North American Books I Read as a Child in Castro’s Cuba
By José Manuel Prieto
In the spring of 2007, I was invited to a dinner organized by The
Paris Review in
honor of Norman Mailer. The novelist had just published what would be his last
novel, The Castle in the Forest, and
would have a conversation with E. L. Doctorow. That evening, when Mailer
entered the room, with his very distinctive mien—that of a rather solid and
stout man who, because of his age, used two canes—I was deeply moved. I told
him—what else do you say in those circumstances?—how much I admired his books
and that I started reading them when I was very young, many years ago.
A few days later I told a friend about this experience. “But, how?” he
acted surprised, “Did you read Norman Mailer in Cuba?” And added, “Wasn’t he
supposed to be one of the banned North American authors on the island?”
My friend had imagined, perhaps for a good reason, that you couldn’t
find American literature in Cuba, that it was banned because both countries
were at more or less declared war, an openly proclaimed enmity. I patiently
explained to him that nothing like this ever happened. Mailer’s books and those
of many other North American authors were not censured in Cuba; in fact, they
were widely sold. You could find them in every library; they could be read by
everyone.
However, his comment did make me reflect on the impact of our neighbor’s
literature in Cuba. It made me think about how these books got past censorship
and political fate, and it caused me to recall an intellectual itinerary, to
take a brief inventory of the North American books I read as a child in
Castro’s Cuba—and to consider how greatly that literature influenced my
literary education. I’m talking about authors like Ernest Hemingway, William
Faulkner, J. D. Salinger, Carson McCullers, William Saroyan, Sherwood Anderson,
James Fenimore Cooper, Thornton Wilder, and many others: an endless list. These
books demonstrated to me—and demonstrate to me today—the way literature can
permeate borders and, above all, perforate the wall of hostility.
William Faulkner
I was a child during the Vietnam War, when the newspapers were covered
with the most damaging anti-American caricatures. The U.S. was blamed for every
calamity, for everything that happened to the country: every death, every
natural catastrophe. America was a heartless place, where people took drugs,
violence had reach unprecedented levels, and racism dominated everything.
That’s what you would find on the radio and television every day.
And if you didn’t listen to the radio or watch television, you might
participate in study groups, which were organized to analyze the Maximum
Leader’s latest speeches. These study groups were one of those public interventions
that lasted for hours and hours, accusing the U.S. of the most treacherous
aggressions—provoking the masses and agitating the imperialist aggressor’s
puppet.
But what I want to call your attention to—what still surprises me
today—is that all of that didn’t end up deeply indoctrinating me. It didn’t end
up shaping my opinion of the outside world and of the United States in
particular. It’s not that it didn’t have an effect, because of course it did,
and my vision was tinged for years by the most common stereotypes; but it
didn’t end up ruining everything for me.
I attribute my salvation to books. It could have been a book by Henry
James that I surreptitiously read while the Communist youth leader
monotonically spelled out a speech that we had all heard only a couple of weeks
before. The Political Commissar’s speech couldn’t have differed more from the
elegance I found, for example, in a story like Daisy
Miller by
James. That book captivated me. I fell in love with its extraordinary heroine
to the extent that many years later, I titled one of my first short stories,
written in Russia, “Daisy,” a name we also have in Cuba.
Henry James
In my opinion, it’s obvious that the people in charge of publishing
policies during the first years of the Cuban Revolution had a humanistic focus;
it wasn’t very ideological. I think they considered major works by American
authors books that should be part of the intellectual training of any educated
person. And I don’t think that any library was purged of North American books.
That wasn’t what happened, for example, at my school library, and I attended
the famous Lenin school, where the nomenklatura sent their children.
Although it may sound paradoxical, my passion for literature, and
particularly for North American literature, was cultivated by state-run
publishing houses. They favored literature about social matters; priority was
given to authors who in some way complemented the work of the Cuban Ministry of
Truth or to books that denounced, in a sophisticated way, the Big Neighbor to the
north. As a result, there were always North American titles among the books my
mother—a big reader herself—would buy for us every week. One week it might be In
Cold Blood by Truman Capote, which must have been published to show
the climate of unstoppable crime that existed in the U.S. The next week it
might be Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers, a book
with no explicit criticism (I don’t think) and that I thought was full of
mystery, and still do. Then she might bring home An
American Tragedy by
Theodore Dreiser, which was published to show the ugly side of capitalism. It
was easy to find They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?by
Horace McCoy, or The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. I still
clearly recall an image from The Jungle that made me tremble as a young boy:
There are giant cooking pots into which some always tired workers throws the
entrails of the animals killed in the Chicago slaughterhouses, and one day one
of them stumbles, trips, and falls in. But they leave him in there, because
capital’s miserable logic impedes them from throwing out all that meat. Then,
in a Chicago diner, a customer bites into something hard with his molars. He
takes it out and examines it in the light. It turns out to be a button from the
cooked worker!
