EXILE
I then traveled through several countries: Venezuela, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, France, Portugal. In all of these countries I screamed; it was my treasure, it was all I had.
I now discovered a variety of creature unknown in Cuba: the Communist Deluxe. I remember that at a Harvard University banquet a German professor said to me: “In a way I can understand that you may have suffered in Cuba, but I am a great admirer of Fidel Castro and I am very happy with what he has done in Cuba.”
While saying this, the man had a huge, full plate of food in front of him, and I told him: “I think it’s fine for you to admire Fidel Castro, but in that case, you should not continue eating that food on your plate; no one in Cuba can eat food like that, with the exception of Cuban officials.” I took his plate and threw it against the wall.
My encounters with this festive and fascist left stirred a good amount of controversy. In Puerto Rico these people were rather cunning; they invited me to speak at the university and asked me not to talk about politics. I read a paper on Lezama Lima, following which a front man for Castro by the name of Eduardo Galeano read a long political essay attacking me because I had adopted a nonpolitical attitude.
Evidently, the war against communists, hypocrites, and cowards had not ended just because I was out of Cuba.
But while it is true that in exile I met a whole series of opportunists, hypocrites, and people profiting from the suffering of the Cuban people, I also encountered some honest and extraordinary people, many of whom did help me. Professor Reinaldo Sánchez offered me a job as visiting professor at the International University of Florida, where I prepared and taught a course on Cuban poetry. I met excellent students there; it was a way of getting back to what is Cuban, though in a deeper sense because we were away from our country.
I also had the opportunity to establish a relationship with three writers, in my opinion key figures in our history: Lydia Cabrera, Enrique Labrador Ruiz, and Carlos Montenegro.
Lydia’s wisdom made me feel close to Lezama again. She had taken upon herself the job of rebuilding the Island, word by word, from a small apartment in Miami, writing nonstop, going through all kinds of economic hardships, with a huge number of unpublished books, and having to pay herself for the few she published in Miami.
Other writers were living in even more distressing circumstances, such as Labrador Ruiz, one of the greats of the contemporary novel; he lived, and still lives, on welfare. He had written his memoirs but never found a publisher for them.
It was paradoxical that those great writers who had left Cuba in search of freedom were now unable to publish their work here.
Such was the case with Carlos Montenegro, a first-rate novelist and storyteller, also living on welfare in a small room in a poor neighborhood of Miami; this is the price to be paid for keeping one’s integrity. The sad fact is that Cuban exiles were not very interested in literature; a writer was looked upon as a strange, abnormal creature.
In Miami I met wealthy people, bankers and business owners, and I proposed to create a publishing house for the best of Cuban writers, most of them living in exile already. The reply of all those men, all multimillionaires, was categorical: Literature is not lucrative. Almost nobody is interested in a book by Labrador Ruiz; Lydia Cabrera can sell in Miami, but not to any great extent; in short, it would not work out as a business.
“We might be interested in publishing one of your books because you just left Cuba and you are news,” they told me. “But those other authors, nobody is going to buy their books.”
Montenegro died the following year in a public hospital, completely forgotten. Labrador is struggling to survive in a small room in Miami. As for Lydia, she is completely blind but still writing. Her small editions hardly circulate beyond Miami.
I once went to the presentation of one of her books. I saw an old lady sitting at a small table under a mango tree, signing books: it was Lydia Cabrera. She had left behind all of her past, her huge country estate in Havana, her extensive library, and was now trying to make ends meet in a small Miami apartment. When I saw this blind old lady signing her books under a mango tree, I understood that she represented a greatness and a spirit of rebellion that perhaps no longer existed in any of our writers, either in Cuba or in exile. One of the greatest women in our history, she was completely forsaken and forgotten, or else surrounded by people who had never read a single one of her books and were now just looking for a quick news story, taking advantage of the splendor that old lady still radiated. It was a paradox and at the same time a good example of the tragic fate Cuban writers have suffered throughout our history; on our Island we have been condemned to silence, to ostracism, censorship, and prison; in exile, despised and forsaken by our fellow exiles. Cubans have a sort of destructive and envious tendency and, in general, do not tolerate greatness well; they find it hard to bear having a person excel, and want to tear all down to the same level of general mediocrity; this is unforgivable. In Miami, the worst part of it is that everyone wants to be a poet or writer, especially a poet. I was amazed when I saw a bibliographic listing of Miami poets, compiled by another Miami poet, who called herself not a poet but a poetess; more than three thousand names were listed. They published their own books, called themselves poets, and held impressive gatherings you had to go to if you didn’t want to be ostracized. Lydia called those poetesses “poetiesas” [stiff poetesses] and renamed Miami El Mierdal [the shithole]. Lydia always urged me not to stay in Miami; she said I had to leave at once, for New York, Paris, Spain. She never found a niche in that flat, envious, mercenary environment, but being eighty years old she had nowhere else to go. Lydia Cabrera belonged to a more refined tradition, one richer in depth and world culture, far removed from those poetesses of boring bad taste and corny inanities, for whom nothing mattered but their current participation in social events, and for whom anyone who managed to publish a book in a foreign country and attain some renown was almost a traitor.
