Autobiografía sucia: The Body Impolitic of Trilogía sucia de La Habana

Por ESTHER WHITFIELD Assistant Professor, Harvard University En: Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 36.2 (May 2002): 329-351. Washington University, United States

Somos lo que hay,
lo que le gusta a la gente
lo que se vende como pan caliente
lo que se agota en el mercado.
Somos lo máximo.
MANOLIN, EL MÉDICO DE LA SALSA
(epigraph to Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, El Rey de la Habana)

It is sexually graphic, self-absorbed and so personal it stifles, yet the book that has made Pedro Juan Gutiérrez known in Europe and the US titles itself not an “autobiography” but a “trilogy”: Trilogía sucia de La Habana. Contrary to the protocol of classical autobiographies, it does not take stock of a life and give it coherence but bundles together, in three loosely related sections, fragments of a loose and listless living. It is not an intellectual trajectory but a narrative of physical and sexual abandon, punctuated only by periods of post-coital respite. Moreover, to Trilogía’s sequel, the swaggeringly-named Animal Tropical, Gutiérrez adds a prefatory disclaimer: “Esta novela es una obra de ficción. Cualquier parecido con circunstancias o personas reales es pura casualidad” (11). Yet autobiographical

Trilogía’s autobiographical trio: Splitting the subject and twisting testimony

If Trilogía sucia de La Habana is not the autobiography of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, then whose is it? Who enunciates the life, loves and lecheries of Pedro Juan, and to whom do they belong? I want to propose that the trilogy has a trio of “autobiographers.” The first is Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, as we suspect and might want to believe. In a second sense, however, Trilogía is the reader’s “autobiography” also; and, finally, it is that of a new Cuban man of the 1990s, who is conceived by the first two in a tacit game of demand and supply. This schizophrenic split in the autobiographical subject, and particularly the emergence of the reader, have been addressed before. Readerly agency assumes suffocating proportions in Paul de Man’s “Autobiography as De-facement”, for example, when the reader-as-autobiographer takes on the author in a fictive identity struggle; and Doris Sommer draws on de Man’s notion of mutual reflexivity to call

   In Sommer’s Proceed with caution, wielding “particularism” as a defense against attempted cannibalization is what distinguishes from de Man’s metaphoric, homogenizing brand of autobiography its more resistant relative, testimonio. Readers of Me llamo Rigoberta Menchu, for example, are forced by barriers of silence in the text to respect the worlds of difference between themselves and the speaker. Might Trilogía, then, be testimonial in its impulse, and might this account for its autobiographical ambivalences? What may seem an outmoded question of generic classification marks, in fact, a crucial turning point in the writing, reception and marketeering of Cuban culture. Trilogía bears several marks of testimonio: aside from its first-person narrator, its is spoken from the social margins of one place to a listener in another (II). The genre has been received differently in the US academy (where, as Georg Gugelberger’s introduction to The Real Thing affirms, it came into vogue in the 1980s) than in Cuba (where Miguel Barnet’s Biografía de un cimarrón appeared in 1966 and the Casa de las Américas testimonio award was instituted in 1971), but Trilogía straddles these two sites and brings them both “up to date.” For where this book departs most dramatically from testimony – namely in rejecting the collective as its voice and social injustice as its cause - it does so in defiance of one set of historical circumstances and in deference to a newer one.

   Trilogía breaks brutally with collectivity and with “cause”. Its first-person speaker is resolutely singular; it is self-obsessed, self-sufficient and, if we can allow a less delicate turn of phrase, smugly masturbatory. It voices no political convictions and names no adversary other than bad luck. In contrast to the socio-political solidarity that underpins testimonio, it distances itself crudely from the population of its own Centro Habana barrio, most loudly and disturbingly from its Afro-Cuban inhabitants and its women. Readers and reviewers, more in the Anglophone world than in Spain and Latin America, have been shocked by the text’s portrayal of Centro Habana’s predominantly black population, as well as its unapologetically machista treatment of women. Cultural disparities and reviewers’ own preconceptions no doubt come into play in such an assessment; and yet, as the Cuban-American writer Achy Obejas has implied and as our elucidation of the writer-reader-text dynamic will confirm, Gutiérrez must anticipate offence on the part of his reader. “There is,” writes Obejas, “an insistent sexism and racism in Gutiérrez's writing that can't be explained as either cultural difference or benign in content—a cool overall detachment, a disdain almost, that Gutiérrez might be aiming as much at his readers as at his characters or even himself” (115). Within Cuba, Gutiérrez is not the first writer to respond irreverently to home-grown testimonio. Margarita Mateo, and later Ronaldo Menéndez, argue that the genre’s canonization as a vehicle for Revolutionary messages and its embrace by the country’s cultural institutions have given it an official, hegemonic status of which it is devoid elsewhere and against which recent Cuban writers, disillusioned with aspects of the regime, rebel. Trilogía, like the novísimo writing Mateo discusses, puts domestic testimonio to its own – perhaps parodic, perhaps merely perverse – use. Furthermore, it takes this domestic model into testimonio’s foreign terrain, anticipating the book’s own reception amongst an outside readership that is still undergoing demographic change. For while bona fide testimonio, at least during its 1980s heyday, was drawn into academic circles – while its readers were also its critics in the narrow sense – Trilogía, for now at least, circulates in a less rarified international milieu. Outside Cuba the book has largely avoided the critical cutting board and has remained in the realm of the “popular”, where critics who would invest the genre with their search for ethical direction are displaced by readers with more mundane demands of Cuban self-writing.

