By Mary Ann Horne Orlando Sentinel.
Boston Globe. 1/27/2001
The story of post-Castro Cuba is a plot with a thousand possible outcomes
and a source of endless fascination for Cuban writers.
A provocative new version comes from a respected Cuban-American academic who
came to the United States at the age of 12. Another equally provocative story
is by a persecuted Marielista who took his own life when he reached the latter
stages of AIDS.
Pablo Medina's second novel, ''The Return of Felix Nogara,'' (Read
about it at Amazon.com) is a poignant tale of an exile who returns to his
native island as a dictatorship falls, and his search for what his life might
have been. The title character embarks on a chaotic trip around the island,
which Medina fancifully calls Barata - playing off the Spanish word for
''cheap'' - accompanied by a sage taxi driver.
Medina uses Felix's trip and his family history to illustrate the exile
hunger for the homeland. The tale focuses foremost on Felix's search for his
mother, who he suspects is now in an insane asylum - but not insane. ''Through
her he might find the place where others ended and he began, the light he was
born to, the earth that failed to nurture him.''
Medina, who also has written three volumes of poetry, has fun along the way
in his story. He names the character of a dissident Catholic priest ''Castro,''
and engineers a scene involving truckloads of explosives and several well-known
Cuban public buildings that would do any thriller novel proud. But the strength
of the book is his deft use of language.
Peopled with quirky characters and some over-the-top scenes, the book is
primarily wistful and melancholy. Medina's picture of the returning exile is of
a man in eternal mourning, ''crying as a grown man cries, alone, before the
great salt tear of the sea.''
Reinaldo Arenas's exile experience is much darker and more violent, but his
novel cloaks it in a bizarre festivity. This celebration, to which Arenas takes
us in the opening scene of ''The Color of Summer,'' is to mark the 50th
anniversary of a dictator named Fifo's ascent to power.
Since Fifo dominates an island in the Caribbean and has a hang-up about
islanders searching for new lives in Florida and has really been in power for
only 40 years - well, we think we know what's going on here. But the carnival is
just the beginning of the grotesquely comedic novel's descent into the
underbelly of Cuban life and Cuban government absurdity.
''This is the story of an island whose people were never allowed to live in
peace,'' Arenas writes, ''an island that seemed not so much an island as a
constant battleground, a vipers' nest of intrigue, abuse, mistreatment and
unending horror - not to mention betrayals, double-crosses, dirty tricks, and
back-stabbings without number. No one ever forgave anyone for anything, much
less greatness.''
Arenas knew well the desperation of artists and writers living under a
dictatorship. And he wrote unflinchingly about the gay experience in Cuba.
''The Color of Summer'' (read
about it at Amazon.com)was the last book Arenas wrote before his death in
1991, though it was conceived as the fourth part of a quintet. The series of
books combine autobiography with a surreal look at Cuban history.
Arenas participated in a good bit of Cuba's history, first as a member of
Castro's rebels, then as a writer who came into such disfavor with the secret
police that he was branded an ''antisocial.'' He was repeatedly arrested and his
work seized, but he persevered.
Three novels were smuggled out of Cuba and published in France before he set
out as part of the Mariel boatlift in 1980. ''The Color of Summer'' and a
memoir, ''Before Night Falls,'' were written in New York. The film adaptation of
''Before Night Falls'' will be released in Boston next Friday.
''The Color of Summer'' is not for everyone. While it contains some
astonishing writing and provocative thinking, it also is peppered with language
and description that at times are simply lewd.
And despite the publisher's characterization of ''The Color of Summer'' as a
comedic novel, the book is most incisive in its reflective moments. There is no
escaping that the book is by and about a man who embodies tragedy - who
struggled against a government that oppressed him and a society that shunned
him, and finally contracted a terminal disease.
For him, the exile life was more than solitary. It was turned on end and
battered before an audience of unsympathetic elements.
''I will paint plants with their roots upside down,'' Arenas wrote,
''seeking their nutrients in the sky. I will paint leaves that move about the
canvas and ask impossible questions when one looks at them. I will paint a heap
of bones - me - rotting in a field overrun with weeds. I will paint the
suffering face of the moon looking down on me.''
This story ran on page F03 of the Boston Globe on 1/27/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company
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