Re: One morning at Cuba's National Library
I'm planning to spend some time in Cuban libraries next winter and, like Weissert, will be checking card catalogues against a list. I'm going to include neighbourhood and small town libraries, though. The National Library has a specialized function; Singing from the Well is there because it was published in Cuba and won literary prizes there. Why anyone would imagine they should have an American-published, totally erroneous book about Cuba's pretend future is beyond me.
I'm planning to spend some time in Cuban libraries next winter and, like Weissert, will be checking card catalogues against a list. I'm going to include neighbourhood and small town libraries, though. The National Library has a specialized function; Singing from the Well is there because it was published in Cuba and won literary prizes there. Why anyone would imagine they should have an American-published, totally erroneous book about Cuba's pretend future is beyond me.
Perhaps someone should send Will Weissert a copy of
Before Night Falls. He has clearly not read it.
There is not a single word in Before Night Falls
detailing Reinaldo Arenas' "brutal persecution" because he was gay. There could
not have been -- it has never been illegal to be gay in Cuba. He was once
arrested for having sex with young teens, but was not convicted when they
changed their story on the stand. Reinaldo appears to relate this accurately in
Before Night Falls, except for a certain coyness about the age of the "younger
one." (The older one was sixteen. Reinaldo was mid-twenties.)
A word to Reinaldo readers. Reinaldo is a "magic
realist." He was brought up in his grandfather's eight-room farmhouse on a
large family farm which had a dairy herd, an orchard, a flock of laying hens,
goats, horses, pigs, a huge fig tree, pastures, corn fields which grew a market
crop, and vegetable gardens.
He writes about eating dirt because there was
nothing else to eat.
Reinaldo's ghastly experience cutting cane ("I was
the slave. I was the Indian.") was volunteer work he undertook to look good to
his co-workers who were all there too. He was working alongside tens of
thousands of high school and college students, tourists in the volunteer
brigades, and Fidel himself.
Reader beware. He reinvents himself on the odd
pages and contradicts his autobiographic details on the even. He was indeed
desperate to get out of Cuba, but it was because they wouldn't publish him.
Too pornographic. Then he had great difficulty getting published in the
U.S.
Enough.
Cass
Hamilton, Canada
