduy recreates Caribbean
history on a planetary scale with a sassy charm, so aptly expressed by
Helene Cixous: “ Cobra’s language plays with its words the way a baby plays
with his toes. Are those mine?” (Adams et al., 1974, p. 30).
Sarduy even goes as far as trying to establish a cosmic model for his
baroque, eroto-aesthetics (see Gil and Iturralde, 1991, pp. 337–42, on Sar-
duy’s cosmographic vision). In his book Barroco (1974) he uses the term
retombée to refer to analogies that do not work in the normal chronological
sense, as when the echo precedes the voice. In this regard he speaks of
Galileo’s circle and Kepler’s ellipse as prefiguring the big bang and steady
state models of the universe in the twentieth century. In an interview,
Sarduy said he sought out the baroque through astronomy, not through
the more accepted route of the plastic arts and literature. His vision of the
baroque was different from Lezama’s. Sarduy claims that to be baroque or
neo-baroque was to “threaten, judge, and parody bourgeois economy”
with its rationality, its obsession with saving. “Throw away, expend, burn
away language for sheer pleasure—that’s the baroque’s core notion.” It is
154 TROPICS OF HISTORY
even the lightest objects would weigh tons. Eventually, a white dwarf
shatters in a nova or supernova explosion, or it can become a black hole (Gil
and Iturralde, 1991). Sarduy links his characters to these astronomical
phenomena, and through his own tropes or associations (color, makeup)
has them cross-dress. Almost literally he brings the stars down to shimmy
on stage, in a cosmic dance that is rich in sources, from the Elizabethan
theater, to Balinese dance, Spanish Golden age painting (Pup is compared
to Carreño’s truly grotesque portrait of a young girl called La Monstrua), or
the Cuban rumba (Gil and Iturralde, 1991, pp. 339–40). Pup, the dwarf,
might have a Hindu resonance as well. Vishnu became a dwarf to hide or
to trick the demon Bali (Doniger O’Flaherty, 1975, pp. 176–79). Vishnu also
expanded, growing to enormous, even cosmic proportions, again echoing
astronomical phenomena. Sarduy, like most Caribbean artists, when he is
not building on existing myths (radically reworking, dis- and refiguring
them), creates his own.
Despite Sarduy’s aversion to texts with univocal meaning, he constantly
interrogates sacred texts, be they from Afro-Cuban, Tibetan Buddhist,
Koranic-Sufi, or biblical traditions. His transgressive, erotic play with
words and his healthy irreverence could never make him an unquestioning
believer. Lourdes Gil narrates a telling incident, after Sarduy had finished
writing Cobra. He was on a boat in the sacred Ganges River and threw a
copy of Cobra into the river as an offering. The book came back to him.
Undeterred, he threw it back in. Again it returned. This happened several
times, but Cobra “would return like a child afraid to separate from its
father.” Finally, Sarduy found a stone, attached it to Cobra, tossed it in the
water, and it sank into the depths of the Ganges. Gil correctly points out
two important points: first, Sarduy was not intimidated by the first signs of
the book coming back. He kept insisting, which she interprets as a quintes-
sentially Cuban trait, that is, “to try and impose conditions on the gods,” to
rewrite the signs of divine interpretation (Gil, 1994, pp. 213–14). This is close
to the Afro-Cuban traditions, where the orishas are like a family: they bicker
and quarrel, they flirt and pray, they rely on divine intervention as well as
their own wits. Sarduy enters into the sacred but not as an act of surrender,
but one of revelation through rebellion.
Sarduy saw writing in all its corporeal dimensions (as a tattooing of the
body) and as an activity which escapes the (de)formation of the logos. It was
a dance of signs that echoed Nietzsche’s analogue of dancing and writing,
and not surprisingly From Cuba with a Song was translated into French as
Écrit en dansant. The author summed it up admirably in an interview: “The
writer is a material, situated subject and not an ‘inspired’ floating author. As
in the Tibetan mandalas, everything explodes from the genitals and goes
up to the hand. I write naked, and sometimes I dance around looking for
the words, looking for them until my body turns into a language and the
language on the page turns into a body, into something tangible, tactile,
156 TROPICS OF HISTORY
which dances and looks in turn” (Adams et al., 1974, p. 11). Cobra’s Tibetan
dance ends up in the snow-covered Himalayas, precisely where his next
novel, Maitreya, begins.
Maitreya is inscribed as a textual practice of Tantric philosophy, a radical
reappropriation of the Bardo Thodol, or the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Tantric
practices embrace both the sacred and the profane, enmeshing themselves
with the material world, almost grotesquely, as a means of spiritual enlight-
enment (West, 1994d, p. 115). Every act is carnal, shot through with desire,
but equally it is a powerful cosmic symbol that leads toward an abolition
of the world and the flesh, seeing these earthly manifestations as illusory
masquerades of misery. As Octavio Paz says: “For Tantrism the body is a
true double of the universe, which, in turn, is a manifestation of the
diamondlike, incorruptible body of the Buddha” (Paz, 1969, p. 81). The
Tantric subtle body is used as an instrument for meditation or concentra-
tion, gestures known as mudras. Sarduy writes with the body, scattering
signs, a mudra of mutations; these mudras inform or inflate the text with a
language of excess, both iridescent and precise, exemplifying one of
Barthes’s definitions of the pleasure of the text as being “that moment when
my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas
I do” (Barthes, 1975, p. 17). Sarduy, who often wrote without his clothes on,
believed in an erotics of reading and writing and practiced it to a degree
that borders on unhinged rapture, trying to inscribe the body of perfection
(the Buddha, nirvana) through his own words.
The Tantric tradition sees language as a verbal double of both the body
and the universe, and often it does not even take a whole word: a syllable
alone can become a mantra, a unit of sound that has great religious,
emotional, or magical impact. A mantra is not a concept but a nondiscur-
sive, sonorous fetish that makes the body vibrate and links it to the cosmos.
The bones of the deceased master at the beginning of the novel are like
mantras scattered to the wind, but instead of being a bridge between body
and cosmos, the bones initiate a long series of migrations and transforma-
tions because Maitreya is, above all, a novel about exile.
The exile is set off by an initial limit, death. The demise of the master in
the Tibetan monastery begins as a limit which will be transgressed. There
is a double reference to Lezama here, both as a person (he died while Sarduy
wrote the novel) and as literary catalyst and mentor in that Luis Leng (and
to a lesser extent Juan Izquierdo) are both characters from Paradiso. In
Lezama’s novel, however, they are minor: in Sarduy, Luis Leng, a Cuban
Chinese cook, is central, and even becomes a reincarnation of the Buddha.
And why not? Cooks have become presidents.
Exile can be seen as a limit imposed by revolution, and the novel sports
three major historical convulsions: the Chinese, the Cuban, and the Iranian.
