An Exile's View of Dawn

THE STRANGEST witness to appear before the Watergate Committee on summer television was Bernard Barker, charged with recruiting the Cuban exiles who actually performed the burglary. Unrepentant, he seized the chance to justify the operation, but listening to his speech was like opening a letter delivered ten years too late: he talked of his love for Cuba, of his memories of the Bay of Pigs invasion, of our duty to the Cubans we had promised to free. All he wanted in return for helping the Republican Party was its gratitude and a promise to continue ostracizing Castro's Cuba. In 1973, his world seemed no more real than that of the Japanese soldier who belatedly emerged from the Phillipine jungle to obey his Emperor's surrender orders. The rest of the United States has managed to forget the years devoted to crushing the Communist island within ninety miles of our territory. Neglect has proved to be a simpler policy than military invasion.

Exiles never forget, of course, but the emigre communities in Miami, San Juan, and New Orleans have calmed down. Extremist groups may still throw a hand grenade down the gangplank of a Russian cruise ship or threaten the airlines of countries resuming diplomatic relations with Cuba, but the lurid billboard in San Juan that showed Cuban soldiers executing prisoners before a bloodsplashed wall disappeared years ago. Hardly anyone remembers its slogan.

It is surprising that only now, so long after he left Cuba, has Guillermo Cabrera Infante published Vista del Amanecer in el Tropico, [View of Dawn in the Tropics], his denunciation of the Cuban Revolution. Surprising, because it has taken so long for an eloquent literary statement to arrive from the Cuban opposition, and because he writes as bitterly as though he had left the island yesterday. Cabrera Infante did not oppose the Cuban government with such vehemence when he emigrated in the early Sixties. Like many of the exiles, he supported Castro at the beginning; for three years he was a cultural official in the revolutionary administration, a founder of its Film Institute. But after conflict over a film that was suppressed because its theme was "decadent," he left the island on a diplomatic mission never to return.

CABRERA INFANTE is too eccentric for any political group to trust him, the prestige of his 1964 novel, Three Trapped Tigers, has given him authority as a spokesman for refugee Cuban intellectuals. Three Trapped Tigers suggested oblique criticism of socialist Cuba because it was nostalgic for the bad old days of casinos, airconditioning and frivolity. Full of word play and nasty irreverence, it seemed to laugh in the face of socialist realism. But since then, especially after a celebrated case of censorship in 1969, Cabrera's feelings about Cuba hardened.

While Three Trapped Tigers is hilarious, Vista del Amanecer, published in 1974, is a grimly serious book, soaked with desperate humor. It is a collection of short pieces, meditations on images in Cuban history, few of them more than a page long. Each vignette presents a static scene or a brief incident. For the colonial period, they describe engravings: conquistadores meeting Indians, bloodhounds catching a runaway slave. For modern times, many of them comment on photographs: a revolutionary commander, terrorists dead in a ditch. At worst, these pieces resemble Reader's Digest fillers, but at their best they are epiphanies.

The book provides a view of history that is akin to walking past displays in a museum. Like a wax museum, it has its chamber of horrors--but everything in good taste and proportion, subdued by esthetic distance:

It was nine o'clock in the evening and the senator had a cafe con leche with a roll in his favorite cafe. At that moment two men entered, took out some enormous pistols and shot at the senator. Innocent or guilty, what is certain is that the senator was eating a roll when they killed him, staining his white linen suit with spilled blood and cafe con leche.

Cabrera's pessimism and deadpan ironic tone cement these vignettes into a book. Whether he is describing some feat of unbelievable bravery, such as peasants armed only with machetes attacking a Spanish cavalry unit, or some remarkable complacency or quite ordinary cowardice, he always deflates heroic claims that men control their destinies. Battles are planned with elaborate strategy and won by blind chance. So many of these images are both horrible and accidentally funny that they finally detach the reader from any feeling but irony.

The chronological progression of the pieces stands as Cabrera Infante's argument against the Castro government. He shows that the history of cruelty and violence on the island has known no beginning or end. Cuba has contributed a number of inventions to warfare and repression. The Spaniards bred slavehunting dogs, "Cuban hounds," that were exported to the United States. Spanish generals invented the system of concentrating a rural population in garrisons and declaring anyone outside them a rebel--a tactic that the United States would employ in Vietnam as its "strategic hamlets" policy. Cuban revolutionaries refined the technique of urban terrorism as far back as the Twenties.

CABRERA ATTACKS the Cuban revolution simply by painting it with the same colors that he uses for any other tyranny. He tells of a waiter turned terrorist who becomes a police interrogator and lives in a confiscated mansion. He recalls famous escapes, such as the two men who stowed away in the landing gear of a plane flying to Spain. (One of them fell out during the journey but the other arrived eight hours later, half-frozen.) The case that the book builds is guilt by association: the Cuban revolution rose out of a tradition of violence and has perpetuated it.

It is unfortunate that Cabrera fell prey to such a bitter, hysterical argument, but it is the only conclusion that is consistent with the pessimistic vision of his book. Denying any possibility of change, he denies any hope of social progress. His closing words are that "the sorrowful, unhappy and long island" will always be there, "after the last Cubans, surviving all the shipwrecks and eternally bathed by the current of the gulf: beautiful and green, imperishable, eternal."

At the last moment, Cabrera invokes Human Rights, assuming the voice of a mother wailing for a son left to die without medical attention in prison. But he does not assemble a moral argument; he is not even a Cuban Solzhenitsyn. He is a self-exiled superfluous man, out of touch with his society, venting his alienation in a very powerful book.

We need another kind of criticism, because pessimistic surrender leads nowhere. Beyond the loss that the exile of men like Cabrera Infante represents, a literary portrait of Cuba should consider the entire transformation of Cuban society. An evaluation of the Cuban revolution must judge its faults in the light of its accomplishments: the extension of economic justice, the political representation of the masses, and the establishment of a new national identity.