The Censorship Files: Latin American Writers and Franco's Spain

Preface: The Censorship Files

Preface The Censorship Files Iam no stranger to censorship, since for years I was a censor myself. This confession is not out of place, I hope, in a book dealing with the Spanish-language publishing industry and the promotion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and 1970s. I would like to use my personal experience to frame a discussion of official censorship during the last phase of the dictatorial regime of Francisco Franco (1960–1975), and of the way it relates to the publishing of Latin American literature during that period. These are the years of the apertura, the political opening up of the Franco regime that started with a series of economic and political reforms designed to break down Spain’s international isolation on the world scene. Since I was born when the apertura was in full swing, I experienced the regime’s “most liberal” side while growing up. Nevertheless I was trained in school to write and to read like a censor. My writing was censorious in its form and content in the same way the regime had been for years. I also read and thought censoriously, for I was constantly reminded of an authoritative and censorial entity poised to watch over my thinking process. Of course, growing up in Franco’s Spain, I was not aware that I was a censor, that censorship existed, or that Latin American literature had been censored by the Franco regime. Nor was I privy to the economic and cultural expansion into Latin America on which the regime had embarked around 1960, or to the seemingly contradictory policies of the Franco regime as it overhauled the Spanish book trade and in pursuit of that goal simultaneously promoted and censored the works of many Latin American writers. I became aware of this paradoxical relationship between censorship and book production when in 1997 I began to examine the official reports of the Franco regime. These reports include declassified documents on the Spanish book trade in the Americas and the censorship xi files on the Latin American novels that were considered for publication or published in Spain. Examining the official reports of the Franco regime has made me realize now that the success of Latin American literature in the 1960s and 1970s was, in part, due to censorship (or, more precisely, to the new rules of censorship implemented by the regime in the 1960s). But for me they also exemplify with particular clarity the way I was led to understand Latin America while growing up in Spain. These official reports reveal the negotiations and behind-the-scenes maneuvering that went on among those involved in the Spanish publishing industry: censors, government officials of the Spanish Book Institute, publishers, literary agents, book exporters and importers, and Latin American writers. They are now housed in Spain’s National Archive, the Archivo General de la Administración, in Alcalá de Henares, the birthplace of Miguel de Cervantes and now the headquarters of Spain’s latest cultural enterprise overseas, the Instituto Cervantes. My current dossier of government documents (censors’ reports, employee records, regulations, and letters exchanged between editors, government officials and censors) is about four thousand pages. For this book I have examined records concerning about thirty Latin American writers, whose work was at some point submitted to the Spanish censorship authorities, such as Reinaldo Arenas, Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Benedetti, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Alejo Carpentier, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, Salvador Garmendia, Gabriel García Márquez, Adriano González León, Vicente Leñero, José Lezama Lima, Álvaro Mutis, Manuel Puig, Ernesto Sábato, Severo Sarduy, and Mario Vargas Llosa. These files offer abundant evidence concerning particular cases. But they also demonstrate the way the Spanish government officials reported on Latin America, and, even more importantly for my immediate purpose, they show which kind of Latin American literature the censors found suitable to play a role in the desired expansion of the Spanish publishing industry. While these authors are not the only censored Latin American writers , their files are the most significant ones. In examining some of them here, I propose to explore a shift in the control of the Spanish-language publishing industry between 1960 and 1970, and to map out Spanish government policies for the marketing of books through tax breaks, subsidies for paper, and some leeway in the rules of censorship. In my view, the fiercely competitive publishing world of the 1960s and 1970s defined...