Other books that sold well were the ones that talked about the
exploitation of blacks in the U.S. I read them with particular interest. For
example, I read Black Boy by Richard Wright when I was
very young, and it painted segregation in the South in a tremendously vivid
way. I can still clearly remember entire passages from the book and the names
of many characters: Shorty, Richard’s fat, cynical friend who let people pat
his behind for coins; Mr. Falk, the Irishman who let Richard use his library
card to check out books that a young black boy couldn’t; the compassionate Mrs.
Ross and her daughter, Bess, who helped little Richard so much.
I also read the “socialist” novel Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell. I read the
U.S.A. trilogy by John Dos Passos and his Manhattan Transfer. I read Winesburg,
Ohio by
Sherwood Anderson. I read Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway, of course.
Hemingway was the epitome of the good North American writer: a lover of Cuba
(fondly portrayed by him, we were told, in The Old Man and the Sea) and
an author committed to the Spanish Republic (For
Whom the Bell Tolls). In Cuba he was worshiped.
I read a lot of William Faulkner. I particularly remember an afternoon
in which I should have been with my father, on one of his doctor’s visits, but
instead stayed in the car and read. I was reading an ugly edition of As
I Lay Dying from the
state-run publishing house and, toward the end, when the family is carrying the
mother’s body and must ford the overflowing river, I experienced a total
acoustic immersion, a kind of sonorous hallucination: I could hear the wind’s
roar, the water hitting the wheel hubs, the rustle of the tree branches. When
my father finally tapped on the little window of the car to let me know that he
was back, I had the impression that everything had gone completely silent
because the book had stopped happening.
Ironic as it may seem, the books that were censored most were books that
were light and cheap. Bestsellers, pulp fiction: in other words, books that
could be a source of entertainment. As a result, it became a status symbol to
have one of these books, even when it was something as insipid as Airport by Arthur Hailey. The children
of Cuban secretaries and diplomats went around with those books in my school
because they were exactly the types of books that the Cuban secretaries and
diplomats would buy on their trips abroad. I managed to read almost all the
best sellers of the time: Jaws by Peter Benchley, The
Odessa File by
Frederick Forsyth, and the most ingenuous, Papillon by Henri Charrière.
Alas, this early liberalism regarding culture in Cuba, from which I
benefited as a reader during my childhood and adolescence, has today yielded to
greater inflexibility, to a more dogmatic focus that doesn’t allow for such
intellectual flirtations. Cuban readers’ vision of North American literature
today is, to be very optimistic, from the seventies. In other words, it’s
thirty years behind. In Cuba, nothing has been published by Don DeLillo, Thomas
Pynchon, or (I believe) Toni Morrison. Important aspects of life in the U.S.
have thus been largely ignored: in particular, the enormous ethnic diversity of
the U.S., the rise of minority authors that has characterized the American
literary scene in the last decades, and the gay revolution.
However, if my history of the American books I read as I child in
Castro’s Cuba explains anything, it’s the power of literature to undo any
stereotype, to annul even the most terrible accusatory campaigns and
propagandistic platforms. Literature does more for the rapprochement of nations
than thousands of well-intentioned speeches.
For me, literature was an antidote to propaganda—one that helped me gain
a more human idea of the country presented as our main enemy, as always spying
on us and ready to invade us. What image did I have, after all of these books,
of Americans? They were obsessed in Faulkner, candidly provincial in Lewis,
neurotic and scrawny in Salinger, brutally alone in Carver. A population—how to
put it?—of humans, perfectly ordinary.
José Manuel Prieto is a New York–based novelist and translator. His
latest novel, Rex, was published by Grove. He teaches literature at
Seton Hall University.
Translated by Regina Galasso.
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