   To make this claim means naming Trilogía’s principal readers as primarily foreign to Cuba, living in Europe, Latin America or the United States and buying their books, directly or indirectly, from large-scale commercial publishers. (III) Trilogía was first published by Barcelona’s Editorial Anagrama and has subsequently appeared in twenty countries. I call its readers “primarily foreign” because both publishing figures and the text’s own practice of embedding confirm this demographic, but Trilogía has an interesting domestic readership too. (IV) The book is not sold in Cuba but nor is it outlawed, despite its US jacket’s eye-catching “banned in Cuba but celebrated throughout the Spanish-speaking world”; and the idiosyncrasies and tribulations of book-selling in Cuba admit, as they do so often, alternatives to a content-based justification. (V) Yet, in one more example of success abroad inciting interest at home, Trilogía has by now been read in Cuba enough to place Pedro Juan Gutiérrez on Havana’s intellectual circuit; for his work to have been compared, in a divergently reported statement, to that of the early Carpentier; (VI) and, most importantly, for a book of his short stories to have been published in Cuba last year (his first monograph since 1988, when he was a far lesser-known poet). (VII) Trilogía depends for its circulation on individual, and unofficial, imports from abroad, and Gutiérrez himself calculates that there are about four hundred copies in circulation in Cuba. (VIII) Yet these Cuban readers are not dollar-paying buyers; and consequently they are included neither in the sales figures that keep the book profitable nor in the buyer-seller dynamic that sustains the text. Foreigners, on the other hand, are “target readers” in these two senses, and we can name them as such without delving too deeply into the notoriously treacherous question of authorial intention; for even if Gutiérrez balks at the thought of his neighbors recognizing themselves in his characters, can we be certain that he does not intend them to do so? (IX) If we name our readers, then we should also “out” the text as one of the “special period in times of peace”, the state of economic emergency declared by the Cuban government following the demise of the Soviet Union. (X) The “special period” is not a matter of mere chronological coincidence for Trilogía: it is the substance of this tale that - like a stream of others produced during Cuba’s 1990s, arguably initiated by the novels of Zoé Valdés - is punctuated by blackouts, fuelled by long waits in food lines and buoyed by black market deals. Together the foreign book-buyer and the “special period” text are an explosive duo: in them, reader-response theory meets first the cultural-cum-commercial reality of a specific Cuban moment; and then, as writers weave this reality into the formal fabric of their work, it heads for a further encounter with New Economic Criticism, the field Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen describe as “predicated on the existence and disclosure of parallels and analogies between linguistic and economic systems” (14).

From Boom to nuevo boom: The “Special Period” market

To move us from testimony to the time-determined brand of self-writing that is Trilogía’s; and, on a further level, to tease out certain ties between Cuba’s history, economics and culture, we have a convenient starting point in the still-resounding Boom of the 1960s. Although testimonio has been claimed for the “post-boom,” the genre’s widely accepted birth date (that of Biografía de un cimarrón in 1966) falls during the heyday of the “Boom” and on the heels, not coincidentally, of the Revolutionary triumph that put both Cuba and Latin America on the map for foreign observers. (XI) Over three

   This re-circulation of the word boom - which can only be understood as a deliberate ploy, on behalf of publishers and critics, to re-light the flame of García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes et al. - is curious as it isolates a single element of the 60s phenomenon: the economic one. The most plausible of many meanings of the word, as Cabrera Infante’s dismissive “Include me out” reminds us, is as a period of economic growth; and Mario Santana, in his retrospective on the Spanish-American new novel in Spain in the 60s and early 70s, claims that “the use of the word boom to describe a literary phenomenon has often been criticized because it seems to express an abdication to the language and values of the marketplace” (34). The most striking resemblance between the nuevo boom and its namesake is that both draw raw material from Latin America to be processed –published, marketed and sold – by Barcelona. (XIV) This echo merely underscores the anachronism of the term boom in today’s context for while the first Boom, like testimonio, was born with the Revolution, this one coincides with what many onlookers perceive as its slow, painful demise. While an unmistakable, if mixed, pro-Left fervor colored the era of the first Boom novels and the subsequent readings of testimonio, Trilogía positions itself in a post-Soviet, almost post-socialist, new world.

