Customer Reviews

Telex from Cuba: A Novel

5 star:		(60)
4 star:		(48)
3 star:		(21)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Rachel Kushner has written a great book that will be up for all the book awards at the end of the year. She has recreated the Cuba of the 1950's, an American outpost run by the Big Business, riped for the revolution of Fidel Castro. Seen mainly through the eyes of American ex-pats who are oblivious to the 'Cuba for Cubans" theme, the writing is lush and descriptive with a cast of memorable characters : the Castro brothers, a Nazi, a stripper, an American family falling apart, and the Cuban People. The author has done her research on the poverty, the customs, the era of the 1950's. "Telex From Cuba" has a feel of "Casablanca" crossed with "To Kill a Mockingbird."

I have absolutely loved my journey through this book. I thought I would not find another book about Cuba to be as brilliant as Carlos Erie's Waiting for Snow in Havana and Eduardo Santiago's Tomorrow They Will Kiss. But this one, although maybe not as brilliantly written, is a wonderful read. I read a review in The New York Times that suggested maybe Ms. Kushner was not necessarily always factual with her history of Cuba. That is something I certainly would not know having lived most of my life in the North where there is, on the whole, little interest in Cuban history. But for years I have lived in Key West and now Miami Beach--and I have grown very interested in Cuba, its history, and most especially the "take" on Cuba from those who write about it now. I lived in the fifties--in the North--so I related well to some of the characters from the United States who find themselves cast in a human drama of a large company owned and operated by a company in the United States. The characters--fictional and non-fictional--seem so real to me. What a great way to learn about Cuban history--the Revolution!

This book was okay. Not bad, not great. Some of the writing was excellent -- especially the descriptions of the characters and the towns in which they lived. I could see it all so clearly. On the downside: the book went in and out of different time periods, different places and was told from the perspective of different characters. All of this made for a confusing read. Half of the pages are devoted to revolutionaries and people working in the 'underground' -- these pages were frustrating to me. There was so much innuendo that half the time I didn't know what the author was referring to. I'm guessing others would have the same issue unless they're familiar with the history/politics of Cuba, Haiti, rebel movements, etc. It took too long for this story line to connect to the other story line (the expatriates living in Cuba). Halfway through, i found myself skimming whole paragraphs. I wouldn't discourage anyone from reading it, but, it did not live up to my expectations.

I'm right in the middle of the book. I've got
Cuban roots and experiences, so the title
caught my attention. What a great read. The author
has a wonderful touch, mixing vivid characters,
textured social and political history, and
engaging narrative flow. I'm enthalled;
I'm experiencing literary art.

Telex from Cuba is an engrossing novel of the years leading up to Castro's revolution, told from the point of view of the American children. But it's different from so many of the other books written on this topic because this story is not so much about the "bigger picture" of politics and revolution but the little and hitherto untold story of the children who grew up in Cuba on American plantations. Their parents had come (as K.C. puts it at the end) "to take" from Cuba and from the Cubans but the children who were sometimes born in and grew up in Cuba were different. For they learned to love the land and the people. More even than their own families sometimes.

As a result of this unique perspective, the first thing you notice are the colors--the red of the nickel plant, of the fire and the sunset; the green and the blue of the sea; the promised ivory of the night-blooming cereus Willy planted underneath Everly's bedroom window (an act of a lover). And then the colors of the skin. Black and pink for the Haitians like Willy--Black skin and pink hands; shades of brown for the Cubans (the lighter, the less noticeable the brown the higher the social status), white for the Americans in their exclusive club from which the not-quite-white enough Cuban President was blacklisted; white for the French Nazi.

And because of this unique perspective (a child's perspective), the characters are always evolving. There's Mr. Blousse who (at first glance) seems a breath of fresh air because the color of the skin does not seem to matter to him at least. Else why would he have an Haitian wife and Black daughters? But then we learn (from Willy the Haitian boy Mr. Blousse had bought) that the daughters and the wife were like slaves in that house. As was Willy himself. Until he ran away. There's K.C.'s father who seems so proper, so devoted, so brave when we first meet him. Except that he beats a pig to death in their backyard and makes K.C watch; except that he (intentionally?) displays his mistress to his family at Christmas while telling the mistress about how much he loves his family. There are the Allains who come to Cuba under the cloud of murder (of a White federal agent we later learn although the gossip in the American colony is that Hatch had murdered a Black man in Louisiana--no big deal, they say) and who, in some ways, turn out to be the most decent of the lot. If decency can be measured by who exploits Cubans least. So many more stories. Each of them an individual thread; each thread woven seamlessly into this colorful tapestry of a novel.

