Myles B. Kantor
Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2003

Note: On Jan. 8, 1959, Fidel Castro entered Havana after Fulgencio Batista left Cuba for the Dominican Republic on Jan. 1.

In 1972, Houghton Mifflin published "Kissinger: The Uses of Power" by 22-year-old David Landau. The book began as a series of articles for The Harvard Crimson and became an international best seller. In 2001, Landau founded Pureplay Press "as a vehicle for publishing books about the history and culture of Cuba."

His new novel, published simultaneously in English and in Spanish translation, is entitled "Death Is Not Always the Winner" or "No siempre gana la muerte" (homepage www.cubanovel.com).

As someone not of Cuban ancestry, how did you become interested in Cuba?

The first part of your question brings up a salient point. We have in this country – especially in fiction-writing – what I like to call the failed melting pot of literary identity. If I'm Irish, I'm supposed to write about my dysfunctional, alcoholic family; if I'm Jewish, I should do successive memoirs about my domineering mother; while if I'm writing a novel about Cuba, I had better have a name like Hijuelos, García or Valdés.

Thirteen years ago, through a mutual friend, I became acquainted with a gentleman of Cuban origin who then came to rent living space in my Arlington, Virginia, house. This was Emilio Adolfo Rivero. I knew in advance that living with him would be an adventure; I remember the shudder that went through me when for the first time I heard him say he had been a political prisoner under Castro for eighteen and a half years.

When Rivero learned of my prior publishing record, he determined to involve me in the Cuban situation. By 1989 I was a former anti-war activist from the Vietnam period who had taken distance from my Left-liberal past. For many people who opposed the Vietnam War, admiration of Fidel Castro has been something like a physical reflex.

Indeed, when I met Rivero I knew only three names from Cuban history: Machado, the tyrant who was followed by Batista; Batista, the tyrant who was replaced by Castro; and Castro, the tyrant who is now celebrating 44 years in power.

A few weeks after Rivero's arrival in my house, his younger brother Adolfo – an ex-Communist official in Castro's government and a recent exile from Cuba – came to live in the neighborhood. These proved to be men of enormous cultivation, with a vast experience of history, whose daily conversation showed me the inaccuracy of Americans' images about Cuba and Castro. Through these people, I met dozens of other Cubans and began to see the whole matter of U.S.-Cuban relations from a Cuban perspective.

What drew you to the form of a novel instead of non-fiction?

Actually, I've written a history of Cuba as well as the novel. The history is called "The Un-Cubans" and will be coming out next year.

I love both forms. History and the novel are siblings deriving from the same parent, narrative prose. Novelists nowadays think they are free to play with history. That hasn't always been the case. When Flaubert wrote "The Sentimental Education" he scrupulously researched every particular of his panorama, 1840s Paris, which he already knew from first-hand experience as a young man.

My historical work about Cuba, which I wrote before doing the novel, is a family biography through which one can see the enormous scope of Cuba's progression from the early 1930s through the late 1980s. Its major characters are the Rivero brothers, their father – a journalist who covered Cuba's presidents from 1933 to 1959 – and their respective families.

These people lived very close to the center of Cuban history. They saw a lot, remembered it well and recorded it eloquently, in letters, testaments and so on. The story of what happened to this family during Castro's regime is one with really tremendous impact – as striking as any fiction you can imagine.

Through several years of work I put this tale into its broader context, wrote a historical narrative and presented it for consideration by New York publishing houses. The manuscript, and even I myself, received brutal rejections. One editor commented that she saw little point in considering an intimate work about Cubans written by a "gringo."

When this happened, a number of my Cuban friends told me I ought to take what I knew about Cuba and turn it into a novel – which, after another several years, I had managed to do. Again I went to the New York houses, which rejected the book on grounds that it had too much history in it.

After this experience I decided to found my own publishing firm, which would issue works about Cuba in English and Spanish. In addition to my novel, we've published a bilingual edition of sonnets by the well-known Cuban poet Néstor Díaz de Villegas. At present I'm looking at manuscripts by several other Cuban and Cuban-American writers who would like to be part of what we're doing.

My novel – if I may so assert – gets the best of both fiction and history. Some scenarios are completely based on historical fact. Others, like the assassination scene, are imagined, while being in every detail consistent with history. We cannot say that these things happened, but we can say they could have happened – and that if they had, they would have unfolded pretty much as they do in the novel.