   What, then, does the reader of the nuevo boom cubano – post-60s, post-80s, post Cold War but not quite post-Castro – want? Why are major international editorials publishing Cuban literature in such proliferation, and why are readers in Spain, Latin America and the United States such avid consumers? How, in other words, do we elucidate the “demand” side of Trilogía’s “textual transaction”? Mauricio Vicent, Havana correspondent of the Spanish daily El País, proposes a tentative answer in his July 2000 article “El oscuro encanto de Cuba”:

   “Para algunos…”, writes Vicent, “se trata de una cuestión sobre todo estética: es la luz pastel que se filtra a través de los soportales a las siete de la tarde y colorea el rostro de los cubanos y de las fachadas desconchadas de La Habana, convirtiéndolos en una misma cosa. Para otros, el morbo está en la contradicción política, en el contraste del uniforme verde oliva de Fidel Castro mientras la ciudad se llena de coches japoneses. En los cadillacs desvencijados y las consignas políticas de los años sesenta --"¡Patria o muerte, venceremos!"-- que dan la sensación de tiempo detenido. En los mojitos de la Bodeguita del Medio, que a uno le hacen sentirse joven. En la forma de mirar que tiene la gente. En el sexo fácil, que se mezcla con la estética de Numancia. "¡Hay que ir a Cuba; pero ahora, luego ya no será lo mismo", dicen algunos. También en esta condición de parque ideológico, de última reserva del socialismo, está la magia de Cuba. Y en la líbido que generan en los empresarios las oportunidades de negocios que vendrán después.”

   Vicent is accounting for tourists’ fascination with seeing Cuba but his analysis illuminates ours for, surely, we might think of reading from one cultural context to another as a form of armchair tourism? Moreover, the boom of Cuban letters abroad accompanies, not coincidentally, a boom in foreign tourism to the island. In the decades between the Revolution and the “special period”, the growth of tourism was stunted by restricted access – to travel permits for individuals, to investment in the industry for foreign corporations and, more broadly, to information. A new Ministry of Tourism was created in 1994 to promote joint ventures with hotel corporations and attract more visitors, with the ultimate aim of increasing dollar revenues and creating more jobs, (XV) and it has opened Cuba not merely as a trading partner but in the visible, spectacular dimension that this industry, just like literature, film and music, affords. As Vicent recounts, tourism has generated a set of images that draw, somewhat ironically, from Havana’s 1950’s heyday as a resort and from a wider Caribbean snapshot: mojito cocktails in Hemingway’s favorite haunt and “la forma de mirar que tiene la gente.” The stronger, stranger pull, says Vicent, is time: time wreaking destruction on what would be timeless, time running out for the Revolution, a sensationally small time-window between now and the day everything changes. The compounding interest is financial: it is the tease of trade, the promise of profit in a capitalist Cuba, for sexual arousal and money are protagonists of this moment. Stock images of cultural vibrancy and sexual allure combine with a curiously nostalgic fatalism and an incipient opportunism, and the combination produces a market not in the planned products of Cuba’s tourist industry but in realities on the periphery, in what is left out of the guided tour and left behind as time takes its toll on the Revolution. This is a market not merely in official tourist attractions but in a place- and time-specific Cuban identity; and whether this identity is packaged as a vacation or as a book, its movement in international circuits defines Trilogía and its readers. It is this same package that visitors to the book seek out, spurred on by an explosion of images and rumors and by the reader-tourist’s excitement at buying unprecedented access.

   Fundamental to the libidinal desire for trade that Vicent describes is visitors’ new ability to deal with Cubans on an individual basis. Rather than the faceless interactions between governments that prevailed before the tourist boom, the 1990s facilitate one-to-one meetings; and the burgeoning numbers of travel articles published both in Europe (whence tourism is permitted) and in the US (whence it is not) delight as much in encounters with individual entrepreneurs as in the jargon - the casas particulares and the paladares – that this entrepreneurship has begotten. (XVI) It can come as no surprise that the predilection for individual interaction should spill over into the physical: Vicent lists “el sexo fácil” as a tourist attraction, and the 1990s saw the emergence of jineterismo, the practice whose most extreme and widely-publicized form is tourist-geared prostitution. (XVII) Just as tourists crave individual partners, for small-scale business deals and for sexual encounters, so nuevo boom readers seek personal contact with individual Cubans. Their ardor eclipses the collective subject of both testimony and socialism, and demands instead a self-centered and physically-driven autobiographer who will respond - albeit on his or her own terms - to the financially and erotically-motivated advances that book-buying entails. The crumbling of communal slogans – the outmoded plurality Vicent sees in “venceremos” and the anachronism of “esta condición de parque ideológico - marks an obsolescence of community whose literary manifestation is Trilogía sucia de La Habana.