The monks, after a crushed uprising, will flee Tibet and Chinese domina-
tion. The Leng sisters escape through India to Sri Lanka with the new child
SEVERO SARDUY 157
master, the Instructor. They’re joined later by their niece, Iluminada Leng,
who shacks up with El Dulce (Honey Boy). The couple takes a boat from
Colombo (Sri Lanka) to Cuba, where Luis Leng is born. Also born in Saguá
La Grande (a nucleus of the Chinese community in Cuba) are the female
twins La Divina and La Tremenda, of unknown parentage. They are likened
to the ibeyes of Santería (Sts. Cosmas and Damian in Catholicism), the
offspring of Oshún and Changó. They perform miracles and cure the sick
until their first period, when their powers disappear. They become opera
singers, but with the Cuban Revolution they flee to Miami with a dwarf
named Pedacito, who also paints murals. There the twins become fanatical
members of F.F.A., Fist Fuckers of America. When later they go to New York,
one of the twins falls in love with an Iranian chauffeur. They follow the
Iranian to his native land, where La Tremenda and Pedacito run a massage
parlor and S/M emporium. The last stages of the revolution of the mullahs
which would soon overthrow the Shah again causes them to flee, and the
novel ends with La Tremenda, after giving anal birth to a strange creature
with blue hair and webbed feet, starting a new cult in Afghanistan.
Even the physical attributes of characters are varied, Sarduy borrowing
heavily from painting: the monks in the monastery are surrounded by
Tibetan mandalas and gods depicted in Himalayan art; the Leng sisters are
like Kuhn-Weber puppets; the twins are right out of Botero; Pedacito
(modeled after Velázquez dwarfs) paints murals inspired by Wifredo Lam;
the descriptions of the Iranian episodes have the lush, dense details of
Persian miniatures. The loss and displacement of exile is compensated for
by a proliferation of images, new cultural icons and beliefs, succulent,
untried food, uncanny experiences that push limits to their breaking point.
Maitreya is a novel about exile and the dispersion of culture, language,
and belief systems, bereft of any idea of recuperating some kind of totality
or center with which to anchor one’s existence. Despite this, and the novel’s
ambiguous ending, it is not a despairing work. One is left with a sense of
expansion, of a flock of birds waiting to take flight.
Sarduy has taken the anecdote from Lezama and made it a novel, the
displacement of humans due to revolution as a springboard (transmigra-
tion as transformation), of fashioning beings into new selves; he has Tantric
eroticism, Sufi mysticism, and Santería ritual collide into a shimmering,
exploratory tapestry that focuses on the decentering of identity, culture,
time, and place.
It is a stretch to call the people in Sarduy’s fiction characters. Often we
have no physical sense of what they are like; in other instances they are
deformed, monstrous, fantastic, or hybrids. They often sprout doubles; they
vanish or die suddenly; they become transformed into other characters;
they change gender, name, and place in a flash. If Sarduy were an orthodox
believer, we could say that he concurs with Buddhist teachings that insist
on seeing human development as a series of mental states (toward corrup-
158 TROPICS OF HISTORY
pp. 272–73). It is curious that Sarduy ends the novel in Afghanistan, a sort
of gateway for the Middle East, Asia, and the furthest extensions of Europe.
A year after the novel was completed, the Soviets would invade (1979).
Again, as in many parts of the novel, East meets West, often with cata-
strophic and bloody consequences. Sarduy’s Maitreya is a relentless effort
to sift through the shards of Eastern mysticism and the ideological detritus
of the West. In the karmic tussling of his characters, and through a “prose
of intensities,” Sarduy refashions the void into a vibrant theater of signs.
Already sick with AIDS, close to the end, Sarduy wrote a series of twenty
poetic prose texts called “El estampido de la vacuidad” (The Crash of the
Void) in which he comments on St. John of the Cross. There is a quiet
transparency, of living in a divine light that’s not exempt from a feeling of
loss: “Defended, walled in by silence and solitude. Last hope: not poison
myself with remorse, desires for vengeance, anxiety about what’s left of life
or annihilation, recapitulations, or fear. Take the step forward without a
scenic stage, without pathos. In the most neutral way. Almost with calm”
(Sarduy, 1994a, p. 37). But a few paragraphs later he is in a much more
Buddhist frame of mind: “If there is no atman—being, self, individual,
soul—what can reincarnate after death? If there is no brahman—universal
soul, cosmic consciousness—what do we dissolve into? Once we make the
leap, how do we hear the crash of the void?” (Sarduy, 1994a, p. 38). Sarduy’s
mentor, Lezama, wrote his last poems in this kind of cross between Western
and Eastern mysticism. The last poem of his posthumous collection of
poetry (Fragmentos a su imán) is called “El pabellón del vacío” (The Pavilion
of the Void). Sarduy ends his meditations at home in a kind of domestic
peace or tranquility, with his library, reviewing his life, his exile, his paint-
ings, waiting for death with a quiet acceptance and beauty. You know he
wants to keep writing, but he knows that he is not Sheherezade: the game
is up. But in a way—and all throughout his work—the game was always
up, and many have pointed to his obsession with the mechanisms of writing
and death. Instead of despairing about that relationship, though, Sarduy
turned his obsession into a motive for celebration.
In one of his last poems, seven décimas called “Epitaphs,” Sarduy rhymes
tumba (tomb) with rumba (rumba) (Sarduy 1994b, p. 21). The poem contains
his baroque homoeroticism, the humor and lightness of expression that
make his words ripple and fly, the mystical void of St. John of the Cross and
Buddhism. In those mere ten lines, Sarduy brings together the three ele-
ments of the Koranic letter: the spoken form for the ear (rhyme and rumba),
the written/visual form for the eye, and the spiritual form, whose locus is
the heart. Close to death, as in life, Sarduy rendered the epiphany of the
body luminous, where the pleasure of the void meets the furious fire of the
world, echoing Lezama’s words that death “engenders us all anew.”
SEVEN
This book began by claiming that Cuba and its history are continuously
being imagined both inside and ouside the island, by its own people and
by others. James Hillman speaks of the link between eidola, the world of
image and soul, and the underworld of skia, or shadow. Cuba’s politicians
have imagined it as a sweatshop or as utopia, both equally abstract, shad-
owy. Cuba’s artists have conjured up a magical and ancestral historical
world: ideas, dreams, figurations, representations, recollection. This Orphic
vision is made of specters, too. We think of specters as nonexistent, imma-
terial, chimeric. But just like Wifredo Lam’s figures, landscapes, and totems,
they have a presence that is corporeal, fiery, emerging from earth: appari-
tions of substance, “fleshed out” if you will. Unlike the political imagina-
tion, obsessed with control, order, and exploitation, the artists’ historical
apparitions prepare their entry in unexpected ways, like props pushed out
at the wrong time. Sent off stage, they always come back. For Lezama, it
might be the imago taking root in history, spawning imaginary eras. In
Morejón, it is the stone with its aché. Sarduy’s apparitions are the demons
of history unleashed by transculturation. In the case of Virgilio Piñera, it is
all the serfs coming back to haunt the cozy comfort of the powerful. With
Carpentier, the ghost of utopia and social redemption returns like a shim-
mering lamp. For Dulce María Loynaz, it is the house of time, with its
intimate histories. While the returning specters of these six authors are by
no means exhaustive, hovering close by, as always, is José Martí, that
apotheosized figure of Cuban letters and history, and no doubt the spec-
ter/spectrum of Fernando Ortiz: transculturation with its full range of
164 TROPICS OF HISTORY
and the image it projects to the world. To the notions of a teleological course
in history they speak of plurality and difference, to the hope of greater
material wealth and technical progress they caution that this must be
accomplished soulfully. They do not hesitate to point out that the Cuban
development model is bankrupt. Instead of utopia it is heterotopia, and
when they hear words like transparency, rationality, and equality they react
a bit like Kundera, who warned that the only truly transparent society is a
police state.
