José Lezama Lima: Letters from a Secret Cuba

When Paradiso, José Lezama Lima's great novel, was finally republished in his native Cuba, twenty-five years had passed since this defiant and extraordinary book had appeared in its first edition. Exactly a quarter of a century since Ediciones Unión had published, in 1966, that red-covered brick of more than six hundred pages, which immediately became one of the seminal works of the so-called Latin American Boom, and in the process elevated the name of its author to a dimension beyond what his devotees and enemies had already claimed. What happened at Paradiso's launch in the auditorium of the Cuban Book Institute on that afternoon in 1991 would have delighted the founder of Orígenes magazine, in which, beginning in the 1940s, he had published extracts of the novel. The horde refused to listen to the book's presenters and leapt over the table from which the speakers sought to read their texts written for the occasion, and the book was sold through the windows of the institute, amid a tumultuous scuffle in which everyone tried to obtain at least one copy. I was one of the many who wrestled to leave with several copies of Paradiso. Thankfully, I was successful. It was not only a matter of acquiring Paradiso, but of attending an event that confirmed that the rehabilitation of such an extraordinary man for our culture had been achieved.

Lezama's work, following the initial publication of Paradiso, had international reverberations that almost no one could have imagined. The author of books of obscure, hermetic poetry, composed in Gongoresque and baroque codes and bold metaphors, and of essays that many claimed to read without ever opening their pages, became a symbol of rebelliousness. The novel, which recreates the life of José Cemí, a young Cuban man on his journey of initiation and self-discovery, is inspired by Proust but also by an ace that Lezama held up his sleeve: a uniquely personal voice, a firm understanding of the poetic value of each word, and an ability to manipulate language that allowed him to reinvent a notion of Cuba, and Cubanness, never before achieved in the literature of his country. The homoerotic charge of several passages, the extraordinary strength of the associations, and the syntheses of different worlds and cultures in Paradiso initiated a conversation, transforming the book into an act of liberation that, beyond the surface of its verbal density, continues to challenge its readers. As it also challenged those who, in Cuba at that moment, were already deciding what should and should not remain within view of the reader.

In 1971, this all reached a critical point. Lezama had been published abroad, celebrated by the most respected names in the Spanish language and beyond, and revered by every important visitor to Havana, and yet he found himself on the regime's Index, following an act of self-repudiation performed by the poet Heberto Padilla at the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba. Even after he'd been awarded the Julián de Casal Prize in 1968 for his book Fuera del juego [Out of the game], by a jury presided over by none other than Lezama himself, Padilla continued his provocations until being detained by State Security for several weeks, from which he emerged to appear on a sinister stage. Not only did he accuse himself of being ungrateful for the benefits that the Revolution had showered on him, but he named others who had committed the same sin. Lezama among them. Lezama was not present among those who witnessed this event. In some way, his absence that night heralded the emptiness, the silence, and the invisibility to which he was to be reduced from that moment on. No more of his books, no more articles about his work, no more interviews. While outside Cuba Paradiso's fame grew, and foreign editions appeared, Lezama, that tall man of robust figure, began to dissolve into the air of Trocadero Street, where he lived until his death in 1976.

Restoring his name, returning...