Supplying demand: The reader, the text and the (new) new man

Today’s reader demands a life in full frontal, and a sordid individualism that betrays the “social” face of Cuba. Through this demand, the reader becomes an “autobiographer”, presupposing and effectively pre-scribing a personal life for the text. The outside does not write autobiography but imputes it to the speaker – and thus, in a sense, “creates” it. This imposition of autobiography whether or not it is there has a testimonial antecedent in the passage of Biografía de un cimarrón to

   From the outset, Pedro Juan roots his writing in physical excess. The climax of his first relato is an encounter with a former girlfriend, and this overture is his opportunity to rub readers in the excremental reality of his sexual existence. On the third page, he declares “el sexo es un intercambio de líquidos, de fluidos, saliva, aliento y olores fuertes, orina, semen, mierda, sudor, microbios, bacterias. O no es. Si sólo es ternura y espiritualidad etérea entonces se queda en una parodia estéril de lo que pudo ser” (11). Farther along in his digressions, he expounds upon his vocation as a writer and again picks up the excremental theme: “Ése es mi oficio: revolcador de mierda” (104). He prides himself on writing dirt and if this does not turn his readers away – as it might well not, given the “parallel market” in deprivation and tourists’ predilection with physical grime, sexual as well as architectural – then he puts them more crudely in their place. Their place is outside, looking in; watching but not acting. Foreign readers are marginalized in this text with a brutality that preserves and, indeed, flaunts the perverse sanctity of the domestic space. Foreign characters are always turistas, marking their transient, outside status. If they are distinguished any further, it is by a national denominator: they are el mexicano (73-78), la alemana (154-158) or dos europeos rubios (305), precisely because they cannot be Cuban. Pedro Juan speaks in an in uncompromisingly habanero Spanish, showing no regard for his readers’ unfamiliarity. Furthermore, in a an act of mild paranoia, he silences the foreign experience even when it is his own, willfully repressing memories brought from beyond Cuba: “hasta que me pasen unos años no puedo hablar de lo que realmente me sucedió en Málaga (67). He restricts the narrative to the suffocating yet seductive locality of his body and barrio, and that he should thus “sanitize” his “dirty” territory, purging it of the foreign and retaining only the most corporeal and the most sordid, might seem odd. Yet, in a twisted version of Sommer’s “rhetoric of particularism” that is spectacularly devoid of that rhetoric’s ethical impulse, there is a seductive element to the exclusion, for Trilogía’s erotics of reading and writing depend on both abusing and amusing the one who does not belong. The stranger who hovers at the outskirts of intimate scenes, silenced and rendered impotent by the principal performer, plays a well-worn role. It is the role of the voyeur, whose recurrence in recent Cuban narrative (by Abilio Estévez, Ena Lucía Portela and Pedro de Jesús López, for example) is striking and who could be considered a figure for Cuba’s systemic vigilance - for its neighborhood watch committees, workplace monitors and ubiquitous police – but is equally insistent as a metaphor for the relationship between “insider” text and “outsider” reader.

   The reader is easily cast as “voyeur”, as an excitable onlooker able to maintain the illusion of illicitness while seeing more than he or she should, even though the very fact of writing and publishing, or making public, presupposes being seen. Readers are stimulated visually – to a greater extent, even, than the tourists Vicent describes - and Pedro Juan takes advantage, wielding over the passive onlooker his own power to perform. Readers/ onlookers are gratified twice over: first, and most obviously, by their vantage point on Pedro Juan’s adventures. Furthermore, the role affords the reader a limited “metaphorical” identification, in the sense Sommer reads from de Man: not with autobiography’s principal performer but, at least, with some supporting characters. For Trilogía is replete with voyeurs: there is a mirahuecos, as Pedro Juan calls them, around almost every corner, watching and masturbating, or watching as a way of masturbating. Some are foreign characters, but many are not; they are ordinary habaneros – men, women, children and even, in the relato “Plenilunio en la azotea” (167-172), police officers. Theirs is a solitary and furtive pleasure but, crucially, it provides subjectivity within a position of exclusion. Although foreign readers have merely a spectator’s pass to Pedro Juan’s autobiography, this pass forges a degree of interdependence between them and the performer. The voyeur position is, on the one hand, a place of inactivity, incapacity and exclusion; but, on the other, it generates a certain, albeit unequal, reciprocity, for Pedro Juan is aware of the spectator’s gaze and he performs to it. The flip-side of what I have called “textual embedding” is readerly self-recognition, and it is a source of satisfaction for both parties.

