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A True Story: A Cuban in New York

Twenty-four years after its publication in Spanish, Miguel Barnet’s testimonial novel La vida real (1986) has finally been translated into English. The fact in itself is fortunate, since A True Story: A Cuban in New York develops new features of a Spanish American literary genre that Barnet had invented back in 1966 with Biografı́a de un Cimarrón (originally translated as The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave , 1968, and retranslated in 1994). As in previous testimonial novels, La vida real does not claim to be a realistic account of a single life. For Barnet, ‘‘memory as a part of the imagination has been the touchstone of this book.’’ He describes his position as ‘‘on the fence between anthropological and literary tendencies . . . because I believe that it’s about time they go hand in hand without rejecting each other.’’ Among the new characteristics of this vibrant genre is first the expansion of its geographical realm: as the protagonist migrates from South to North America, so does the genre, which has now reached the Northern Hemisphere with its literary-ethnographical account of Latino life in New York City. Another novelty of the text is the new type of protagonist/narrator. In contrast to earlier testimonios that center on exemplary political activists who lived in times of extraordinary historical change, A True Story follows ‘‘a normal Cuban . . . who, after an eventful life in the Cuban countryside and then in Havana, decides to emigrate to the United States a decade before the triumph of the Cuban Revolution’’ (José Manuel Prieto in his introduction to the novel). Hence, the subtitle of the English translation is deceptive. It is not until the last third of the novel that we read about the life of a Cuban in New Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 82, Vol. 44, No. 1, 2011, 159 160