If we were to adopt Lezama’s terminology, perhaps we can say that
modernity was (is) an imaginary era. Communism would be the attempt
to take modernity to its ultimate consequences, some would say to the point
of parody. Zygmunt Bauman has made this point with great eloquence and
insight:
The fall of communism was a resounding defeat for the project of total
order—an artificially designed, all-embracing arrangement of human actions
and their setting, one that follows the rules of reason instead of emerging from
diffuse and uncoordinated activities of human agents; it was also the downfall
of the grandiose dream of remaking nature—forcing it to yield ever more of
anything human satisfaction may require, while disregarding or neutralizing
such among its unplanned tendencies as could not be assigned any sensible
human benefit; it demonstrated as well the ultimate frustration of the ambi-
tions of global management, of replacing spontaneity with planning, of a
transparent, monitored, supervised and deliberately shaped order in which
nothing is left to chance and everything derives its meaning and raison d’être
from the vision of a harmonious totality. In short, the fall of communism
signalled the final retreat from the dreams and ambitions of modernity. . . .
With the fall of communism, the ghost of modernity has been exorcised.
(Bauman, 1992, pp. 178, 180)
These words point clearly to the Enlightenment dream gone amok. In many
ways capitalism embodies these same traits, but Western capitalism has
perhaps avoided the extremes of this vision by virtue of having some kind
of political democracy. However, in its third world variants, history has
offered an appalling array of examples that combine the need for control
and planning with environmental degradation, extreme inequalities of
wealth, lack of political freedom, poverty, sexism, and social violence. The
end of the so-called cold war has done little to ameliorate these deplorable
realities.
What are some of the images that characterize that “beautiful totality,”
as it was expressed in earlier and more innocent times? Bauman offers three
metaphors for the nature of the modern state pursuing this goal: (1) a
gardening state; (2) a therapeutic/surgical state; (3) a space-managing state
(ibid., p. 178). I would add two more: (4) a total visibility state; and (5) a
nontemporal state. The gardening state selects “useful plants” and “exter-
166 TROPICS OF HISTORY
minates the useless ones.” This garden metaphor (with perhaps a sly bow
to Voltaire’s Candide) has an agricultural as well as social dimension. De-
spite the goal of remaking nature, the social process is equated with natural
ones. Even today, in our highly technical societies, a supreme compliment
is to say that someone is natural. But just as in nature there are “bad weeds,”
so too in society. Communist experiments with nature as productive unit
have been miserable, and sometimes hilarious. Cuba has been no exception,
even if it has avoided the forced collectivization and famine that took the
lives of millions in the USSR of the 1930s. The “ten million ton harvest”
planned for 1970 failed and caused an enormous disruption of the economy.
Plans to surround Havana with a coffee belt were equally futile, and a plan
to plant trees by the shores to serve as a buffer against hurricanes led to the
severe erosion of the coastline. The cruel ironies of sugar monoculture are
still felt, so admirably summed up by a landowner and economist of the
1940s. The first said, “Without sugar there is no nation”; the second,
“Because of sugar there is no nation” (as cited in Pérez-Stable, 1993, p. 14).
These statements issue a double warning, aside from the obvious point of
the dangers of monoculture: that nature can not be remade to conform to
society, nor can nature be a norm for society. And perhaps a third: if a nation
is like a being, then it is not stable, fixed, and permanent but depends on
dialogue, event, consensus, and interpretation (Vattimo, 1992, p. 11).
In the “therapeutic/surgical model,” a very defined sense of what is
acceptable is established, and deviations from the norm are pathologized,
interpreted as a sickness or a disease. The citizens of a society are at best
viewed as patients who must be tutored by their doctors (the state, the
party) toward good health. As bourgeois society and capitalism are viewed
as a sickness, the population under socialism and eventually Communism
must transcend this ailment. Perhaps this explains socialism’s obsession
with athletic prowess, sports training, healthiness, and cleanliness. Under
(over?) this biological determinism, of course, is an ideological message.
Communism is capable of producing faster, higher-jumping, and better
physical specimens than its capitalist counterparts. Curiously, it seems to
mirror the productivist ethic of capitalism and its ever-growing prolifera-
tion of material goods. But as history showed, even though Communism
was quite successful in producing high-quality athletes, it was clearly
outmatched in the area of consumer goods. In both the remaking of nature
and the building of a “healthy” society, Cubans have rallied around centu-
ries-old calls to duty, heroism, and sacrifice which will be discussed more
in depth when we examine Cuba’s four codes of political discourse.
The space-managing state refers more to landscape and architecture, a
model of creating and distributing space that views territory as a wasteland
to be sculpted by a “unifying, homogenizing principle of harmony” (Bau-
man, 1992, p. 179). A Soviet book from the 1960s describes the NUS (New
Units of Settlement) in terms of grids featuring three complexes: the resi-
PARADIGMS LOST 167
status quo. In Cuba the political time moved fast in the 1960s, but clearly it
has slowed down. This is not only due to an institutionalization of the
revolution, but to the general orientation of socialist societies: they are
always geared toward the utopian future. As a result, they are impatient
with the present and undervalue the past. They compensate in a voluntarist
fury by pressing harder for the future, the upshot being that they freeze
time. This is reinforced by a scientific ideology, a blind faith in progress, a
thirst for destiny and a one-party state. E. R. Cioran reminds us of the words
of Seneca: “The life of the insane is sad, agitated, because it’s always
oriented toward the future.” Communist history carries some of that same
madness, as in the Cuban Communist Party’s slogan for its First Congress
(1975) which stated, “Human beings die; only the Party is eternal.”
As contradictory as it seems, nothing illustrates this better than the
communist mausoleums of their great leaders: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi
Minh, Kim Il Sung. Despite visual proof of mortality, it is as if the leader’s
dead body were the embodiment of the Party’s eternal power. The social
body, the body of doctrine, the collective body of the Party must never be
allowed to decay, become “corrupt.” The mausoleum itself seems to indi-
cate its triumph over nature: its immobility, its “sacred” dimension be-
speaks perfection. In these images all the models we have spoken of come
together: nature, architecture/space, medical-therapeutic, visibility, and
time. The “beautiful sickness” of revolution has become the “beautiful
totality” of utopia in the form of a dead body, the corpse of paradigms lost.
