THE LIBRARY

I was still writing poetry, taking advantage of the typewriters at INRA in those free moments that always occur where bureaucratic activities take place. I filled pages and pages with poems that I think were really bad. I showed them to Luis, who was knowledgeable in literary matters, and he confessed that the poems were, in fact, horrible. But that did not stop me from writing.

In 1963 the National Library organized a storytelling competition. During my lunch period I would always go and do some reading at the Library, which was close to INRA, and I saw the notice. Anyone who wished to participate had to memorize a story by some well-known author and tell it. The committee entrusted with the selection would choose on the basis of the storyteller’s skill. I looked for a story that would not take more than five minutes in the telling (which was the maximum time allowed), but did not find any. So I decided to write one myself. I named it “The Empty Shoes.” It was only two pages long and took three and a half minutes to read. I went before the committee, consisting of five very respectable-looking men and an old lady who was blinking all the time, and told my story. They were impressed, not by my skill in telling the story but by the story itself. They asked me who the author was, and I told them that I had written it the day before. I pulled the paper with the story out of my pocket and gave it to one of them.

The next day I received a telegram saying that they were very much interested in talking with me and would I please come to the National Library. It was signed by a man named Eliseo Diego. I went, and met Eliseo Diego. I also met the blinking old lady, María Teresa Freyre de Andrade, who was the director of the National Library. Cintio Vitier and his wife, Fina García Marruz, were also present. They constituted a sort of cultural aristocracy. At the time, all of them (including Salvador Bueno) were considered somewhat unsympathetic to the government, and María Teresa, who was a magnanimous woman, was protecting them. She had given them jobs at the Library and there they worked, or pretended to work, and while drawing a salary, they could go on writing their poetry.

María Teresa then instructed the assistant director of the National Library, a huge and butchy woman by the name of Maruja Iglesias Tauler, to contact the director of my section at INRA and arrange for my transfer to the Library. To transfer an employee from one place to another involved complicated bureaucratic maneuvering, even in those days. Fortunately, Maruja Iglesias was very adept at such formalities. I think today she is a high official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This woman, by the way, had been the owner of the Tauler Hotel in Holguín, where Raúl and I used to make passionate love.

The transfer went through and suddenly I left Fidel Castro’s sphere, the accounts, the numbers, the adding machines, and the endless list of names and figures that had to be repeated and corrected. I had joined the magical world of the National Library, which still enjoyed an aura of splendor under the leadership of María Teresa Freyre de Andrade.

This woman belonged to an aristocratic family of old revolutionary tradition. She had been educated in Paris and had created the National Library, which functioned splendidly under her direction. My transfer there was decisive for my literary education. My job consisted in looking for the books people requested, but there was always time to read. Moreover, on the nights when I had guard duty, by then a requirement at all work centers, I enjoyed the magical pleasure of picking any book at random. Walking among those shelves, I saw, radiating from each book, the scintillating promise of a unique mystery.

Eliseo Diego tried to direct me in my reading of children’s books, and Cintio Vitier told me to stay away from the works of Virgilio Piñera and other similar authors. I was subjected to a refined and gentle censorship. At that time they were all against the government and said terrible things about Fidel Castro and the tyranny he had imposed; they wanted to leave the country, but they either had too many children or were not able to for other reasons. Eliseo Diego said: “The day I have to write an ode in praise of Fidel Castro or of this Revolution, I will stop being a writer.”

Some time later, however, both Cintio and Eliseo became spokesmen for Fidel Castro’s regime. Eliseo has written not one but dozens of odes in homage to Fidel Castro and his Revolution. Cintio has done the same, and perhaps worse. Maybe that is why they are no longer writers. But in those days, they were sensitive men who undoubtedly influenced my literary development. Eliseo gave me a copy of his book En la Calzada de Jesús del Monte [On Jesús del Monte Avenue], which I consider among the best in Cuban poetry. Cintio was a critic with a rather monastic approach, but he was a man of culture and it was still worthwhile to talk with him. Fina was a much better poet than her husband, but she always assumed a subordinate role to him, in accordance with the Spanish Catholic tradition. She was the patient, submissive, resigned, chaste woman; the one who shone was Cintio, while she just stayed in the background as the obedient wife.

I used the Library to the utmost. María Teresa, in her wisdom, required only five hours of work. My working day started at one, but I would come in at eight and, taking advantage of the empty halls, write. There I wrote Celestino antes del alba [Celestino Before Dawn, published in the United States as Singing from the Well]. I read a great many of the books on the shelves in that huge library.