Financial fetishism: Writing in money

The observer of Pedro Juan’s dirty depravities enters more fully into the dynamics of the “special period” when the “revolcador de mierda” adds money to the mix. Sex, dirt, excretion and defecation go together, he tells us in his opening enumeration of coital efluvia

   Ferenczi aside, Trilogía forces a connection between feces, fornication and finance. Its subtext is money: specifically, the US dollar. Dollar transactions were brought into the open - from the black market to legality – in 1993, and carry substantially more weight in household economies than the Cuban peso. Yet the dollar’s domesticity is double-barbed for, although as the strength of the doble moneda it is the individual’s life-blood, it does not flow freely. Its surest sources are still foreign, and these are desperately dry for the cast of Trilogía: “Nadie tiene dólares y la gente ya se acostumbró a vivir con agua con azúcar, ron y tabaco, y mucho tambor” (264). The dollar is a palpable absence, and living without it is to live with it incessantly. As Pedro Juan observes of his neighbor, Carmen: “Ella es ese tipo de personas que resuelven su vida de un modo sencillo: tienes dinero o no tienes dinero. Lo demás no importa” (145). Dirt and sex, or dirty sex, in contrast, have an overpowering physical presence; and, as a consequence, they become a function of money. Sex for money becomes both an exchange (one in payment for the other) and a metaphor (sex taken for money, occupying its place). The dollar bill is fetishized, in a carnivalesque reversal of the Freudian model in which physical objects stand in for the absent genitalia. Pedro Juan stages instead a parade of private parts – his own, those of his legion lovers, and some of his neighbors’- masking the absence of the dollar bills that are, implies his friend Susana who is “traumatizada con los yumas y los dólares” (321), the ultimate erotic fantasy. (XX)

  The money that matters – the money that, paradoxically, is not matter – has an inherently foreign status in Cuba, and Pedro Juan and his neighbors take sex for money (either letting sex compensate for impoverishment or, more literally, working as prostitutes) because dollars lie outside their reach. Just as the characters are socially marginalized, so dollars are in turn “marginal” to their own sphere of existence, hovering on the outer edge of what they can hope to attain. This outer edge of a close-knit circle we have, of course, already seen - for here, too, the reader/ voyeur is positioned. Moreover, this reader shares the dollar’s essentially foreign quality and thus, we might say, finds his or herself uncomfortably close to the place and form of “compensation,” as both substitution (the core of fetishism) and, more starkly, as payment. Here the “embedded” reader must realize his or her full role in Trilogía. For to pair the reader with the dollar as the last in a serial relationship that runs from writing to excrement, from excrement to sex and from both to money and then, finally, from money to the reader, is to bring to the fore the founding dynamic of this text: the writer rakes dirt and sex “for” money; and that money comes with, or comes from, the reader.

   This encoding of monetary relations in a literary text affirms the interdependence of writing and money that Marc Shell and others have signaled in their work in economic criticism. Money emerges from the third chapter of Marx’s Capital as a highly developed commodity, assuming a far greater symbolic value than its material composition allows it. Writing on money – the invention of paper money - is the epitome of over-determined representation. (XXI) As such, it invokes Trilogía’s dollar-driven representations of life in Cuba: Pedro Juan writes on money in the sense of writing about money and at the same time he “writes in” money, factoring it in as the subtext to relations between Cuban and foreign characters. But to write on money is in itself to “make” money for, following Shell, without writing the dollar bill would be a mere slip of paper. Writing constitutes money; and yet Trilogía takes economic criticism’s model beyond this theoretical conception, bringing textual “money-making” to the specifically contextual and tracing a transparent, demystified relation between writing and money. To the parallel between linguistic and economic systems in general, Trilogía adds a further layer of symmetry, inscribing not only writing as a maker of money, but the book and its characters as players in hard-currency markets.

   That Trilogía should implicitly take its inscription of the economic beyond the abstract - that it should encase the foreign reader as paying spectator of Pedro Juan’s sexual extravaganza - brings us once again to Trilogía orchestrator, the “autobiographer” whose author biography we see before the text. While Pedro Juan the protagonist performs to his watcher and reader, it is Gutiérrez who gauges the demands of the broader audience: the international market for products and images of Cuba, that comprises both publishers and readers, or processors and consumers. By re-producing the market as a player in Trilogía, Gutiérrez plays to its demands - but he refuses to do so without rehearsing, with irony and a touch of cynicism, just how demand and supply function. This author is the stage-manager who always keeps the upper-hand; who knows why a sordid, sexualized socialism arouses interest and knows, ironically, how to capitalize. Arrogance is too petty and personal a charge for Gutiérrez as autobiographical subject or as the internationally-known figure he is rapidly becoming; for what he wields is a sense of self-worth at a national level, or an awareness of the “currency” of being Cuban. His declaration of worth, like the epigraph to his El Rey de la Habana, echoes Manolín, el Médico de la Salsa’s 1996 hit: “Somos lo que hay/ lo que le gusta a la gente” (7). This is, at its most simple, a statement of attitude; but Gutiérrez then inserts the claim in a market economy whose consumers, in his case if not necessarily in Manolín’s, are primarily foreign: “(somos) lo que se vende como pan caliente/ lo que se agota en el mercado” (7). El Rey de la Habana’s epigraph – ending in “Somos lo máximo” (7), Manolín’s punchline that subsequently became the slogan of the Unión de Jovénes Comunistas - is a sly celebration of the interest and revenue that Cuba, as a spectacle, commands abroad. (XXII)