In their intense questioning of established truths, Cubans are critically
redefining many terms: nation, history, class, cubanía (Cubanness), race, and
the relationship between art and politics. On the issue of cubanía, one of the
tenets of the Cuban Revolution is being either discarded or substantially
revised: that one must be on the island to preserve one’s Cubanness. By
extension, this tenet apparently holds true for Cuban art (and its artists),
which is one of the most unfortunate and myopic consequences of the
Cuban Revolution, as well as being historically ungrounded. Some of the
greatest examples of Cuban art were created in exile: José María Heredia
(1803–39), José Martí (1853–95), and the composer Ignacio Cervantes (1847–
1905) are some of the prime examples in the nineteenth century. In the
twentieth, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, Lydia Cabrera, Reinaldo Are-
nas, and Severo Sarduy are among the best-known examples, not to men-
tion a series of Cuban-American artists who have flourished in exile, for
example, Cristina García, Elías Miguel Muñoz, José Kozer, and Dolores
Prida. At the crudest level, for example, this tenet concerning cubanía meant
that if an anthology of Cuban literature was being edited, and a writer had
left the island and was anywhere from indifferent to hostile to the revolu-
tion, s/he was not included in the book. After 1960, writers like Guillermo
Cabrera Infante, Lino Novás Calvo, Lydia Cabrera, Enrique Labrador Ruiz,
and Gastón Baquero would not be selected. After 1980 the list grew longer:
PARADIGMS LOST 169
Heberto Padilla, Reinaldo Arenas, Antonio Benítez Rojo, José Triana, Jesús
Díaz and many more. In the last few years, since 1989 and 1990, some
attempts have been made at discussing and even publishing authors who
had left the island, such as Lydia Cabrera, Jorge Mañach, and Lino Novás
Calvo. But it is still far from being enough: Cabrera Infante and Arenas are
still considered taboo. Sarduy is viewed more favorably, although it is
doubtful that his work will be published in Cuba any time soon. And even
more troubling is the state of the Cuban economy and the cost of imported
books, which makes it extremely difficult for Cubans to purchase books
unless produced locally.
Likewise, Cubans who fled the island adopted an equally defensive
attitude to the utopian vision of Communism, which they defined as merely
tyrannical. Some retreated into nostalgia, clinging to a pre-1959 Cuban
society and culture, which they viewed as authentic and as now being
destroyed by an atheistic and communist revolution. Others simply tried
to fit in wherever they went, and left their cubanía if not behind, at least on
hold. But many Cubans who came of age in exile in other countries viewed
things differently. Cubans in the United States, for example, began to
question their identity and culture vis-à-vis an Anglo culture with which
they were familiar but which somehow did not satisfy a lingering sense of
longing for knowledge of the island. This generation, growing up away
from the island, yet saturated with its parents’ mythic nostalgia and unre-
mitting political rage, also began exploring why Cuba went through a
revolution, a questioning aided by the context of the 1960s and the Vietnam
War. They felt cut off from their Cuban heritage and experienced that
separation as a terrible loss, both personally and politically. No doubt this
was reinforced by the fact that from 1959 to 1977 no Cuban who had left the
island had returned. Some Cuban writers and artists did go back to Cuba,
seeking to build bridges, people such as Lourdes Casal and Ana Mendieta,
or members of the Antonio Maceo Brigade (AMB). However courageous
and welcomed these efforts were, they were still initiatives by individuals,
except for the brigade. The AMB did require, however, a high degree of
identification with the Cuban Revolution, even if it was critical of individ-
ual Cuban governmental policies. All of these efforts, both individual and
organizational, were subject to the whims of the Cuban and U.S. govern-
ments. If relations were strained, it was almost impossible to travel to the
island.
A more recent effort to build bridges between Cuban artists, intellectuals,
writers, historians, and thinkers bore some fruit, in a double issue of the
Michigan Quarterly Review (MQR, summer and fall 1994 issues, reprinted in
book form in 1995). For the first time since the revolution, a Cuban writers’
publication included a roughly even breakdown: half the contributors were
in exile, the other half from the island. This is not meant to belittle previous
efforts, as in the case of Edmundo Desnoes’s Los dispositivos de la flor (1981).
170 TROPICS OF HISTORY
In this second number, we extend the notion of the bridge beyond the
relationship between Cuba and its post-revolutionary diaspora. In my intro-
duction to the first number, I was only able to allude to the way syncretism,
transculturation, and diaspora are deeply embedded in the Cuban sense of
identity. Here the complex hybridness of Cuban culture is explored in greater
depth and in a variety of exciting and original bridgings. Rather than starting
from the assumption of Cubanness as a given, the aim is to unpack the layers
of meaning which are crammed into that bulging suitcase. (Behar, 1994b, pp.
639–40)
narratives we can dispose of, like truth, metaphysics, and religion. But it is
not quite so simple. Are small, poor, underdeveloped countries and their
nationalistic impulses always to be criticized because of what we see
happening in Bosnia or the recent war between Iran and Iraq? Cuban
nationalism, even given its excesses, has never showed itself as chauvinistic,
or with imperial or expansionist pretentions. Far more significant is to see
how that nationalism has been embedded within a political logic that has
shown remarkable consistency.
Nelson Valdés has incisively commented on recurring themes of Cuban
political discourse, which have dominated social thought on the island for
at least the last two centuries. He speaks of four codes: (1) the generational;
(2) morality and idealism as a lever of conduct; (3) betrayal and treason as
an ever-present danger; and (4) the duty-death imperative (sacrifice and
martyrdom). The generational code speaks to youth as renovator/innova-
tor of society, taking over from the older generation, whose ideas have
become stagnant, corrupt, or decadent, this latter word being laden with
heavy ideological baggage. But to speak of youth as “regenerating” society
is to use biological metaphors, a common enough ocurrence. It also draws
on family metaphors, and this convergence of society and family equally
conjures up the analogy of leadership of a generation (equals head of
family) with the usual paternalistic connotations. The underlying assump-
tion of generational metaphors, despite the differences and conflict to which
they allude, is that we are a big happy family, one preferably headed by a
stern father. Cuban patriarchal mores have continued throughout the revo-
lutionary period (some would say they have been exacerbated) and are
echoed by the following comment by Raúl Castro, head of the armed forces,
when referring to his brother: “Fidel is our father, and father of the Revolu-
tion.” In this context, the word affiliation takes on enormous (if not ominous)
resonance. To become affiliated with the revolution (the Party, Marxism) is
a filial relationship, to history and to the ruler. To affiliate is to be a member
of a group, to trace an origin. This corporeal identity (biologistic, if you will)
evokes the body politic, which is headed by a person who is the literal
embodiment of power. This literality is closely intertwined with the visibil-
ity, transparency, and power mentioned earlier. There is nothing new in this,
as it goes back to Christian theology, as well as medieval political theory
about kings and their power (Ernst Kantorowicz’s the king’s “two bodies”:
individual and collective, mortal and immortal, worldly and divine). What
is perhaps novel in modernity is how this concept has been recycled in
twentieth-century autocratic and totalitarian regimes, using the mass me-
dia and other manipulative though noncoercive systems of persuasion to
project and display a visibility of that body that is not only ubiquitous, but
all-powerful. (And, of course, when persuasion fails there are more coercive
ways to enforce this visibility.) It literally occupies not only a real social
space, but an imaginary social space which can only be described as mythic
172 TROPICS OF HISTORY
which the revolutionary sun casts no shadow where treasonous doubt can
hide. Newer voices, however, are suggesting that this kind of family is
dysfunctional at best, if not pernicious for the political health of a nation.
