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Anais Nin: The Voyage Within

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The Cuban political soul is both fractured and brilliant, but above all sensual. Looking at present day the militant anti-communism of the Cuban exile community, it is hard to imagine but it is true that this comes, in part, from the illuminating experience of a failed romance with the far left.

Anaïs Nin (Angela Anais Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell 1903-1977) whose father and mother both had Cuban roots can be taken to represent an important vein of the political-sexual tension of the Island. One aspect of Spanish rule was Catholicism, and the cruelties of that metropolis in the Cuban wars of independence led many away from religion to explore the far left. Of course for the young the attraction of left was sexual freedom. This took too many innocents to flirt with the far left and receive deception, disillusionment and disaster.

My Catholic roots were in Ireland through my father and thus I had no problem with the Catholic Church; and found the communists distasteful; and was at peace with the idea that Spain was the eternal enemy of my family. Believing strongly then that the wages of sin were eternal damnation I stayed away what ever the temptation.

Thus I listened in silence when my step-father Enrique Sanz mentioned a trip he had made in his youth to visit Leon Trotsky in Mexico. When I arrived in the U.S. in 1962, he asked me to defend his friend the non-communist Marxist Luis Simón to the FBI I did as he asked, but the reluctance in my tone must have tipped the investigators off.

Strangely there is no hate like that of a lover spurned and these leftwing militants often became the most aggressive enemies of Castro and the communists and the feeling was mutual. Both Sandalio Junco and Eusebio Mujal former Trotskyites became strong anti-communists. Junco was murdered in 1942 when Batista was an elected president, apparently as "part of a deliberate campaign to of the Communists to liquidate Auténtico labor leaders." Spaniard Andrés Nin, also a Troskyite, the mentor of Junco, was "disappeared" by the communists in Civil War Spain.

The violent splintering of the extreme left was a matter of faith and heresy generating great hate among the various factions. For instance, Anaïs wrote: " At a cocktail party at the home of Dr. Hass of UCLA, I again ran into an editor of Partisan Review. The magazine became hostile to me years ago when I answered truthfully that I was not a relative of Andrés Nin the anarchist and their hero. There are many Nins in Barcelona. They thought I repudiated him because he was a Trotsky man. Ridiculous, I was against Franco. Andres Nin was a hero. ... "

Ever amorous, ever emotional Anaïs Nin also wrote: "...Taxicabs pass by, full of people singing, with red flags. What tightness and anger I feel, blindly against them. Blind, unreasoning. The instinct has made a choice. I hate the workman. I hate the collectivity. I hate the masses and I hate revolutions. Love of beauty has carried me here ... But my whole being is set against it all ... "


Thus, Cuba --like Anaïs Nin--did not love communism. Castro could never have reached power if he had admitted before hand that he was a communist.

(a fragment from a manuscript draft "Love and War in Cuba"