I realized immediately that Miami was not for me. The first thing my uncle told me when I arrived was: “Buy yourself a jacket and a tie, have your hair cut short, and walk properly, tall, firm. Also, have some business cards printed giving your name and saying that you are a writer.” Of course, he was trying to tell me that I had to become more of a macho man. The typical Cuban machismo has attained alarming proportions in Miami. I did not want to stay too long in that place, which was like a caricature of Cuba, the worst of Cuba: the eternal gossip, the chicanery, the envy. I also hated the flatness of the scenery, which could not compare with the beauty of an island; it was like the ghost of our Island, a barren and pestiferous peninsula, trying to become, for a million exiles, the dream of a tropical island: aerial, bathed by the ocean waters and the tropical breeze. In Miami the obsession with making things work and being practical, with making lots of money, sometimes out of the fear of starving, has replaced a sense of life and, above all, of pleasure, adventure, and irreverence.
During the few months I lived in Miami, I had no moment of peace. I was surrounded by gossip and difficulties, and by an endless succession of cocktail parties, soirées, and invitations. It was like being on display, a strange creature that had to be invited before it lost its luster or until a new personality arrived to displace it. I had no peace to do anything, much less to write. Moreover, the city—not really a city but rather a number of detached houses peopled by cowboys for whom the horse had been replaced by the car—terrified me. I was used to a city with sidewalks and streets, a deteriorated city but one where a person could walk and appreciate its mystery, even enjoy it at times. Now I was in a plastic world, lacking all mystery, where loneliness was often much more invasive. It did not take long for me to become homesick for Cuba, for Old Havana, but my enraged memory was stronger than any nostalgia.
I knew I could not live in Miami. Now, needless to say, after ten years, I have realized that an exile has no place anywhere, because there is no place, because the place where we started to dream, where we discovered the natural world around us, read our first book, loved for the first time, is always the world of our dreams. In exile one is nothing but a ghost, the shadow of someone who never achieves full reality. I ceased to exist when I went into exile; I started to run away from myself.
In Miami, Lázaro had another crisis of total madness; it was getting worse. Everybody lived in a state of constant paranoia, locked up; even my aunt, whom I had not seen for twenty years, seemed more moonstruck. When I arrived in Miami I think I made some statements that people did not like very much. I said: “If Cuba is Hell, Miami is Purgatory.”
In August of 1980 I accepted an invitation to speak at Columbia University, in New York. Without a second thought, I prepared my lecture in less than two hours, and took the plane. I was fleeing from a place that only increased my anxieties and wasn’t suited to my way of being; I was also, forever, running away from myself.
The exile is a person who, having lost a loved one, keeps searching for the face he loves in every new face and, forever deceiving himself, thinks he has found it. I thought I had found that face in New York, when I arrived here in 1980. The city took me into its fold. I felt as if I had arrived in a glorified Havana, with great sidewalks, fabulous theaters, a transportation system that worked marvelously, streets that were really lively, and all kinds of people who spoke many different languages; I did not feel like a stranger in New York. That very first night, I started walking around the city; it seemed to me that in another incarnation, in another life, I had lived in this city. That evening, a group of more than thirty friends, including Roberto Valero, Nancy Pérez Crespo, and even Samuel Toca, whom I had forgiven, took cars and drove along Fifth Avenue, which, on the first of September, was beginning to be invaded by the mists of autumn.