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3.0 out of 5 stars
One of the Better Anthologies of Cuban Writing, February 14, 2010
This review is from: Cubanisimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature (Paperback)
This book was published in 2002 and contained 31 works by 25 Cuban or Cuban-American writers. There were 9 poems, 8 short stories, 7 excerpts from novels, 3 excerpts from essays, 1 speech, and 1 excerpt each from a diary, biography and autobiography. This was the most diverse selection of types of writing among the recent anthologies on Cuba I've seen. Of all the writers in the collection, seven were women.
The works ranged from the 1880s to the 2000s. The coverage was mainly from the 1940s onward, with works for each decade through the 2000s. There was comparatively little for the 1970s and 80s, though. A third of the works covered the 1990s and after.
For the late 19th century, there was José Martí. For writing published between the 1920s and the 1959 revolution, there were pieces by Nicholás Guillén, the poet Dulce María Loynaz, Alejo Carpentier, Fernando Ortiz, Virgilio Piñera, Lydia Cabrera, Lino Novás-Calvo and Calvert Casey. The last two of these authors later left Cuba.
For writing published following emigration from Cuba -- so far as could be determined -- there were works between the 1960s and 90s by veteran writers Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Heberto Padilla, Severo Sarduy, Reinaldo Arenas, Antonio Benítez Rojo, Lourdes Casal and María Elena Cruz Varela.
For work published between the 1960s and the 90s by writers who were based in Cuba at the time, there were pieces by Miguel Barnet, the poet Nancy Morejón, José Lezama Lima and Zoé Valdés. This last writer later emigrated. Compared to other collections, this one contained relatively few writers remaining in post-1959 Cuba.
There were also works by Cuban-American authors who were either born in the United States or Puerto Rico or went there early on, before starting their careers: Ernesto Mestre-Reed, Rafael Campo, Ana Menéndez and Gustavo Pérez-Firmat. Their pieces were written originally in English and published in the 1990s and 2000s. An additional writer, José Manuel Prieto, who left Cuba for Russia decades ago and now lives in the West, was represented by something from the 1990s translated from Spanish.
For the period before 1959, the work most enjoyed was Casey's early tale "The Walk," about a boy's awkward initiation into the adult world. Other interesting choices were an excerpt from the diary kept by Martí during the war for independence from Spain, a 1940 essay by Ortiz contrasting the characteristics of tobacco and sugar, and Carpentier's prologue to his 1949 novel The Kingdom of This World that defined the "marvelous real."
Among the writing published after emigration, most enjoyed were an excerpt from Cabrera Infante's 1967 novel Three Trapped Tigers, containing energy and wordplay that made me understand finally why the novel's so well regarded. And a gripping excerpt from Before Night Falls (1993) by Arenas, about the writer's attempt to flee the country.
For pieces by authors based in Cuba, there was an excerpt from Barnet's 1966 oral history-based biography of a former slave. Among the Cuban-Americans, the standout for this reader was "In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd" by Menéndez, which followed the thoughts and acts of an émigré playing dominos in Miami, with much humor and sadness. There was also a mostly humorous essay by Pérez-Firmat on language and cultural differences between Cuba and the US.
Among the other things in the collection were a murky tale of the supernatural from the 1940s by Lydia Cabrera, a chapter from Lezama Lima's 1966 erotic novel Paradiso, which has been called a masterwork that greatly influenced writers in the region, but seemed merely infantile, and Sarduy's 1967 campy experimental novel From Cuba with a Song. A few of the other selections were also unintelligible, overlong and/or eluded me.
Among the Cuban writers not in the collection: before 1959, Alfonso Hernández Catá, Luis Felipe Rodríguez and Carlos Montenegro. After 1959, among those who remained in Cuba, Onelio Jorge Cardoso, María Elena Llana, Marilyn Bobes, Senel Paz, Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Angel Santiesteban Prats, Anna Lidía Vega Serova and the poet Cintio Vitier. After 1959, before or after emigration, Luis Aguilar León, Edmundo Desnoes, Ana María Simo, Norberto Fuentes and Carlos Victoria. And among Cuban-Americans, Pablo Medina, Achy Obejas, Cristina García herself and Richard Blanco.
Other collections of Cuban lit include
Cuba: A Traveler's Literary Companion (2002) -- balanced in that it covers some writers in Cuba, émigrés, and foreign-born Cuban-Americans, and maybe best as an introduction.
The Voice of the Turtle: An Anthology of Cuban Stories (1997) -- like Cubanísimo!, it's balanced, goes further back in time and is very worthwhile for further exploration.
Dream with No Name: Contemporary Fiction from Cuba (1999) -- a collection mainly of writers who've remained in Cuba, many of whom were published in the 1990s, but less of an introduction to the range of Cuban writers abroad.
Writers in the New Cuba: An Anthology (1967) -- worthwhile to get an idea of work being done in Cuba in the early to mid-1960s, before the sidelining of writing that didn't support official aims.
Cuba on the Edge: Short Stories from the Island (2007) -- hard to find.
Each book contains some authors the others don't have, and for those interested in Cuban writing all should be worth reading.
Cubana: Contemporary Fiction by Cuban Women (1998) is a translation of Pillars of Salt, an anthology published in Cuba in 1996 and the first collection of Cuban fiction by women. Another work, the Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature, Vol. 2 (1977), contains nine Cuban writers, including Carpentier, Cabrera Infante, Sarduy and Arenas as well as Lezama Lima and other poets.
Excerpts:
"Because of the dramatic singularity of the events, because of the fantastic bearing of the characters who met . . . in the magical crossroads of [Haiti], everything seems marvelous in a story it would have been impossible to set in Europe and which is as real, in any case, as any exemplary event yet set down for the edification of students in school manuals. But what is the history of all the Americas but a chronicle of the [marvelous real]?"
"In the deep darkness now, in darkness fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty fathoms under the edge of light swimming in darkness, in the lower depths, wet kissing, wet all over, wet in the dark and wet, forgotten . . . oblivious to ourselves, bodiless except for mouths and tongues and teeth reflected in a wet mirror, two mouths and two tongues and four rows of teeth and gums occasionally, lost in saliva of kisses, silent now . . . not noticing, tongues skin-diving in mouths, our lips swollen, kissing humidly each other, kissing, kissing before countdown and after blast-off, in orbit, man, out of this world, lost. Suddenly we were leaving the cabaret. It was then that I saw her for the first time."
"During the entire trip my mother tried to persuade me to give myself up; she said it would be best for me. She was telling me that one of her neighbors who had been sentenced to thirty years had been released after only ten, and now was free and walked by her house every day, singing. I could not see myself singing in front of my mother's house after ten years in jail; this was not really a promising future."
"He remembered holding his daughters days after their birth, thinking how fragile and vulnerable lay his bond to the future. For weeks, he carried them on pillows, like jeweled china. Then, the blank spaces of his life lay before him. Now he stood with the gulf at his back, their ribbony youth aflutter in the past. And what had he salvaged from the years? Already, he was forgetting Rosa's face, the precise shade of her eyes."
"As Ricky got older, his English didn't get any better, but his Spanish kept getting worse."
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