And so you have a tale of contradictions: rich colors and color-blindness; terrible cruelty and awe-inspiring love; cynicism and naivete all against the backdrop of the cruelty of the American plantations which was followed by the cruelty of the revolution. But maybe it's this very contradiction that underscores the shared humanity of everyone. Maybe that's what makes this seem a magical story about an all-too-real place.

I recommend it.

This is a book that carried me along as I was reading, but with a rather unsatisfying ending. The book starts with the big scene, the burning of the United Fruit sugarcane fields, and then goes backward in time to set up who the people involved are and what they are doing. The characters whose lives the novel most closely follows are the children of American managers in Cuba, K.C. Stites and Everly Lederer. (It's very odd that Kushner gives almost all the children in the novel asexual names-- not really very characteristic of the 1950s). K.C., despite being the only one to narrate in the first-person, stays at some distance from the reader; it is his brother, who joins the rebels, who is by far the more interesting character, but spends most of the novel offstage). Eventually, as K.C. grow from a child through his teenage years, he decides that he's interested in the other main character, Everly, although without any real passion. Everly is portrayed as an aloof, rather intellectual child, and in turn, as she grows up becomes romantically interested in yet another character, although again nothing really happens. For all of the dramatic action of the novel-- bombs, kidnappings, rebellion, fields and towns in flames-- it's odd how little the characters seem to be affected.
Interspersed with the story of the children are the stories of a relatively large cast of secondary characters. Most of these are the American community in Cuba, although Kushner spends a bit of time following the lives of a cabaret dancer, Rachel K. (apparently a historical character in Cuba at the time), and the French weapons merchant and agitator La Mazière, who joins the revolution as an outside advisor. Their stories are only peripherally related to the main thread of the novel, as they develop a romantic connection that is intimately entangled with conspiracies involving both the rebels and Cuban leaders. La Mazière's machinations, and Rachel K.'s professional assignations, serve as a window into the politics of the revolution, something to which the main characters are completely, and perhaps deliberately, oblivious. La Mazière is a wonderfully amoral character, a prime driver of the revolution who is contemptuous of the people he works with, and who is both uninterested in the end result and uncaring about which side he works for.
The novel is at its best when it brings the environment of pre-revolution Cuba to life, mostly portraying the lives of the expatriate Americans, but also sometimes elucidating the lives of the Cubans who they brush against in their day to day activities.
Eventually--as was inevitable from the beginning--the Americans are pulled out of Cuba, all the characters go off in separate ways, and none of the characters see each other again. Ongoing plot threads are for the most part cut off without resolution (although the novel does incorporate a brief epilogue from K.C.'s point of view, where we get a brief summary of the offstage lives of many the characters after they left Cuba, and one from Everly's perspective, the only one of the characters to return to Cuba, long after the revolution.)

In "Telex from Cuba" author Kuchner has emulated Hollywood's notorious reputation for distorting history in order to entertain.
The book is historically innacurate, but I couldn't put it down.
Highly recommended as a fanciful read.

Signed:

Andrew J. Rodriguez
Award-winning author: "Adios, Havana," a Memoir

Rachel Kushner's first novel, TELEX FROM CUBA, is about the second time that Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar ruled Cuba directly. In the 1930s, as military chief, he had pulled the strings of his puppet, President Ramon Grau. From 1940 to 1944 he was an elected President. Eight years later, rather than face certain defeat as one of three candidates in a scheduled election for President, Batista seized power in March 1952. Running unopposed, he was later elected. He resigned his office January 1, 1958, having been forced to flee abroad by armed rebel Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz. The novel roves back and forth mainly between 1952 and early 1959.

Not long after Batista seized the Presidency, young lawyer Fidel Castro filed a protest with Cuba's Urgency Court. That court ruled that "Revolution is the source of law" (p. 123).

In this otherwise very promising novel there is a confusion of narrators: a God-like anonymous one plus two American children. There are so many American children and their parents living in American enclaves in eastern Cuba that a list of characters (not provided) is close to indispensable.

In an undated interview presented at http://www.powells.com/ink/rachelkushner.html, author Rachel Kushner lists her sources for TELEX FROM CUBA: books, ideas, her father's having worked in one of the two enclaves described in TELEX FROM CUBA, various films and documentaries and the life of real French aristocrat Christian de La Mazière, who had joined the German Waffen SS in 1944. There is no evidence presented that in real life Maziere ever worked in or visited Cuba.