Let me refer to one scenario in showing how the novel functions differently from a historical work. It's pretty clear to me that Castro actually encouraged the event we call the Bay of Pigs. He did so by having his own agents, working undercover, spread the story that his regime was ready to fall – that a mere push from the U.S. would spark a general uprising in Cuba and end his rule.

Castro knew the U.S. was going to take some action against him. He wanted to have a hand in what the U.S. would do. He wanted a violent showdown that he would win. He wanted the incalculable political benefit that such a victory would entail.

His counterintelligence people sowed a brilliant fiction in the minds of American agents – who, while being highly capable and courageous, were also susceptible to optimistic viewpoints. Castro got U.S. officials to buy the idea that they could have a cheap victory in Cuba. The result – a small invasion at the Bay of Pigs that Castro's forces handily defeated – was a victory of infinite dimension for Castro and an unparalleled disaster for the U.S.

A careful historian, in looking at the buildup to the Bay of Pigs, can say with confidence that Castro's own spies did tell stories about the regime being ready to fall. While you won't read that in official documents, plenty of people are still around to affirm it. The thing you cannot do in a historical work is to locate the heart of the puzzle – to uncover what Castro was thinking. The framework of a novel, by contrast, allows you to draw a picture. Even there you must not say things too broadly or flatly, because they need to stay subtle; but you can guide the reader's imagination.

About the Bay of Pigs, my novel proposes a striking new look at what most everyone who knows the episode assumes to be reliable history. The novel's view of things tends to upset Castro's claim that he and his regime have been victims of American aggression. Indeed, the image of Castro as a bold player, an audacious instigator, is much more true to life than the oddly prevalent view of him as a persecuted rebel.

In designing a Web site for the novel, I thought I would make parts of my earlier historical work available to the novel's readers as background matter. Owing to that first set of rejections from New York editors, I had come to think of the history book as merely a study for the novel.

After an eight-year hiatus, and with the purpose of mining it for the novel's Web page, I returned to the history book and found it a remarkable work in its own right, possessing qualities quite distinct from what's in the novel. So my press is preparing it for publication. Projected appearance date for "The Un-Cubans" is October 2003, with the Spanish translation – "Los Incubanos" – to follow later.

What historical period in Cuba does your novel examine?

After a retrospective opening, the narrative moves in linear fashion from December 1959 to September 1961. The settings are Havana, other parts of Cuba, and Washington, D.C. High points are an attempted assassination of Castro, depictions of the Bay of Pigs battle, and an emotional trial scene. A penultimate chapter provides a retrospective view of Cuban history, as seen from Cuba's political prisons, from 1961 to 1982. The finale takes place in Paris in 1982.

You reveal the source of your book's title with an epigraph from George Arnaud's "The Wages of Fear." How does Arnaud's observation relate to your novel?

For a long time I wanted to call this novel "The Losers." That intent was integral to one of the book's main messages, namely that oftentimes the losers of history deserve the kind of notice reserved for winners. Who have been some of the last century's biggest winners? Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao and certainly Castro.

At the same time, our media and indeed most of our historians are addicted to winners. In view of society's basic and terrible prejudice against losers, I'm sure I would have killed the novel by using that title.

I was still searching for a suitable title when I happened to pick up the Arnaud novel, which Emilio Adolfo Rivero of all people had given me. The opening of that novel is a section called, simply, "Warning" – a device I also wound up using in my book. And on the first page of the "Warning" is Arnaud's statement about death not always winning – a sentence that attracted me enormously. I installed it as my epigraph and kept looking for a title.

In his first pass at translating the book, Beni Dou – who knows French quite well – handed the draft back to me and said in passing, "I just took that opening quote and put it as the title." He had rendered Arnaud's curled French phrase into good, strong Spanish: La muerte no siempre gana. That was real progress. I fiddled with the Spanish and made it "No siempre gana la muerte." Then, in fashioning the English title, I changed the sense yet again.

I like the novel's title far better than my original, which it happens to preserve as a reflection. The title works especially well because much of the narrative shows people getting loose from the grip of death. And I would venture to call the title an epitaph for the century that ended on September 11, 2001.

At one point, your protagonist refers to Fidel Castro as an "entrepreneur in politics."

Let's be clear: Castro doesn't want you to know who he is. He isn't trying to be understood. We are now 44 years into this absurd regime called the Cuban revolution, and hardly anyone knows how Castro has managed it.