Valdés’s other two themes can be summed up under the notion of
heroism (morality-voluntarism and duty-death). I have often suggested
that the time for heroes in Cuban history is over and have evoked that wily
old Communist Bertolt Brecht himself, in his play Galileo, who when
hearing the lament that sad is the country without heroes, retorts, “Sad is
the country that needs heroes.” I am not alone in voicing this opinion: Coco
Fusco, Nena Torres, Ruth Behar, and others of our generation in exile have
also expressed themselves in a similar vein. (I am not saying that Cubans
cannot perform “heroic” deeds; but from that to “being a hero” is a large
step, one as far as going from history to myth.) However, no one has
expressed the danger of the hero with the devastating eloquence of Elías
Miguel Muñoz in his poem “Los vaticinios” (Prophecies):
Muñoz’s poem, with its savage humor, goes to the heart of what was
previously mentioned about socialism’s madness of always living in the
future. He debunks the utopian vision which promises all the excitement
but says nothing of “the silences, /the betrayals.” But the poem does much
more than that, creatively riding the line between ideology and utopia,
showing how they feed on each other. If ideology is the gap that must be
filled between the claims that a society makes and the beliefs of its citizens,
PARADIGMS LOST 175
essay “Women’s Time,” speaks about a concept of nation that now seems
to be outdated, one characterized by economic homogeneity, historical
tradition, and linguistic unity. All of these criteria have been opened up by
economic interdependence as well as a symbolic complexity in terms of
tradition and language. In Cuba’s case the economic interdependence has
always had an element of dependence on colonial or foreign powers (Spain,
the United States, the USSR). Cuba’s linguistic unity is changing with its
diasporic culture that is also writing, thinking, and expressing itself in
English. It is no longer acceptable, if it ever was, to assume that the work
of Cristina García, Oscar Hijuelos, Robert G. Fernández, Elías Miguel
Muñoz, or Carmelita Tropicana is any less Cuban by being in English. The
historical tradition is also being pluralized, made more inclusive by those
who have not previously spoken or have been completely marginalized
(women, gays, war veterans, Afro-Cubans).
Kristeva also speaks of temporality in terms of gender, with linear,
progressive time, defined by productivity and obsessiveness with conquer-
ing and power, as male-oriented. She evokes Nietzsche’s distinction be-
tween cursive (linear) and monumental time, which transcends national
boundaries, linking up with a wider temporal dimension akin to Lezama’s
imaginary eras. Monumental time is either cyclical or biologistic, and some
feminists have tried to draw a positive source of strength from this kind of
time without turning women into a kind of archetype, devoid of historicity.
Too often, Cuban history, its national symbols, its goals, have been defined
in cursive time, as an airtight tradition or as prophecy. Some of the chapters
of this book have been dedicated to exploring a historicized version of this
monumental time, particularly the ones on Nancy Morejón and Dulce
María Loynaz (and to a lesser extent Lezama and Sarduy). Will this “new
time” (women’s and beyond) speak of jouissance, create and describe new
forms of power, propose a new way of valuing intersubjectivity, move away
from models of domination and mastery, view human development as a
dialectic of autonomy and mutuality? Possibly, and some of the writers in
this book either directly or indirectly suggest these possibilities for an
imagined Cuban future.
In the chapter on Morejón I spoke of the manigua, the Taíno word
referring to a place with dense vegetation, consisting of shrubs, bushes, and
lianas. The manigua is a landscape where there was a “natural profusion of
confusion,” a locus of escape from oppression and a new spot from which
to begin a life of freedom. If we compare it to the colonial model of the
square with a plaza and its important buildings (symbolically and politi-
cally), perhaps the manigua will seem chaotic. But it is not; instead it is a
more flexible place than the plaza, one that must be both respected as it is,
but also shaped for its new purposes of freedom. It is a signifying space as
well, which, if indicative of monumental time, does not need everlasting
monuments. Ultimately, it is a manigua of meaning, where the goals, iden-
PARADIGMS LOST 177
with which they weave time. They are the daughters of Erda, goddess of
wisdom and the earth, and represent the past, the present, and the future.
They surround the Yggdrasil, the World Ash Tree, quite withered. From the
tree a fountain streamed forth, that of wisdom. They yearn for a lost
harmony, brought about by Wotan’s actions. In order to obtain wisdom he
gave up the use of one eye. In addition, Wotan took a piece of the tree to
make a spear on which he inscribed the laws and from which he derived
the power to rule. But that caused the tree to lose its power and dry up the
fountain of wisdom. As the Norns try to wrap the chord or rope around the
rocks, it snaps or breaks. Finally, in despair, they return to Erda and sink
into the earth. A Jungian interpretation will, of course, point out that
Wotan’s ignorance of the earth’s wisdom is also a repression of the feminine,
of his anima, and ultimately a destructive act. This is borne out by the
opera’s end where Wotan and Valhalla perish in flames, as the sacrificial act
for a new beginning.
It would be tempting and perhaps too easy to read a literal meaning of
this ending of the Ring Cycle into current Cuban history. Instead, in the
spirit of Fernando Ortiz, and seeking in the dying tree from the Old World
the inventiveness of the New, I would instead offer the following counter-
point: there is a knowledge, a subjectivity, and a history embedded in
Cuba’s official history that is being explored and has not fully blossomed—
that of women, of gays and lesbians, war veterans, and Afro-Cubans. That
knowledge is very close to the poetics described by Gaston Bachelard in the
epigraph at the beginning of this book: “We are never real historians, but
always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression
of poetry that was lost.” It also derives from our understanding of air,
water, and earth as a constant, renewable source of knowledge (a manigua).
Consider Bachelard’s words on roots and trees:
As a dynamic image, the roots assume the most diverse powers. It is both a
sustaining force and a terebrant force. At the border of two worlds, the air
and the earth, the image of the root is animated paradoxically in two direc-
tions, depending on whether we dream of a root bearing to heaven the juices
of the earth, or of a root going to work among the dead, for the dead. . . . A
root is always a discovery. . . . The tree is everywhere at once. The old root—in
the imagination there are no young roots—will produce a new flower. The
imagination is a tree. It has the integrative virtues of a tree. It is root and
boughs. It lives between earth and sky. It lives in the earth and in the wind.
The imagined tree becomes imperceptibly the cosmological tree, the tree
which epitomizes a universe, which makes a universe. (Bachelard, 1987, pp.
84, 85)
This description of the tree and its analogy to the imagination has a
suggestive correspondence with the ceiba tree in Cuba, another New World
symbol with ancient configurations. The ceiba is considered sacred by
PARADIGMS LOST 179
whites, blacks, santeros (or not), as well as the Chinese. Humans are not
supposed to cut the tree down without making the proper offerings. The
ceiba is so sturdy that neither lightning nor hurricanes are capable of
destroying it (Cabrera, 1992, p. 149). It is sacred in the Afro-Cuban tradition
of Santería, being both a life force and containing the souls of the dead as
well. It is known as the Mother Ceiba and referred to as the tree of the Virgin
Mary. Lezama refers to it in La expresión americana, along with the ombú tree
as a historical tree.