But things began to change, for the worse of course. It was said that the National Library was a center of ideological corruption, that María Teresa was not strong enough and the place had been taken over by lesbians. I do not know whether it was true or not, but rumor had it that María Teresa herself was a lesbian, along with all the women who worked there. Some of them actually did appear to be rather masculine, but I think their lesbianism was more platonic than anything else. They would meet at Maruja Iglesias’s rather luxurious apartment, or at the home of María Elena Ross (married to a relative of Fidel Castro) and have some refreshments, enjoy the swimming pool, or discuss the literary idol of the time: Alejo Carpentier and his novel El siglo de las luces [published in English as Explosion in a Cathedral].

And then one day a big scandal erupted at the Library. Two well-known women employees had been caught in the ladies’ room, undressed, and making love. The women were brought before María Teresa, who pardoned them, saying that this was none of her business and concerned only their husbands, and that there was nothing for her to do. Precisely for being so generous, María Teresa could not avoid having more and more “enemies” infiltrate the Library: resentful people who could not forgive her for the fact that they owed their jobs to her. One of them was María Luisa Gil, who hated María Teresa with a passion simply because she wanted the job of director for herself. She was a Stalinist Spaniard, married to an old stalwart of the Communist Party. She was filled with bitterness, which she covered up with an apparent sweetness. Little by little those enemies started to make headway, saying that María Teresa was a lesbian, an aristocrat, and a counterrevolutionary, and they finally managed to get her replaced. Lisandro Otero was the one to tell María Teresa that she had been ousted. Like a good partisan custodian and enemy of culture, he took great pleasure in firing the person who had created that institution. The new director was none other than a captain of Fidel Castro’s police, Captain Sidroc Ramos. María Teresa left the Library in tears.

A few days later I decided the Library was no longer a place for me either. Any book that could be deemed to be “ideological diversionism” disappeared immediately. Of course, any book dealing in any way with sexual deviation also vanished. An eight-hour workday schedule was introduced, which became ten hours because we had two hours for lunch and there was no place to go.

Fortunately for me, about this time I received a literary award for my novel Singing from the Well, which I had submitted to the [1965] competition sponsored by UNEAC [Cuban Writers and Artists Union]. The novel was published sometime later. One of the members of UNEAC came to interview me. He had liked my novel very much, and not only interviewed me but asked me to share his bed as well. I did not appreciate his offer; he was not my type. But in those days I was neither monogamous nor selective. His name was Rafael Arnés and he lived in the Vedado [an affluent suburb of Havana]. I stayed with him for several months. He had a sense of humor, was not an altogether bad poet, and in those days still had a rebellious spirit. This was the period between 1964 and 1966, when young men were persecuted for having long hair or wearing tight pants. He had rather long hair himself and wrote an ode to my hair, in which he criticized the current inquisitorial attitude toward long-haired youths.

In 1966 I submitted my second novel, El mundo alucinante [This Hallucinatory World, published in the United States as The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando] to the UNEAC competition, where Singing from the Well had won first honorable mention. My new novel won second place again. The jury was made up of Virgilio Piñera, Alejo Carpentier, José Antonio Portuondo, and Félix Pita Rodríguez—more or less the same group as when I received the previous award, except that the first jury included Camila Henríquez Ureña, an exceptional woman who fought hard to give first prize to Singing from the Well while Alejo Carpentier and José Antonio Portuondo, a longtime militant in the Communist Party, applied their influence to have the prize given to Vivir en Candonga by Ezequiel Vieta. Vivir en Candonga was an apologia of Fidel’s struggle in the Sierra Maestra and a denunciation of the so-called escapist writers who, according to the author, spent their time chasing butterflies with their hats, in the fields around Bayamo and elsewhere.

Now Carpentier and Portuondo refused to award first prize to El mundo alucinante. Apparently there was no other novel to merit the prize, so they decided not to award it and to give my retelling of the story of Fray Servando first honorable mention.

At the awards ceremony I met Virgilio Piñera and he said to me point-blank: “Portuondo and Alejo Carpentier deprived you of first prize. I voted for you. Here is my phone number, call me; we have to work on that novel. It looks as if you typed it in one night.” He was almost right. The deadline for the competition had kept getting closer, and with my eight-hour job at the Library I did not have much time. I would lock myself in my room and write thirty or forty pages at a stretch.