Revolution in Gray: Leonardo Padura’s El hombre que amaba a los perros

• In Event: The Tricontinental Legacy: A Retrospective on Global Revolution

Abstract

In 2007, Cuban essayist and intellectual Ambrosio Fornet gave a speech entitled “El quinquenio gris: revisitando el término,” a surprisingly frank re-evaluation of the difficult first half of the 1970s which Fornet termed “gray” for their turn to imposed socialist-realist literary models and suppression of political and literary creativity in favor of “bureaucracy and routine.” The period of 1971-1976 came on the heels of Cuba’s turn away from European allegiances toward rhetorics of decolonization and solidarity with the then-called Third World through the ideology of Tricontinentalism, even as the island’s relations with the Soviet Union grew closer in the political, economic and artistic spheres. The inheritances of this relationship on the first Cuban generations who grew up with the Revolution is the primary subject of Cuban novelist Leonardo Padura Fuentes’s 2009 novel El hombre que amaba a los perros. The novel traces the three interlinked stories of Leon Trotsky, his Catalonian assassin Ramón Mercader and the fictional Cuban novelist Iván. Padura’s work, however, stages the reconsideration of Cuba’s relationship with other revolutionary movements and powers from the literal and ideological margins. This paper considers Padura’s novel as part of a recent movement among Cuban intellectuals to reconsider the course of the Cuban Revolution in its international context, particularly the Soviet period, as one where the radical possibilities of Tricontinentalism and other liberation ideologies were foreclosed in favor of what Fornet calls the “deletéreos efectos de aquella estética normativa.”

Author

• Lanie M Millar, University of Oregon