   Through Trilogía, Gutiérrez stages a spectacle for a geographically, politically and economically distant audience. Yet although its target is foreign, this performance reverberates in Cuba, too. While Pedro Juan, the protagonist, is proud to be one of a kind, and the author’s commercially viable persona is something of an exception among letters on the island, Trilogía is certainly a text of its time and place, and its ways of writing the body are rooted in the material scarcities of the dollar-dependent “special period.” The merger of “special period” motifs – sex, dirt, deprivation, political vigilance, rum and a “Caribbean” joie-de-vivre – with the textual embedding of a dollar-paying market has an important precursor in the novels of Zoé Valdés, and yet it changes under Gutiérrez’s pen. Valdés lives in exile, where the “special period genre”, with its tacit denunciations of a ruinous revolution, perhaps inevitably began. Gutiérrez, however, lives and writes in Havana, and the “special period” genre’s relocation from outside to inside – and, maybe but more contentiously, from a female writer to a man – has granted it a strange relevance as regards literature in Cuba. Trilogía’s sexual explicitness and the crass continuum it constructs between text, context and commercialization are more sensational, and less “literary”, than many a writer, Cuban or otherwise, would advocate. Yet they are, at the same time, a shrewd response to the changing dynamics of publishing in and around Cuba. Writing and money – and the market, the foreign publisher and the reader – are ever more insistent concerns as Cuban literature, like Cuban tourism and its cultural industries more generally, “opens up”, and as soaring numbers of foreign agents and publishers flock to Havana’s annual book fair hoping to sign up the newest darling of the nuevo boom. Cuba’s domestic publishing industry was hit devastatingly by the economic crisis and, although it has been in recovery since the late 1990s, foreign contracts tend to be more lucrative. The promise of money from abroad is a disruption and a temptation, and it raises questions about how encounters with the foreign affect domestic literature. The paying power of publishers is, of course, but one aspect of Cuban letters’ response to new “foreign” presences, in the shape of literature and criticism previously unavailable on the island. Some of this literature is foreign-authored and some Cuban, but published abroad and once subject to heavy censorship (the cases of Reinaldo Arenas and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, now read avidly by Cuba’s young writers, come to mind). “Re-negotiating the foreign”, a term I borrow from Víctor Fowler Calzada, raises pressing questions of canonization and re-canonization. My reading of “re-negotiation” hones in on the economic and although it does so at the expense of a fuller treatment of Cuban literature’s changing canon, the monetary subtext to today’s intellectual contact with the foreign lends, I think, both relevance and urgency to this approach. “Negotiating” has inevitable monetary undertones and in the current period of economic trouble, where engagement with the outside can all too literally involve a financial transaction, the dollar is never far from broader theoretical questions about Cuba’s changing place in the world.

   Chief among the concerns provoked by foreign publishing deals is the trade-off between intellectual integrity and material temptation, as Rafael de Aguila, a young writer and critic, expressed forcefully in “Pathos or Marketing”, a 1998 article bemoaning the emergence of “la literatura regida por la ley de oferta y demanda” (2). The market, claimed de Aguila, stimulates a literature with a superficial basis in social themes of the moment, his sarcastic (and interestingly anal) example being “un cuento sobre una frikie jinetera drogadicta de padres balseros y hermano con sadismo anal.” (XXIII) De Aguila’s is a particularly angered expression of the tension between writing and money, but it is by no means the only one. A year earlier, in a 1997 interview with Alfredo Alonso, the writer Alberto Garrandés agreed that “todo el mundo trata de hacer dos cosas: no apartarse de las exigencias del mercado y ser fieles a una poética personal” (5). Gutiérrez knows this market and its lures but, rather than anguish over its ethical implications, he gives it and its readers a role in his text. This is may be a sell-out of sorts, but it is also an innovative, entrepreneurial way of grappling with the demands and propositions made to Cuban literature today. By dramatizing the demand side of the dynamic between Cuba and its foreign market, Trilogía demystifies it. The book exposes the demanders’ eccentricities, their perversions and, most importantly, their pliability to the caprices of their supplier: the writer. Gutiérrez’s strategic exploitation of the tripartite subject of autobiography breaks the Cuban cultural market, too, into three component parts. The reader is the buyer, the writer is manager and seller, and autobiography’s central and yet most vulnerable subject, its speaker, is the new hedonist who is so in demand. Trilogía is written for and, in a sense, underwritten by the money that moves to Cuba from its cultural consumers. It is a cynical but savvy commentary on, and culling of, the benefits of twisting testimony to new limits; of staging the private life of Cuba – or a day in the (sex) life of Pedro Juan – for an eager audience, itself conditioned by the economies of access and supply that this strange, “special” period has produced.

