The Cuban writer Edmundo Desnoes died this Wednesday in New York at the age of 93. He is an indispensable figure for understanding Cuban culture after 1959 and his relationship with politics. He was a critic, essayist and author, in 1965, of the novel Memories of underdevelopmentmade into a film three years later by Tomás Gutierrez Alea.
Bilingual, the son of a Cuban and a Jamaican, Desnoes was born on October 2, 1930 and lived between Havana and New York, cities that function as poles of his narrative. Close to writers of the caliber of José Lezama Lima, he was part of the group of novelists who tipped the literary balance of the Island – traditionally poetic – towards narrative.
In 1956 he married María Rosa Almendros, daughter of the Spanish teacher Herminio Almendros and sister of the filmmaker Néstor Almendros, with whom he lived for a time outside of Cuba. Upon his return, Desnoes was part of the editorial team of the supplement Revolution Mondaydirected by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, which put him on the front line of battle in all the cultural controversies of the 60s.
Desnoes is known for writing the novel Memories of underdevelopment, whose first edition, by Casa de las Américas, is unfindable today. The narration, frenetic and in first person, is similar to that of other classics of the time, such as Three sad tigersand shares with them the same concern: What should the intellectual be like in the revolution?
“It is an antiphonal book: it only works for Castro’s choir”
The answer would be provided by the system itself, which in the same decade dismantled Monday, he censored and removed from circulation several notable works, and rejected – from the top to the local leaders – the “bourgeois” intellectuals whose concerns Desnoes’ novel formulated. The arrest of the poet Heberto Padilla, in 1971, was the most eloquent sign that what many writers continued to consider the freest decade of Cuban literature had never existed.
It was of no use, in political terms, for Gutiérrez Alea to take the novel to the cinema. Fidel Castro’s Revolution had already taken the first steps towards regulating cultural processes, and the country’s intellectuals would soon see all attempts at criticism from within the system suspended.
Yes Sergio, the protagonist of Memories, opting to stay on the Island even though this meant his disappearance as an intellectual – and as a person – Desnoes decided to go into exile in 1979, after a trip to Venice. The film version of her masterpiece has been recognized as the best Cuban film of all time, and one of the 100 most important in the world on various lists.
However, like some of his less famous contemporaries – such as Antonio Benítez Rojo –, Desnoes gradually lost notoriety and readers on the Island were only able to access his novel in 2003, when the ruling party published an insufficient circulation and invited him to be jury of the Casa de las Américas award.
His exile was not without controversy. After publishing the anthology The devices in the flower –with texts by Cuban intellectuals from exile and the Island, as well as several leaders of the Revolution–, received fierce criticism from Cabrera Infante, due to the “disparity” of the volume. “It is an antiphonal book: it only works for Castro’s choir,” the narrator wrote from his home in London.
After the protests of July 11, 2021 on the Island, Desnoes – cured of horror after his 2003 trip – said in an interview with diary At the Sea that Cuba’s motto could no longer be, as Castro stated, “Homeland or Death”, but – following the song that served as an anthem to the protests – “Homeland and Life”. Although, true to his skepticism, he noted: “The first stage of revolutions are always very stimulating, they attract us and move us, but the second is repressive and disappointing.”
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