Their island story
Malcolm Deas
SELF-PORTRAIT OF THE OTHER: A MEMOIR by Herbert Padilla
Faber, £11.99, pp. 247
GUERRILLA PRINCE: THE UNTOLD STORY OF FIDEL CASTRO by Georgie Anne Geyer
Little, Brown & Co, £14.95, pp. 445
he author of the first of these books ran foul of the subject of the second in 1970, was briefly imprisoned and forced to perform a public act of self-criticism. That was the Padilla affair, which alienated from the Castro regime a number of prominent intellectual sympathisers who had managed to overlook many worse previous affairs that had not involved writers. It figures in the index of most books on Castro's Cuba, though not in that of Guerrilla Prince. Padilla is a poet. Geyer is not quite up to poets.
Unfortunately, Padilla's book reads as if he is not quite up to writing memoirs. The publisher asserts that they are written in 'a poet's prose'. Most poets do not write particularly good prose, or particularly memorable memoirs, and Padilla is no exception. His work is not provided with an index, though an index of proper names would have been impressive. He is not a boastful name-dropper, but he is a name- dropper in a lamentably well-established Latin American literary tradition, one given to recording encounters in cafés, breakfasts in hotels, conversations in news- paper offices, most of them 'abroad', many with friends departed (and their wives), the beauty of whose souls and the fineness of whose spirits most readers must take on trust. I suspect that this tradition derives from the great Nicaraguan poet, boule- vardier and drunk, Ruben Dario, the hero of the first Latin American literary boom, the one before the first world war, when the biggest American spenders in Paris were Argentinians.
Times have changed, and either the genre is now thoroughly exhausted or this poet's heart is not in it. From these parts of Self-portrait of the Other (the Spanish title is less pretentious — La Mala Memoria) some vignettes and conclusions stay in the reader's mind. Sartre had the first dis- posable lighter Padilla had ever seen, and fiddled with it all the time; Moscow KGB informers — 'short, well turned-out, and quite ceremonious' — spoke an antique Spanish that contained such phrases as 'Well, your excellency, I shall bring about my return at eventide'; Yevtushenko proved to be a loyal and courageous friend. But too many of the figures who flit across the pages are there because they were there because they were there.
Historians of Cuban literature will com- pile their own indexes, and for them Padil- la's portrait of the poet Jose Lezama Lima will make the book worth buying — affectionate, admiring, still critical. Padilla himself is un-tropical, un-baroque. He does not much like the sun. Even in this some- what weary Goodbye to All That there are some poetic moments, and even in trans- lation — Alexander Coleman's, perfectly unobtrusive — a flash or two, as with Castro's farewell towards the end: 'Just then Fidel appeared, half real and half fiction.' The account of 'the affair' is dis- tanced, tangential, like a victim's descrip- tion of a traffic accident.
A grinding shift of critical gears is required to make the change from Padilla to Georgie Anne Geyer, whose Guerrilla Prince is written in a style whose excesses would shock the designer of a Batista-era casino. 'Without the incredible editing mind and hand of Carol Tarlow, the book would never have had the style and form it has.' Carol Tarlow has much to answer for. The author has the imperfect grasp of lots of things, including English, that can only come from three decades as a syndicated .foreign correspondent and thrice weekly columnist. Of one poor man she says 'even- tually he would be shot dozens of times in the head by Fidel's executors'. Forget the 'dozens of times' — 'executors'? Fidel's legal training?
Still, historians have to read a lot of badly written books, by other historians as well as by journalists. It is a penalty of the profession. Padilla's book is not badly written, it is just too often dull. Geyer's book is bird-brained and very badly written, but it is not dull. Those interested in Castro and Castro's Cuba will have to read it, just as they will have to read Padilla. Geyer does not tell an entirely untold story. Most of her material is familiar, though she has some excellent new photographs and is more detailed than her rivals on Castro's relations with women. Her psychological and sociological specula- tions are not new, and many of them are dubious. It is far from being so clear that being illegitimate, a common enough condition where he came from, had any importance for Fidel, to give just one instance where the author sprays a quantity of psychological froth over him. Too many adjectives chase too few facts. The Colom- bian Jorge Eliecer Gaitan is described as a 'big sensuous man with hypnotic eyes . .. a big rugged populist'. Populist, yes, but he was not particularly big, nor particularly
sensuous. Does it matter? Those inaccurate in little are not necessarily inaccurate in much, but can you believe Geyer, even when you want to? Did Fidel, at that poet's request, really give Pablo Neruda $20,000 (US) when he visited Cuba, so that his wife could have some 'shopping money'? Tad Szulc's Fidel, or the attacks of the dogged Carlos Franqui, inspire more confidence than Geyer does, despite the trouble she has taken to track down and interview a large number of survivors from Castro's past.
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