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Notes

(I) I briefly develop the contextual implications of this persistent pun in my essay “Comprando y vendiendo: Lengua e intercambio en Te di la vida entera y The Aguero Sisters.” (Return)

(II) Victor Fowler explores the idea of “marginality” in Cuba through Gutiérrez’s El Rey de la Habana, whose material, economic marginality he sees as distinct from the “intellectual” margins that are both the provenance and the subject matter of those he calls los jóvenes narradores. Fowler is alluding to the novísimo writers, the first thirty-eight of whom were included in Salvador Redonet’s 1993 anthology Los últimos serán los primeros based on criteria of age (all were born after 1959) and the experimental, iconoclastic nature of their writing. There is, claims Fowler, such a vast qualitative difference between real economic marginality and the series of intellectual reactions and counter-reactions in which the younger writers have indulged that to use the term “marginality” in the latter case is an act of bad faith. (Return)

(III) Jill Robbins’ paper “Spanish Literary Prizes and the Marketing of Latin Americaness” explores the relationship between the increasing globalization of the Spanish publishing industry and the representations of Latin America that this industry generates. Although Editorial Anagrama is still perceived as an independent publishing house (as opposed to the global conglomerates that include many of Spain’s other literary publishers) I would argue that, in the case of Cuba at least, it nevertheless participates in the generation of certain broadly marketable images. (Return)

(IV) Editorial Anagrama confirms that by August 2001 the Spanish-language original of Trilogía sucia de la Habana had sold 17,562 copies in Spain and Latin America - particularly in Argentina and Mexico, where Anagrama has a wide distribution. (Source: personal e-mail from Cristina Mora, Editorial Anagrama, on 3 September 2001). There is no distribution in Cuba. (Return)

(V) For economic reasons, few books by foreign publishers, incendiary or otherwise, are sold in Cuba. Foreign-published books are sold in dollars and Cuba’s dollar-only bookstores, of which there are relatively few, cater principally to visitors. The domestic publishing industry, from which Cubans tend to buy, sells books in pesos at just above cost price, when limited print-runs mean quickly-exhausted supplies; although some copies are reserved for the dollar bookstores. (Return)

(VI) Following a reading from Animal Tropical that Gutiérrez gave at Havana’s Centro Cultural de España, Amir Valle reported: “La calidad narrativa de Pedro Juan Gutiérrez ha sido un tema de mucha discusión entre los escritores de la isla, y a pesar de la acogida del público, aún continúa esta polémica. Por un lado, escritores como Francisco López Sacha insisten en comparar, por ejemplo, la calidad descriptiva de Pedro Juan con las descripciones magistrales de Alejo Carpentier en La ciudad de las columnas; por otro lado, los asistentes a la lectura comentaron el bajo nivel dramático y de realización de diálogos en esta última novela, aún cuando el tema escogido es atractivo y de gran tensión humana.” I have verified this quotation with López Sacha, who explains that the imperfect narrative quality of Trilogía sucia de la Habana displays the narrative imperfections of any early work, including Carpentier’s; while El Rey de la Habana is more accomplished. (Conversation with Francisco López Sacha, New York, 6 April 2001). (Return)

(VII) Melancolía de los leones is notably more muted than Gutiérrez’s Spanish-published books. Gutiérrez himself calls it “realismo fantástico”, in contrast to the others’ “realismo sucio” in his interview with Kiko Nogueira and Helena Fruets of Brazilian Playboy. (Return)

(VIII) In the Nogueira and Fruets interview Gutiérrez says: “Calculo que haja uns 400 exemplares ilegais no país, que os etrangeiros trazem e fazem circular de mão em mão.” (Return)

(IX) In the same interview, Gutiérrez recounts his horror at the unexpected appearance of one of his own books in his barrio: “Outro dia apareceu um deles no meu bairro. Um amigo o leu e veio me falar: ‘Homem, aqui esta o bairro inteiro!’ E eu gritei: ‘Esconde isso, porra! Eles me matam se veem suas histórias publicadas.” (Return)

(X) In August 1990, following the breakdown of the Soviet-driven Council for Mutual Economic Assistance which had accounted for 80% of Cuba’s foreign trade, the government adopted stringent economic measures usually reserved for wartime, known as “el periodo especial en tiempos de paz” (the special period in times of peace). For an account of government action leading up to this period, see Jorge Pérez López. (Return)

(XI) Angel Rama, for example, links the Boom to the Cuban Revolution. Addressing the sudden popularity of Latin American literature in translation during the late 1960s, he interrogates “las razones que condujeron a la traducción de narraciones latinoamericas a otras lenguas, lo que no sólo tiene que ver con la excelencia de ellas o su adaptabilidad a otros mercados, sino también con la repentina curiosidad por la región que alimentó centralmente la revolución socialista cubana” (53). Georg Gugelberger’s introduction to The Real Thing claims the same birthplace for testimonio: “The genre came into existence due to the Cuban Revolution, more specifically due to Miguel Barnet’s recording of the life story of Esteban Montejo under the title Biografía de un cimarrón/ The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave (1966)” (8). (Return)

