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Reviewed by:
  • King of Cuba by Cristina García
  • Ada Ortúzar-Young
García, Cristina. King of Cuba. New York: Scribner, 2013. Pp. 235. ISBN 978-1-47671-024-2.

The dictator has been a recurrent character in Spanish American fiction since the birth of the new nations. In 1845 Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento wrote Facundo. Civilización y barbarie (Facundo. Civilization and Barbarism), considered one of the cornerstones of Spanish American literature. The Spaniard Ramón del Valle-Inclán contributed with his own version in 1926, Tirano Banderas, as part of the cycle of the “esperpento”—a distorted and grotesque depiction of characters and reality. Some of the most well known exponents of the genre are Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias’s El Señor Presidente (1946), Mexican Carlos Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962), Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos’s Yo, el supremo (1974), Cuban Alejo Carpentier’s El recurso del método (1974), Colombian Gabriel García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca (1975) and Peruvian Mario Varga Llosa’s La fiesta del chivo (2000). These fictional accounts, modeled after real-life dictators, represent ruthless and corrupt characters who terrorize and torture their people, perpetuate their power by any means, and have a lasting and negative impact in their respective countries. [End Page 376]

King of Cuba, Cristina García’s latest novel, follows this tradition as it shares many elements with her Spanish-American counterparts. But as a writer, the novelist straddles two waters. She is both an insider (born in Cuba and visited the island a number of times) and an outsider (raised and educated in the United States from an early age) often speaking with a double-voiced discourse appealing to multiple audiences. As a member of the Cuban diaspora, her novels, most notably Dreaming in Cuba (1992), The Agüero Sisters (1997) and A Handbook to Luck (2007), portray the trauma of separation and conflicting ideologies through the eyes of families living on both sides of the Straight of Florida. King of Cuba is not just about the dictator. It is about an era coming to an end and how the Cuban revolution has impacted its citizens in general.

It centers on two mirror image figures whose stories are braided together in the novel. In Havana, a Castro-like figure often referred to as El Comandante, and sometimes as the Maximum Líder, the tyrant, or the despot, but never simply Fidel, as the average Cuban would. The English-speaking reader might think it follows in the footsteps of Oliver Stone’s 2002 adulatory documentary-interview with Castro, entitled “Comandante,” portraying a still eloquent and energetic leader very much in control of his country. On the other hand, the Cuban reader might ask whether García is establishing a subtle contact with the average Cuban, who refer to the aging dictator humorously as the “coma andante,” walking in state of coma, as they seek relief of their daily penuries. The prominent Cuban intellectual Jorge Mañach has considered the “choteo” (poking fun) a trait of the Cuban character and a survival strategy in times of adversity. His antagonist, the octogenarian Goyo Herrera, a former classmate of the Comandante, is in exile in southern Florida after having lost all his spiritual and worldly possessions as a result of the revolution. His mission in life is to assassinate him, or at least to live long enough to see him dead.

In a way reminiscent of the portrayal of Fuentes’s Artemio Cruz, García centers on the deterioration of the body, which also serves as a metaphor for the deterioration of extreme ideologies on the part of revolutionaries and exiles alike. In Havana, an aging and distrustful dictator is tortured by his failing body: he lacks the strength to open a window, has faced the decline of his sexual prowess, needs dentures, must take an array of pills, needs bifocals, his diet is reduced to oatmeal and toast. Most importantly, his reputation around the world is fading and there is no mention of him on the anniversary of the revolution in the foreign press. He looks outside his window to a...

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