A brilliant novel of cuba
FALCOFF, MARK
A Brilliant Novel of Cuba The 'Paradise of Nada,' As Seen from Exile By Mark Falcoff Leftists, social democrats, and innocents of various sizes and shapes are fond of telling us that, say what you...
...Instead of fantasizing about sex, Yocandra gorges on it...
...Rather less often do they remark upon the fact that all those literate Cubans don't have much to read, unless your idea of light fare is an operating manual for a tractor or the collected works of Lenin...
...A Brilliant Novel of Cuba The 'Paradise of Nada,' As Seen from Exile By Mark Falcoff Leftists, social democrats, and innocents of various sizes and shapes are fond of telling us that, say what you will about Fidel Castro's revolution, Cuba is the one Latin American country that has completely eliminated illiteracy...
...I know there's wretchedness throughout Latin America," she concedes, "but other countries didn't experience revolution, didn't have to listen to the bullshit about 'building a better world.'" Why not admit, she adds, that the whole thing has been a gigantic fraud...
...The latest example is an astounding new first novel by Zoe Valdes, a young Cuban woman who lives and writes in Paris...
...How indeed...
...Luckily for her, Yocandra is something of a nymphomaniac...
...adise of Nada is a series of vignettes spanning the period from the narrator's birth in 1959, the year of Castro's accession to power, to the present...
...American author Oscar Hijuelos, whose generous endorsement is printed on the back cover, tries to reassure liberals, the sort of people who might feel uncomfortable with "Cuban exile literature," that Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada has "no pro-Castro or anti-Castro agenda . . . only the agenda of self...
...I saw it being made in Almodovar's film, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown...
...True, she says, the fare is pretty bad, but she derives near-orgasmic pleasure from the advertisements for food items, deodorants, and shampoos...
...The relationship between Cuban writers and the Cuban state is one of synergism in reverse: Cuban literature today is quintessen-tially a literature of exile, the product of a revolution whose only enduring legacies have been physical hunger and emotional nostalgia...
...Yocandra in the Par-Mark Falcoff is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...
...Nor is Yocandra impressed with the revolution's "achievements...
...Is this a "political" book...
...In fact, however, it is difficult to see how "the agenda of self" can be unrelated to such a dichotomy...
...But it isn't just paper that Cuba lacks...
...Even her mother, for so long a pillar of the Federation of Cuban Women, has slipped back into senile recollection of the delicious entrees she used to prepare before Castro came to power...
...it's food, toothpaste, toilet paper, electrical power, fresh water . . . you name it...
...The bulk of the story takes place now, in the "Special Period in Time of Peace," the Castro regime's euphemism for Cuban history since the collapse of the Soviet empire and the end of Moscow's $6 billion annual subsidy...
...The literary magazine where Yocandra works can't even be printed, because there's no paper...
...To have provided such eloquent testimony in fewer than two hundred pages, and to spice it with sex and humor, is a sign of immense literary vitality...
...Life for the title character, Yocandra, as indeed for most Cubans, has become unimaginably hard, and the best talents on the island are wholly absorbed in negotiating past new scarcities...
...Just consider: Today no major Cuban writer—not a single one, not a one—is at work on the island...
...In Cuba," the narrator declaims, "there is no dignity—how can you have dignity without deodorant...
...I say "luckily," because sex is just about the only thing left in Cuba that is not unobtainable or subject to government rationing...
...This provides Valdes with an excuse to fill endless pages with graphic descriptions of Yocan-dra in bed with various lovers, which—far more than its obvious literary merit—may explain this book's huge commercial success in Spain, France, and Germany...
...In a letter to a friend in Spain, Yocandra asks pathetically what gaz-pacho tastes like...
...Yocandra/Zoe Valdes takes angry issue with people who think that "people throw themselves into the sea over insignificant economic deprivations—can't get any blue jeans, can't find any chewing gum...
...Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada provides convincing evidence that, even continents away from its source, Cuban literature is alive and well...
...Guillermo Cabrera Infante lives in Great Britain, while Norberto Fuentes, Heberto Padilla, Antonio Benitez Rojo, Eugenio Florit, Jose Triana, and Jesus Diaz are in the United States...
...No Communist country, with the possible exception of Albania, has ever done such an efficient job of exiling the totality of its literary class...
...As a child born and educated in the Cuban revolution, Yocandra has grown up to be its perfect antithesis...
...This is, after all, not merely a book about poverty and scarcity, but about poverty and scarcity of a very particular kind, the consequences of deliberate political choices...
...Such people "simply don't know Cuba, don't know the hunger and terror that the Cuban people have known...
...Far from being a devoted militant of the cause, the model of Castro's New Socialist Man (or Woman), she has become wholly self-absorbed...
...As a result, their work is unavailable to the majority of their compatriots...
...Her idea of pornography, however, is to watch American television programs at the home of a friend who's figured out how to circumvent the government's efforts to scramble incoming signals...
...As one of her friends remarks, "Life is more than boot camp...
Vol. 2 • May 1997 • No. 35
