A Literary Look at Cuba in Revolt

LOS ANGELES -- When Americans think of 1950s Cuba, they tend to picture Fidel Castro ranting in tattered fatigues about the revolution.

But a new novel shows us, instead, United Fruit Co. executives in starched linen suits, daughters who play Chopin preludes on pianos groaning with humidity, a mysterious exotic dancer who comforts dictators, and company wives who wile away their days dreaming of French perfume. The cane cutters and "the help" are viewed obliquely, as if through the shimmer of tropical heat. Just before the revolution, then, we see the crisp world of Anglo privilege it overturned.

These scenes were created, or re-created, by Rachel Kushner, a Los Angeles-based art writer whose compelling debut novel, "Telex From Cuba," was recently published to strong early reviews.

The book was built on extensive research as well as family lore: Her mother spent four years, before her 15th birthday, in what was then called Cuba's "Oriente province," the daughter of a middle-class nickel-mine manager.

"She was slightly aware at the time, and certainly aware later, of a kind of disparity between the way they lived in the American colony and the way the Cubans lived," said Kushner, 39, at a Cuban restaurant near her home in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Echo Park, which she shares with her professor husband and their 10-month-old son.

"But I think it was a very free place for a child, compared to living in the States. Especially in the '50s: Things were racially a little more mixed than they were here, and it was just a wonderful place to be a kid -- very tropical, very beautiful."

Two of the novel's key characters are children: This allows Kushner to frame a complicated racial and political situation through relatively innocent eyes, free of ideology and adult politeness. But more practically, the children of the '50s are, in many cases, still alive to serve as sources, while the adults of the period have mostly passed away.

She was struck, during the interviews she conducted on visits to Cuba and Florida, by the intensity of her subjects' memories as their stories called a lost world back into being. What she's writing about, after all, is a place "essentially wiped off the map." She has a hard time making simple sense of it all.

"A historical event represents the best and the worst of that moment," said Kushner, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia University. "There were people in Cuba who truly had substantial things to gain from revolution. There were people who had things to lose in the revolution. I think they're all allowed to have their memories of what happened."

Kushner " who was raised in San Francisco's Haight district by poetry-loving scientist parents and moved to Los Angeles in 2003 " made three visits to Cuba over the six years it took her to write the book. Much of the novel takes place in Oriente (Spanish for "East"), a fertile province then owned by American interests. Roughly 330,000 acres of sugar cane fields were owned by United Fruit.

She came across a range of political views " some sympathetic to the revolution, others who called Cuban workers "peons" " as well as memories, from the child who sees his father burned and bleeding from the fires set in his fields to the butler who became a town mayor after the revolution. Her grandfather's assistant became what she calls a national hero because of his technical ability at the nickel plant after the Americans left.

"I wanted to bring out the excitement of the revolution and also give some sense of why it overlooked some of its brighter possibilities," she said. "The thrill of liberation from the cane cutters, the loss of that world for the Americans, the kids who loved it and had to leave. And also this very open moment ... of what could happen before things became ideological."

Her most important source was the son of a United Fruit manager who serves as the model for one of her narrators. Kushner calls him the novel's muse.

"He talked about his life as if it was a childhood paradise for him " and he wasn't a sentimental man. But he paused at a point and said, 'We went down there, and we took.' And I stole that line for the book, because it just rang so true."

Other characters, based on her mother's family, come from Tennessee and head to Oriente because they are not comfortable with their status back home.

"It kind of speaks to the time," Kushner said, "when people tried to move to these tropical locations to ratchet themselves up a little bit to a higher class."

As an American writing about a time and place she'd never experienced, Kushner was not in a position to fake it. And while the wealth of research material made her novel possible, it wasn't easy.

"I think there's an inevitable process of failure you move yourself through ... The material itself is not the armature for the story, even though it seems like it would be. You have to work backward, as a kind of framing, from something that we all know happened " the revolution. But I had to throw out everything I wrote and start over," she said.

"It's a cliche, and in a way it's a conservative idea about fiction, but I did learn the hard way that plot does need to dictate the story. Even if it happened in real life " and, oftentimes, especially if it happened in real life " it might not work in fiction. So I probably used 10 percent of my research: You learn after a point that you can't have a precious relationship with historical facts."