In rewriting Wagner’s scene for three Antillean Norns born in Cuba, we
can invoke Yemayá, Oshún, and Oyá, the three great female orishas of
Santería, who rule over the Cuban psyche: Yemayá, who gave birth to the
river, the orishas, and all that lives; Oshún, Yemayá’s sister, orisha of love,
celebration, sensuality; and Oyá, impetuous and sometimes violent, who
rules over lightning, the winds and storms, as well as cemeteries. She helped
Changó escape from jail and often accompanied him in battle. These three
orishas guard the ceiba tree and make not only the dead speak, but the living
as well. Like the three Norns who thread time and its roads, they invoke
Elegguá.
Maybe the three Norns—but much more so Yemayá, Oshún, and Oyá—
seem to come together in Carmelita Tropicana’s performance piece Milk of
Amnesia, which is a kind of ongoing conversation with Cuban history’s
dead and living spirits as she painfully reconstructs the memories shattered
by exile. She crosses genders and borders in a kind of exorcism which is
always mixed with Cuban choteo (poking fun) par excellence, as if to
exemplify Gianni Vattimo’s idea of freedom “as a continual oscillation
between belonging and disorientation.” This is hilariously evoked in two
different episodes, one in which she becomes a horse during colonial times,
another when she turns into a pig during the current “Special Period.” As
if turning Lezama’s “animistic (and animalistic?) counterpoint” inside out,
Carmelita’s memory trances evoke the pain of the “syntax of forgetting,”
but with enormous humor and compassion. The horse complains of having
the hairs of his tail used to make shirts, but these humiliations are small
compared to the genocide of the indigenous population that he has wit-
nessed. The pig remembers having a family photograph taken with a
baseball cap on, an innocent foretaste of his ultimate fate as a lechón asado,
or a roast pork sandwich. At one point Carmelita shadowboxes with a
strung-up pig figure, a rich metaphor for the demons and passions of
history that always seem to elude our grasp.
Carmelita’s oscillation between belonging and disorientation is transla-
tion in overdrive, as if to say, “there are no facts, only interpretations.” She
seems constantly to question from where she speaks: here, there, nowhere,
from women’s time, queer time? Perhaps she is a figura under the shade of
a ceiba tree, traversing the manigua of meaning, knowing that more than a
journey, or a path, it is a bridge to the past that must be constantly
180 TROPICS OF HISTORY
reinvented, so that history will not be “the most dangerous product evolved
from the chemistry of the intellect.” If the path or the bridge is to speak to
the future (or in the future), it must embrace tropes that fashion the act of
tolerance “that creates the imaginative province where no one owns the
truth and everyone has the right to be understood.”
CODA
separated families, cold war rigidities from both sides of the Florida straits,
and a sense of loss aggravated by so many missed opportunities. As
tempting as it was to forget, it was an impossible task for any considerable
stretch of time. Cuba’s presence is overwhelming: the island will not let you
forget. I would not go so far as to describe myself as being tattooed by
history, like Cuban poet and fiction writer Rolando Sanchez-Mejías, but at
the same time Cuba has exerted a pull that is dangerously close to being an
obsession.
In the previous chapter I analyzed a poem by Elías Miguel Muñoz,
“Prophecies,” from his book No fue posible el sol (It Wasn’t Possible to Have
the Sun). There is an affinity between Muñoz’s poem and a recent text I
wrote about Cuban music. Written for a Cuban magazine published in
Madrid while I was in the midst of preparing this manuscript, it offers a
deconstruction of the hero in the spirit of Sarduy’s notion of transcultura-
tion as cross-dressing. The translation is a free one, trying to echo some of
the wordplay found in the original Spanish.
The conclusion of the poem evokes an image that is both an ending and
a beginning, a recurring theme in the book, one that suggests the sly and
unpredictable movements of history. It encourages a reworking of
Bachelard’s phrase as follows: we are never real poets but always near
historians, and both our wonder and our despair are an expression of
history (and poetry) that reemerge, like the shifting border of light and
shadow, embroidering the abyss. If Cuba’s history echoes an Orphic dis-
memberment, our tropes make us more whole; poetry is a re-membering,
affording us the numinous and difficult serenity of the manigua. From the
manigua, trope and nature, philosophy and history sing their memory and
image. Like a great ceiba tree, it outwits and outlasts the unheeding and
forgetful night.
APPENDIX
were all found hanging, with their women and children, fifty households
of the same village.”
Goldfields and mines were exhausted quickly in Cuba, which paralleled
the decimation of the indigenous population, which by 1519 was at 19,000,
then down to 7,000 by 1531. After that, the encomiendas were dedicated to
animal husbandry and sugarcane production, introduced into Cuba from
the Canary Islands in 1515. By the 1550s, most of the Taíno population had
been wiped out (only 3,000 were left), paving the way for the introduction
of a greater number of slaves brought from Africa. (Black slaves had already
been brought to the island, but even as late as 1650 were only one out of
every six inhabitants.)
The Taíno legacy, however, was important to the future societies of the
Caribbean. Many foods that were unknown to the colonialists are still part
of the Cuban diet: yucca, yautía, sweet potato (batata), guanábana, mamey,
and peanuts (maní). Maize and tobacco, though originally from other
Mesoamerican cultures, were introduced via the Antillean islands to
Europe. Canoes (also a Taíno word), bohíos (the thatched huts where people
lived) and hammocks (hamaca) were elements of Taíno society that persisted
for centuries (or still do). Many Taíno names are still used for names of cities,
towns, and rivers: Maisí, Baracoa, Canimar, El Caney, Mayabeque, Ariguan-
abo, Camagüey. The Spanish language has more than three hundred words
that are of Arawak origin: canoa (canoe), cacique (chief), caimán (crocodile),
manigua (bush), tiburón (shark), huracán (hurricane), tabaco (tobacco), and
caoba (mahogany).
Cuba’s importance dwindled when more gold was found elsewhere.
Because of its strategic location, Cuba benefited indirectly by being the
point from which all expeditions set out for Mexico and Central or South
America. By and large, it was a population that was transient, but slowly
the population and the economy grew. Sugar, as in most of the Caribbean,
was an important crop, but Cuba could not compete with Saint Domingue
(Haiti), by far the world’s leading producer. In fact, economic activity was
centered on cattle raising and tobacco, which, because of its high price,
prompted many small farmers to produce greater quantities, often selling
it illegally. The concept of illegal sales must be understood in the context of
Spanish economic policy: it was illegal for colonists to trade with people
who were not members of the Spanish crown. Spain’s rivals—mostly
France, England, and Holland—also attacked its ships and looted them. The
pirating and competition were intense and led to the English taking over
Havana in 1762 for ten months. Although the British left, the aftermath was
economic liberalization and a substantial growth in Cuban production and
trade.
