Persona Non Grata: A Memoir of Disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution (Nation Books) [Paperback]

Jorge Edwards (Author), Octavio Paz (Preface)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 31, 2004 | Series: Nation Books

In 1970 Jorge Edwards was sent by socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende as his country’s first envoy to break the diplomatic blockade that had sealed Cuba for over a decade. His arrival coincided with the turning point of the revolution, when Castro began to repress the very intellectuals he once courted. In Kafkaesque detail, Edwards records the four explosive months he spent in Havana trying to open a Chilean embassy and his disenchantment with the revolution. His stay culminated in the arrest of his friend Heberto Padilla—the first imprisonment of a well-known writer by the regime—for giving Edwards a “negative view of the revolution.” In a menacing midnight political debate with Edwards immediately after Padilla’s arrest, Castro argued that in this phase of the revolution, bourgeois writers would no longer have “anything to do in Cuba.” Castro accused Edwards of “conduct hostile to the revolution” and declared him “persona non grata.” The winner of the Cervantes prize—the Spanish language equivalent to the Nobel Prize for literature—Jorge Edwards' memoir splendidly recounts this time and the wrath of Castro.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A splendidly written, extraordinary book."

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Nation Books (March 31, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560256079
• ISBN-13: 978-1560256076
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,797,369 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, September 30, 2006

By 

Andrew Cooke (santiago, chile) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Persona Non Grata: A Memoir of Disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution (Nation Books) (Paperback)

This is a fascinating book.

First, it's a long, honest (brutally honest) look at the Cuban state by a "bourgeois liberal intellectual" (I'm using "liberal" in the English sense - with connotations of free speech, free trade, and social justice - perhaps "reform liberalism" is a better term in the USA?); a point of view pretty close to my own (and, I would guess, many westerners these days who consider themselves synpathetic to "the left"). So the author is sympathetic to the revolutionary ideals, but can also see, quite clearly, what Castro cannot.

Second, it explores the tension that arises when an attempt to achieve those ideals is opposed - the spiral of control and resistance, secret police and "traitors". It's pretty common to forgive Cuba because "they've had to withstand so much" (particularly the American embargo); this book makes a good case that by the early 1970s Castro had already overdrawn this moral account.

Third, it indirectly sheds light on Chile's own democratic revolution, under Allende. To what extent Allende failed through being too open, and whether any other approach would have been worthwhile, is a constant subtext.

Finally, it was interesting to see how diplomacy "works" at a basic day-to-day level.

[I should add I read the Chilean/Spanish 2006 edition - it has a few extra details (mainly footnotes) added, apparently, but nothing very significant.]

4 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The facts are fascinating alright, the author is quite another thing, August 7, 2008

By 

Quilmiense (USA/Spain) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Persona Non Grata: A Memoir of Disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution (Nation Books) (Paperback)

Although a denunciation of Castro's dictatorship in Cuba, during the author's 4 months as a Chilean diplomat in havana in 1970, he reveals the haughtiness and lack of compassion towards people not as 'intellectual' as him.

The book must me considered a well-intentioned exercise of narcissism. Verbosity, conceit, and arrogant outpouring of self-adulatory writing. I couldn't stand it and put the book away almost half-way through. If only the reader didn't have to fish the interesting bits of information from this sea of conceit...

The obscene thing about it is the nonchalant tone, the care-free attitude of intellectual superiority with which he carries on in the island while thousands of poor Cubans he ignores were starving, sentenced to hard-labor, executed by firing-squads or tortured in nazi-like concentration camps. All this while he was being regaled lavishly by the the nomenklatura.

Thanks for your help, anyway, mister Edwards. I couldn't finish your book but I guess it moved a few strings up there, in the abode where the elistist class of self-called intellectuals and diplomats hang around.

I, nevertheless, will hang out with real men like Valladares ('Against All Hope') and Jorge Masetti ('In the Pirate's Den').