As others have noted, too much diverse material in this novel works against unity of plot. La Maziere and his exotic girl friend Rachel K. anchor one end of the tale in Batista's Havana -- along with the themes of arms smuggling and international intrigue. Meanwhile the American children narrators and their socially second-rate parents tug the reader 600 miles east to a second anchorage: Nipe Bay and the luxurious life of American expatriates running a sugar plantation and a nickel mine from their twin towns of Preston and Nicaro. Oriente Province and its mountains eventually become the locale of the invading Castro brothers, Fidel and Raul. As soon as they can, to show how fair they are, the brothers burn the sugar cane plantation of their father, about 15 miles from the American enclaves.

Ms Kushner was fascinated, as she tells us in the interview flagged above, by the notion of fictionally transplanting Maziere to Cuba. Once that is done, she unifies her plot by having him arrange weapons for both Batista and the Castro brothers. He also spends months in the mountains of Oriente Province shaping up Castro's laid-back Cuban rebels. The author applies an imagination (vivid albeit feeling no obligation to be factual) in more texts than one. A blatant example: Fidel Castro is portrayed as bisexual and more or less carnally assaults the Frenchman in the latter's tent. A Frenchman, be it recalled, who in real life never visited Cuba.

TELEX FROM CUBA has justly propelled its talented, well read author to the notice of a wide reading public. Previously Ms Kushner was known in important but limited publishing and art circles. Her first novel shows enormous promise as both historical novelist and novelist of manners. While some of her characters are two-dimensional and eminently forgettable, yet there are exceptions, such as Christian de la Maziere -- as memorable as IVANHOE's amoral Knight Templar, Brian de Bois-Guilbert. Maziere would not have quarreled with the court's pro-Batista decision that "Revolution is the source of law." Indeed in his thoughts the French aristocrat, invoking Saint-John Perse and his treatment of Xenophon's ANABASIS, makes disciplined violence a thing of beauty. Even before Xenophon, Heraclitus had asserted that "war is the father of everything" and to Maziere, 20th Century Cubans and mercenary allies prove him right.

I, for one, look forward to a FOUR STAR or higher second novel by Rachel Kushner, a very talented writer, still growing into mature self-discipline. -OOO-

I often finish a novel in a span of 2-4 days, and I particularly enjoy those set outside the U.S. (i.e. The Kite Runner, Snow Flower) and those covering an historic period (Prisoner of Tehran, The Interpreter). I've even been able to muddle through prosaic memoirs focused more on political events than juicy character plots, such as Lipstick Jihad.

So it is with great dissapointment that i finally give up on this book, more than halfway through, after attempting to read it for several weeks. The book jumps from narrator to narrator with the loosest connection between the families whose stories are being told. While the voice of the initial protagonist was indeed captivating, I have struggled through a few chapters with characters I simply could not relate to. Furthermore, the lack of linear direction or storyline means that there is nothing pulling me back to this book at the end of the day.

Nor is the chronology of the revolutionaries told in any cohesive way. They seem thrown in randomly in various chapters, in a disjointed fashion that leaves me more confused about these important figures than I was when I began reading this book.

I really do hate to leave a book unfinished, and I have a strong threshhold for dry history woven into tales, so I don't think my experience is that of someone who merely should not have chosen this particular tome. I don't know why my own experience was so different than others who have read this. Perhaps those with a working knowledge of the history of Cuba before reading had more luck than those of us seeking to learn from it.

It's an actual pleasure when an exceptional novel emerges from the morass of juvenilia which we have seen from publishers in recent years. "Telex from Cuba" is a retrospective of elitist American life in Cuba, chiefly in the ten years or so prior to Fidel Castro's ultimate rise to power in 1959.

You realize that you're reading a truly great book when, as you approach the conclusion, you wish the book wasn't ending so soon. Such is the case with Rachel Kushner's outstanding work in this instance. Kushner, fairly young to have produced a text of this maturity, faced a bulwark of difficulties when she began this book (whether she knew this or not!):

1. She relates much of the story in first person (always difficult) through her protagonist who happens to be MALE. Since the work is nostalgic in its ambiance this would be quite cumbersome but she managed to pull it off with a detailed finesse.

2. She faced the dilemma of writing a fictional account of an actual, well-known story, an endeavor which does not often result in success. A case in point (of a failed attempt -- see my full review): Crippen: A Novel of Murder

3. Writing fictional social commentary in retrospect about an era that preceded her birth would have represented a monumental task. Kushner succeeds where fiasco has often been the result in similar cases where various authors have tried to convey the intricacies of a culture which was foreign to them, either in time or custom.