(XII) To give just a few examples of the widespread use of the term el boom cubano in publishing-related articles and in the press: in June 2000 the Spanish monthly book review, Leer, published an article entitled “El nuevo boom de la narrativa cubana en España” in which Raúl Cremades and Angel Esteban trace the increasing popularity and visibility of Cuban literature in Spain; and in allusion to the boom, Amelia Castilla and Mauricio Vicent title a 1997 article in El País “La explosión literaria de la Habana.” (Return)

(XIII) The past two years have seen the re-edition of José Lezama Lima’s Poesía completa, Reinaldo Arenas’s El color del verano, and Virgilio Piñera’s Cuentos completos, for example. These are published by major commercial publishers with a strong presence in Spain and Latin America. (Return)

(XIV) As Santana points out, Barcelona’s economic situation, and its linguistic and political removal from Madrid, helped to make the city a publishing center for Latin American literature in the 60s. Anagrama, Planeta, Seix Barral and Tusquets, all based in Barcelona, are promoting Cuban authors today. (Return)

(XV) The 2000 report of the Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe discusses the rationale behind Cuba’s embrace of tourism (505-506). Tourism in Cuba increased rapidly but steadily during the 1990s: CEPAL reports that 340,300 tourists visited the island in 1990, and 1.7 million in 1999. Of this latter figure, 41.2% were from Europe, 17.2% from Canada and the remainder from all other countries – including the US, despite the embargo prohibiting recreational travel to Cuba by US citizens. (Return)

(XVI) Casas particulares and paladares – room rental and food provision in individual homes – were legalized in 1993 under law decree no. 141, passed to institute cuentapropismo, the exercising of heavily-regulated small businesses. (Return)

(XVII) Coco Fusco’s “Hustling for Dollars: Jineterismo in Cuba” traces the phenomenon to the 1980s, when women would semi-officially entertain visiting businessmen. Both Fusco and Nadine Fernández insist that sexual exchange is merely one face of jineterismo, a term which “is actually used to describe a broad range of activities related to tourist hustling (including selling black market cigars, rum, coral jewelry etc.), providing private taxi services or access to ‘authentic’ santería rituals, or simply serving as informal tourists guides in return for a free meal or some token gifts from the tourist” (Fernández 85). (Return)

(XVIII) The 1969 translation, by Jocasta Innes, has the title Autobiography of a Runaway Slave. A later translation by W. Nick Hill restores the original title, apparently at the urging of Miguel Barnet who insisted on the work’s literary quality and on his own status as author. Goffredo Diana’s doctoral dissertation interprets this dispute over testimonio’s authorship as a fundamental distinction between Cuban and US conceptions of the genre. (Return)

(XIX) Senel Paz’s “El lobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo”, in which a homosexual is befriended by a straight militant of the Unión de Jóvenes Comunistas, has been criticized for failing to depart from the Revolutionary model of “Dentro de la Revolución, todo; contra la Revolución, nada.” See Paul Julian Smith’s “The Language of Strawberry.” (Return)

(XX) The full text of Pedro Juan’s fantasy is rather more lurid: “Es un vacilón esta loca, con su pelo negro, suelto. Pero la muy cabrona es una caja contadora. Si no hay dinero no se acuesta con nadie. He tratado de enrolarla un par de veces en las pequeñas orgías de la azotea, pero qué va. Está traumatizada con los yumas y los dólares. Si alguna vez tiene un orgasmo con sus clientes será cuando le introducen un billete en la vagina” (321). (Return)

(XXI) In his chapter “The Gold Bug” in Money, Language and Thought, Shell draws from Emerson, Wittgenstein and Marx to distinguish between gold money and paper money and demonstrate the greater symbolism of the latter: “While a coin may be both symbol (as inscription of type) and commodity (as metallic ingot), paper is virtually all symbolic” (19). He continues, “As Marx argues, credit money (the extreme form of paper money) divorces the name entirely from what it is supposed to represent and so seems to allow an idealist transcendence, or conceptual annihilation, of commodities” (19). (Return)

(XXII) In 1996 the UJC used “Somos lo que hay” as the soundtrack to their radio and television announcements, and placed a billboard with the slogan “Somos lo máximo” on la Rampa, in the Vedado district of Havana. Ariana Hernández-Reguant drew my attention to this appropriation. (Return)

(XXIII) De Aguila’s hypothetical cuento takes up contemporary “special period” tropes – the balsero exodus of August 1994 and jineterismo – as well as others more specifically associated with the novísimo generation, such as the frikie groups (from “freaky”, referring to a young, alternative style of dress and music) and drug use. (Return)

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© Esther Whitfield