What kind of society was Cuba as a Spanish colony? If conceived as a
pyramid, the top would be occupied by the colonial administrators and
officers, followed by the clergy and the military, comprising the most
190 APPENDIX: CUBAN HISTORY
were brought there after 1791. From 1512 to 1763, 60,000 slaves were
brought into Cuba, but between 1790 and 1864, the figures are staggering:
the estimates vary between 650,000 and 832,000. Slaves and free nonwhites
made up half the population of Cuba. Both Spain and the creole elite were
alarmed at this, and Madrid encouraged European immigration to
“whiten” the Cuban population mix. Many Spaniards fleeing newly inde-
pendent Latin American countries wound up in Cuba. Naturally, they
favored continued colonial rule. (As black slave figures began to decline,
Cuba imported Chinese indentured servants, which from 1847 to 1874
totaled nearly 125,000. By 1959, the Chinese population of Cuba was
estimated to be between 17,000 and 20,000.)
The independence forces grew under the aegis of excellent spokespeople
like José Antonio Saco (1779–1855), José de la Luz y Caballero (1800–1862),
and Félix Varela (1787–1853), all intellectuals, philosophers, and educators.
But it was a new generation of Cubans born in the nineteenth century who
were to provide the leadership of a more solid independence and revolu-
tionary movement: Carlos Manuel de Céspedes (1819–74), Antonio Maceo
(1845–96), Ignacio Agramonte (1842–73), and Máximo Gómez (1840–1905),
who was Dominican. By far the most brilliant was José Martí (1853–1895),
an extraordinary writer, poet, and journalist, an inspiring orator and a
tireless advocate for the Cuban independence cause.
In 1868, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes and others led the “Grito de Yara.”
Céspedes freed his slaves, proclaimed Cuban independence, and with his
co-conspirators drew up a constitution several months later known as La
Constitución de Guáimaro (April 10, 1869). This first great independence
war was called La Guerra de los Diez Años (The Ten Years War), lasting
from 1868 to 1878. It was a long, bloody conflict, costing hundreds of
thousands of lives and millions in property damage, and severely crippling
the productive capacity of the country. It left a festering wound in the island
between pro-independence and pro-Spain forces, between the rich and the
poor, and also between blacks and whites. For Spain, Cuba was one of two
colonial outposts left in Latin America (Puerto Rico was the other). Though
it had declined from its imperial glory of the sixteenth century, for Spain,
Cuba was still considered a prized possession whose prestige far out-
weighed its economic importance. One important positive outcome of the
war was that slavery was finally abolished in 1886.
José Martí was too young to have been a major player in the 1868
uprising, though as it wore on, he played a role in exile, first in Spain, then
in Latin America. Finally, in New York, where he spent many years (1881–
95), he campaigned, fundraised, and rallied Cubans toward independence.
Along with Gómez, Maceo, and Calixto García, Martí initiated a new
struggle for independence in 1895. Though Martí was killed early on (May
1895), the struggle continued and was quite successful, despite a further
setback with the death of Maceo in 1896. Overall, the war continued to favor
192 APPENDIX: CUBAN HISTORY
the Cuban patriots, but again it looked like a protracted struggle. This
changed abruptly when, in 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine was blown up
in Havana harbor. The United States blamed the Spanish, who denied
responsibility, but by April 1898 both countries had declared war on each
other, and the United States intervened militarily, defeating the Spanish in
a few months.
Cuban freedom fighters had waged three wars in thirty years. They
wanted a country politically and economically free of Spain; they had fought
for the abolition of slavery and had given blood to forge a nation in which
they could live in peace without the intervention of foreign powers. Martí
had warned his compatriots that Cuban independence was not only threat-
ened by the Spanish but by the designs of U.S. expansionism. His political
acumen in seeing future developments was borne out by subsequent events.
The United States ruled Cuba directly from 1898 to 1902 with a military
government. Though Cuba achieved formal independence as of May 20,
1902, the Platt Amendment, passed by the U.S. Congress, gave the United
States the right to intervene in Cuba whenever it thought its interests were
in peril. Furthermore, the United States also leased a military base in the
eastern part of the island, known today as the Guantánamo Naval Base; it
is still under U.S. control. These issues are a humiliating reminder to Cubans
of U.S. control over their affairs.
The Platt Amendment was abrogated in 1934 after dictator Machado was
overthrown. From 1902 to 1959 the Cuban political system had been rela-
tively democratic, plagued with periods of tight control (1929–33 and
1952–59). Despite a progressive constitution in 1940, most civilian govern-
ments had been marked by corruption, inefficiency, and nepotism, under-
girded by dramatic social and economic injustice. One of the key figures in
this period was a sergeant who later became General, Fulgencio Batista. For
a quarter of a century (1934–59) he dominated Cuban politics either directly
or behind the scenes. He was president from 1940 to 1944, and in this first
period was esteemed to be an apt and respected leader. He then withdrew
from public office but was always a significant player behind the scenes. As
subsequent governments (1944–52) proved inept, Batista stepped in again.
Seeing that his appointed candidate would lose the 1952 elections, he
engineered a coup d’état. For the first few months, not much changed, but
then his regime grew more repressive, often killing its political opponents.
Some disgruntled sectors of society felt that Cuba would not change paci-
fically. Among them was a young lawyer, Fidel Castro. On July 26, 1953,
Castro and about 150 followers attacked the Moncada Barracks in Santiago,
Cuba, hoping to establish a base for resistance and ultimately spark an
uprising in the general population. It failed, with many killed or jailed.
Castro was among the imprisoned, and in his defense speech, over two
hours long, he laid out the ills that beset Cuban society. The speech, called
“History Will Absolve Me,” spoke of “el tiempo muerto” (dead time), the
APPENDIX: CUBAN HISTORY 193
six months of the year when cane workers are unemployed, the 5 percent
of the rural population that eats meat, the lack of proper sanitary conditions
(running water, health care), the large numbers of Cubans who cannot read
or write (about 25 percent). Castro eloquently bemoaned the dismal expec-
tations of a one-crop country (sugar constituting 85 percent of exports)
dependent on one country, the United States. He denounced the vast social
and racial inequalities in the country, stated that they needed to be ad-
dressed, and that there was a need for political democracy. Though his
speech was a sensation, Castro was jailed, only to be released by an amnesty
in 1955. By the following year, from Mexico, he and 82 followers launched
an invasion by boat, landing in Oriente province. They began a guerrilla
struggle against the Batista government, under the banner of the July 26th
Movement. Their popularity grew, and in a little over two years they
defeated the Batista dictatorship. They were also favored by a pro-demo-
cratic climate in the western hemisphere that was rejecting military dicta-
torships like that of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic (1930–61), Pérez
Jiménez (1953–58) in Venezuela, Rojas Pinilla (1953–57) in Colombia, and
Alfredo Stroessner (1954–) in Paraguay.
Cuba in the 1950s, despite being a poor, underdeveloped nation, was
among the more prosperous of Latin American countries. It had a fairly
evolved industrial base, a more than adequate road system, excellent
communications, and a growing, if erratic, economy. Why would this
relative prosperity lead to a revolution? Part of this is explained by what
Castro referred to in his “History Will Absolve Me” speech. The economy
was growing, but there was high unemployment; the political system, with
censorship, repression, and corruption, had made the Batista regime ex-
tremely unpopular. Social inequality between classes was great, and this
generated expectations and resentment among the poor. And Cubans, a
very nationalistic people, saw major sectors of their society in U.S. hands
(including Batista himself), not to mention a tourist industry viewed as an
American playground. More critical voices denounced the vices of tourism
more emphatically and called Cuba “the whorehouse of the Caribbean.”