This is not a book that I would ever have purchased at the book store and, in fact, was an alternate Vine Program pick for me when the books which I actually wanted to read and review were already grabbed up. So I entered into this read with a highly critical eye. As a result, I must report that this tale is nearly flawless from a technical aspect, a caveat which much-pleased me.

This book shares many common themes with Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools, even though the two works embody different topics and were written about different historical eras and events. They each address racism, sociological isolation, rampant ignorance and stupidity among the principal characters, political intrigue, sexual tension, and exotic settings. I enjoyed both books equally, albeit, Porter's Magnum opus was published much earlier, in 1962, (it took her 20 years to write it!)

Summing up Kushner's 322-page story: An American family in Cuba, prior to Castro's dictatorship, is compelled to endure ever-increasing disasters initiated by local Cuban freedom-fighters in response to government and corporate repression of the masses. The patriarch of the family, Malcolm Stites, is a brutal businessman who directs the activities of the notorious United Fruit Company on the eastern end of the politically unstable island country. As the idea of self-determination catches on with the indigenous people, as well as with imported laborers, Stites has to deal more and more with the rebels and their insurgent activities. The Camel's back is broken beyond repair when Stites' eldest son runs off into the mountains to join up with the rebels, subsequently carrying out espionage activities against his father's own company. The work's protagonist is the younger of Stites' two sons.

Of course, Stites employs a broad pecking order of American employees who supervise and administer operations at various tiers throughout the organization, from the nice old paymaster down to a yet-to-be-convicted murderer imported from Cajun Country, along with his entire clan, and who deals with the workers directly.

Who else do we encounter throughout the course of this story? Taking into account some overlapping of the numerous eclectic personalities, the list includes, teen lovers; despots; prostitutes; the numerous downtrodden indigenous peoples of Cuba; imported and exploited laborers (cane cutters) from other Caribbean islands; revolutionaries; criminals; dictators; displaced Cajuns; American robber-barons; desperate housewives; cuckolders; Henry Cabot Lodge; Desi Arnaz; Xavier Cugat, and; an ostentatious and drunken Ernest Hemingway! Perhaps the reader of this review can now better envision my stated parallels with "Ship of Fools."

Some of Kushner's writings astounded me in their accuracy and realism. Here's a quotation which expands upon a little-known secret of the arsonist:

"In an abandoned hut out in the cane cutters' batey, the Allain brothers had found stacks of notices calling for a strike, and flyers with arson instructions and diagrams: `tie a kerosene-soaked rag to the tail of a rat and [after lighting the rag] let him loose in the cane. A cat would work too.'" (p. 184)

From my early days as a professional Park Ranger, I can tell you that many forest fires were set by rotten arsonists who utilized this very heinous technique (typically using some unfortunate stray cat or dog) throughout Appalachia both during and subsequent to this same era in Cuba.

Kushner's incredibly subtle and prickly humor also challenges the reader's alertness: "Mrs. Billing said that there was no place for garlic and boiled yucca at her house. She'd trained her staff to cook reasonable American dishes, and now all she had to do was train them to eat reasonable-sized portions. She said her servants ate enormous piles of food. The others listening concurred, and Mrs. Lederer asked how it could be that none of the servants were a bit fat, while she and Mr. Lederer were constantly on reduction diets," (page 117.)

Under my closest scrutiny, I only encountered one minor glitch when, in fact, I was prepared to encounter many more. This may sound petty to some but I mention it only to punctuate how thorough Kushner was in her intricate knowledge of the Cuban culture and in her fact-checking:

"On the foam, which looked like a hunk of ceiling insulation, she'd written `Panda's Pillow' in magic marker, so no one else would use it," (page 97.) This is an anachronism. While Sidney Rosenthal actually invented a rudimentary felt-tipped pen in 1953, these marker pens were really not around in general use until 1958 when Carter, Inc. came out with its aluminum tube version of the felt marker pen. I clearly recall, here in high-tech America, when I first saw and used one in the mid-60s. In any case, the name "Magic Marker" name was not manifest until 1966 which is when Rosenthal re-named his company "The Magic Marker Corporation" and Kushner's reference to "magic marker" precedes this by many years.

Rachel Kushner clearly garnered much of this story vicariously, through her mother, who lived in pre-Castro Cuba. I don't grasp exactly how she did it, but the reader is drawn into the tale as if the author had lived through these life experiences herself. I found this to be an astounding achievement. And here we encounter a female author who writes about hunting, fishing, and other typically male rites of passage with an incredibly convincing cleverness.

This is a poster example of intelligent and maturely-written contemporary literature and I'm eagerly looking forward to reading more of Kushner's works. Highly recommended!