I always laugh when I see an account by a journalist or by someone else who claims, after a number of hours in the presence of the leader, to have gotten to know Castro. If the human heart is bottomless – which I think it is – then Castro's is the deepest of chasms. You don't just reach into that chasm and find the man.

From his political actions, however, we can call Castro an opportunist. After the disastrous failure of the April 9, 1958, insurrection in Havana against Batista's regime, Castro made a deal with the communists because he understood that his own "July 26" cadres had no ability to organize in Cuba's cities, whereas the communists did.

[The July 26 Movement derived its name from Castro's attack on the Moncada barracks on July 26, 1953.]

Castro cared no more for the communists than he did, or does, for anyone else. He used the communists – and when he had finished using them, he discarded them. U.S. officials, especially in the regime's early years, often puzzled about whether Castro was a communist; but the major question of Cuban politics since January 1, 1959, has not had to do with communism. It has been: "Are you with Fidel or against Fidel?" Those against Fidel – or even suspected of being against Fidel – have been subject to destruction; and hundreds of communist leaders have had their lives destroyed.

Your novel doesn't romanticize pre-Castro Cuba. For instance, you refer to the "torture chambers" of Fulgencio Batista's secret police. This reading of Cuban history seems to view Castro as the culmination of tyranny, as opposed to contrasting with a previous golden age.

I think Tocqueville's great discovery – the one in ''L'Ancien Régime,'' where he finds that social upheavals occur in societies where conditions are already improving – strongly applies to Cuba. The trajectory of my novel didn't allow for a real picture of the pre-Castro age. My history book does give that in detail.

When you look at the progression that includes the Machado period, the revolution of '33, the Batista presidents, the Auténtico governments and then the Batista regime of the fifties, you see a vibrant, prospering society that also had major tensions and discrepancies.

Batista himself was an equivocal figure – surprisingly progressive in some respects, corrupt and repressive in others – a kind of Cuban Nixon if you will. The abuses of the Castro regime have moved Cuban poet Néstor Díaz de Villegas, in the last line in one of his sonnets, to make an ironic plea for a return of the Batista days: ''Let them give us the forgotten dictatorship!''

The society Batista helped engineer was surely on the upswing when Fidel came to power. Today, with Cuba depleted and sad, any form of progressive upheaval is hard to imagine.

To what extent are your characters, for instance the protagonist, based on historical figures?

Rodrigo is an amalgam of fact and fiction. Some of the subsidiary characters, like Gálvez, are fairly literal portraits of actual people, while others like Nathalie, Rodrigo's main love interest, are entirely imagined. In essence, this is a story whose resemblance to actual people and events is definitely not coincidental.

The lives of Emilio Adolfo Rivero – the "real-life" component of Rodrigo – and of other actual people profiled in the book do tend to explode the widespread myth that Castro and his band of rebels were the sole opposition to Batista. In fact, what we call the Cuban revolution was fought and won by a wide assortment of people and groups that Castro, on coming to power, hastened to destroy. Cubans are well aware of this history, while American and European intellectuals – who have largely celebrated Castro and his regime – remain ignorant of it.

You mentioned being an antiwar activist from the Vietnam period who became distanced from your leftist past. What caused this distance?

When the war stopped, I found no further reason to continue hating the government. Encountering the Cuba matter in 1989, I made a firm departure from the Left-liberal worldview – since love of Castro is a keystone of the Left's collective psychology.

In light of what I've learned about Cuba, I've had to reconsider my old attitude to America's war in Vietnam. What made that war politically untenable, its fatal flaw, was the same kind of arrogance and shortsightedness that has handicapped this country in dealing with Castro.

But when we see the regimes that have come to dominate in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos – when we see the human destruction and the infinite anguish those regimes have caused – I think we must grant that America's effort to stop the movement of tyrannical subversion in Southeast Asia was intrinsically just.

We've finally outgrown the sixties – or most of us have – and we are living in a different time. We now inhabit the age of 9/11, an event which contains a greater smell of evil than anything since the civilian slaughters of World War II. I, for one, am inclined to view with favor the current administration¹s willingness to go to war against the regime in Iraq; and I expect that in their Iraq policy Bush and his advisers will show more maturity than did the U.S. leaders who dealt with Vietnam.

Contact Myles Kantor at kantor@FreeEmigration.com

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