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¿Un Cubano Más?: An Interview with René Depestre about His Cuban Experience

I first became aware of the great Haitian writer Rene Depestre (1926-) when I saw the immortal Cuban film Memories of Underdevelopment (Guitierrez Alea, 1968). A scene from that film is a literary roundtable on the topic of "Literature and Underdevelopment," and among the participants (including David Vinas, Edmundo Desnoes, Gianni Toti, and others) is Depestre, whose cameo pronouncement on the topic under debate always seemed to me (like the film itself) of an underappreciated profundity:La cultura en un pais subdesarrollado no puede ser otra cosa que una operacion a veces costosa, dolorosa, mediante la cual un pueblo toma consciencia de su capacidad de transformar su vida social, de escribir su propia historia, y de recoger lo mejor de sus tradiciones para hacerlas fructificar y para enriquecerlas con las condiciones de la lucha de la liberacion nacional.This pronouncement on the role of culture in a revolutionary society-and the tension between the poet's rarified vocation and the expression of a genuinely popular culture-was my entre into reading Depestre and something that I have always taken as a critical key to interpreting his work.1In 2011, I wrote a letter to Depestre (he does not use email) at his home in Lezignan-Corbieres in the Aude Department in the South of France. I was interested in speaking to him, specifically about his experience living in Castro's Cuba for almost twenty years, from 1959 to 1978, where he published some of his most important works, including Journal d'un animal marin (1964), Un Arc-en-ciel pour l'Occident chretien (1967), Cantate d'octobre (1968), Poete a Cuba (1976) and his first novel, Le Mât de cocagne (1979), originally published in Spanish as El palo ensebado (1975). Despite this total personal and ideological investment in Cuba and its revolution during those years, it seemed to me that most of the critical commentary on Depestre was articulated from a Francophone and Haitian perspective that did not sufficiently take into account the Cuban context and milieu. So despite the existence of numerous excellent interviews with Depestre over the years (such as those conducted by Colin Dayan, Jean Jonassaint, Mohamed B. Taleb-Khyar and others), I wanted to speak with him specifically and exclusively about Cuba, a passion we share. Much to my delight, his hand-written response to my letter embraced the idea with enthusiasm and included an invitation to come to his home. I did so in June 2011.The result was not only a lively discussion but also, I believe, a friendship leading to several repeat visits over subsequent years. Perhaps it is because Depestre is approaching the end of his life and wants to set the record straight, but for whatever reason, once we began conversing about Cuba and other matters, the proverbial floodgates opened. Our first session lasted five or six hours. His energy to speak about Cuba and his past seemed boundless. He appeared to hold nothing back, including revelations about the intimacy of his friendship with Che Guevara, the guerilla training he received to infiltrate Haiti in 1959, his experience taking over the National Editions of Cuba publishing house and the editing and publishing of Don Quixote in 1960, and finally the surprising degree of his participation in the infamous "Heberto Padilla Affair" and his subsequent marginalization. And of course he was more than willing to offer his historical assessment of the Cuban revolution itself, which was in some ways surprisingly nuanced. The interviews were conducted in French with some phrases in Cuban Spanish (that I have left untranslated) thrown in for good measure.2Paul B. Miller: What were your first impressions or ideas about Cuba when you were growing up in Jacmel, Haiti?Rene Depestre: First of all, when I was a child, many Haitian workers from the Jacmel area would leave to cut sugarcane in Cuba, the braceros. From this region in the south of Haiti, thousands of people departed and some would return with news from Cuba. …