Cubans’ frustrated nationalism, so admirably expressed by Martí, was
given eloquent form in the leadership of Fidel Castro, whose oratorical
skills border on genius. Castro was able to gather the support of all major
sectors of society to overthrew the Batista tyranny. Most Cubans welcomed
the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, with the hope of establishing the
Constitution of 1940, a pluralistic, liberal document. Little did they know
that the storm of history would soon turn their world inside out, with
greater force than any hurricane.
and from October 16 to 28, 1962, the world lived on the brink of a possible
nuclear showdown between the United States and the USSR over Cuba.
Khrushchev, the Soviet president, backed down after strong pressure from
President John F. Kennedy and withdrew the missiles, despite the angry
protestations of Fidel Castro. In exchange for the withdrawal of the missiles
from Cuba, the United States agreed never to attack Cuba militarily and to
remove missiles on Turkish soil aimed at the Soviet Union.
Despite the peaceful resolution of the crisis, relations between the United
States and Cuba grew worse. In 1964 the Organization of American States
(OAS) requested that all its members sever economic and diplomatic ties
with Cuba; all did so except Mexico. Cuba responded angrily, claiming that
U.S. pressure was behind the move, and called the OAS the “United States
Ministry of Colonies.” Part of it had to do with Cuba’s support for Latin
American guerrilla movements, many of which were later to become part
of OSPAAL, an organization dedicated to the solidarity of peoples in
liberation struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. OSPAAL was
founded in January 1966 in Havana. By then, Che Guevara, Fidel’s right-
hand man and premier guerrilla warfare strategist, was fighting in the
mountains of Bolivia, where he had gone to establish a continental base that
could fan the flames of revolution throughout South America. Guerrilla
movements were active in Guatemala, Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia, as well
as several African countries (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea, South Africa),
and, of course, the war in Vietnam was escalating daily. All of these
liberation movements were opposed by the U.S. government, who saw
Cuban support, if in many cases only moral and/or political, as major
contributors to “subversion and communist infiltration.”
A “revolutionary offensive” launched by Castro in 1968 nationalized
some 55,000 small businesses in Cuba. Except for some private farmers
(around 20 percent of rural landowners), all economic activity in Cuba was
placed in state hands. In fact, it was part of an ideological hardening that
began in 1965 with the creation of the UMAP (Units to Assist Military
Production). The UMAP was originally set up to imprison armed counter-
revolutionaries who had taken up arms against Castro in the Escambray
mountains from 1962 to 1966. But by early 1966 those anti-Castro forces had
either surrendered or been killed. The UMAP became political internment
camps with harsh conditions. Rapidly the ranks of the UMAP swelled with
dissidents of all kinds, be they political opponents, homosexuals, young
people with long hair, or others whose behavior was considered “anti-so-
cial.” The UMAP were closed down in 1967 (some claim 1969) as a result of
an alleged visit by Castro himself, who found the conditions deplorable and
inhumane. Despite their closure, the Cuban system still had ways to punish
political dissidence, either through incarceration or closely supervised hard
labor (mostly cutting cane).
196 APPENDIX: CUBAN HISTORY
lation. Many third world students from Africa and Latin America were
studying at Cuban schools, and many Cuban professionals and medical
personnel were serving abroad. Cuba was also buoyed by the Sandinista
triumph in Nicaragua (1979) and the New Jewel Movement in Grenada
(1979), both becoming close allies. The Cubans reciprocated by helping out
the Sandinistas and the Grenadians in terms of education, health care and
the training of their respective armies.
But not all was well. By 1986 a rectification campaign was instituted to
try and curb waste, excess bureaucracy, and corruption, all too familiar evils
in a centrally planned economy. The year 1989 turned out to be crucial. That
summer Cubans were to witness the trials of several high-ranking Cuban
officials and military personnel on charges of corruption and drug smug-
gling. Among them was General Arnaldo Ochoa, a popular figure and
brilliant military strategist who had won major battles in Angola. He had
won the highest titles: Hero of the Cuban Republic and the Máximo Gómez
Order, First Degree. Ochoa was found guilty not only of these charges but
also of treason and was executed by firing squad. It was a sad moment and
one that shocked many Cubans, because as implicated as he was in some
charges, everyone knew that Ochoa was breaking the law with the knowl-
edge and consent of higher-ups. They knew Ochoa was a scapegoat, and
this further undermined people’s credibility in the government.
But more trouble was to follow: in the fall of 1989 several communist
governments fell in Eastern Europe (East Germany, Poland, Hungary,
Czechoslovakia, and Rumania). Soon afterwards, in February 1990, Cuba’s
principal friend in Latin America, the Sandinistas, were defeated in elec-
tions.
The loss of socialist bloc support was disastrous. Cuba conducted 90
percent of its trade with COMECON countries. The loss was soon felt in the
Cuban economy; shortages were more frequent, and many products and
medicines simply vanished from Cuban shelves. Even the Soviet Union
started to draw back on its commitments to Cuba, and after the failed coup
in 1991, and with the subsequent presidency of Boris Yeltsin, Russian
largesse has ended. The magnitude of Soviet aid had allowed Cuba to
achieve what few poor third world countries could even dream of. Cuba
had an economic system with virtually no unemployment, whereas most
underdeveloped countries have from 20 percent to 60 percent of their
populations without work. They had built an educational system that was
comprehensive and had eradicated illiteracy. The health system was not
only free to all but preventative and able to deal with even sophisticated
medical problems; it was widely praised by the World Health Organization.
Cuba even exported doctors to Africa. The Cuban sports system was also
very effective and achieved international renown. Politically, Cuba was a
player on the world stage, being active in the nonaligned movement, by its
198 APPENDIX: CUBAN HISTORY
be done, since the Cuban economy has probably contracted by at least half
in the last five years. Deals and joint ventures with many European, Latin
American, and Japanese firms are a hopeful sign. The economic future of
the country is clearly going toward market measures while still trying to
retain the social gains of the revolution. This juggling act has had mixed
success, perhaps because little real change has ocurred in the political realm.
When the communist governments of Eastern Europe fell in 1989, many
predicted Cuba would soon follow. Yet eight years later, Fidel Castro is still
in power, defying all odds. Cuba’s political future remains uncertain as it
continues in the grip of a cold war mentality, abetted by U.S. hostility (and
recalcitrant sectors of the Cuban exile community) on the one side and
Cuban intransigence and dogmatism on the other.
SELECTED READING
Cuban History—General
Abel and Torrents, eds. (1986). José Martí, Revolutionary Democrat. Duke University
Press: Durham, N.C.
Aguilar, Luis E. (1974). Cuba 1933: Prologue to Revolution. W. W. Norton: New York.
Bonachea and San Martín (1973). The Cuban Insurrection: 1952–1959 . Rutgers Uni-
versity Press: New Brunswick, N.J.
Farber, Samuel (1976). Revolution and Reaction in Cuba, 1933–1960 . Wesleyan Uni-
versity Press: Middletown, Conn.
Foner, Philip (1972). The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American
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