The Initials of the Earth: A Novel of the Cuban Revolution

Cuban writer and filmmaker Diaz (1941–2002) originally published this novel of the revolution in Havana and Madrid in 1987, a few years before his self-imposed exile to Europe in 1991. It traces the life of Carlos Pérez Cifredo, the bourgeois child of a smalltime moneylender, as he grows up into the revolution and its aftermath. The young Carlos harbors a childish adoration-cum-contempt for a poor illiterate girl, a wariness of the black boys from the nearby slum and a real love for John Wayne. As a young man, he struggles to reconcile a visceral resistance to communism with bourgeois guilt and with social idealism. Over the course of the revolution, Carlos becomes a doctrinaire leader of the student movement, an eager would-be fighter, a lousy soldier, a sexual experimenter, a denier of communism and a pariah. Diaz supported the revolution when Castro took power, but the seeds of his later ambivalence toward the regime can be found here, along with an almost impossibly complex and intimate rendering of the revolution, for which a helpful chronology is included. (Oct.)