Farewell to the Sea, by Reinaldo Arenas (Viking, 413 pp., $18.95)
This novel has the rainbow sheen, the deceptive lusciousness of rotted meat. It is, for Cuba, what surgical drains are for heavy, abscessing flesh. Twice Farewell to the Sea was confiscated by Castro. Twice it was rewritten from memory. In 1974, at last, Reinaldo Arenas smuggled his manuscript out to Spain. It is the conclusive indictment of Cuba under Castro, vicious as sjambok blows across an open mouth. If you thought Cuba couldn’t be worse than Russia (at least it doesn’t get cold), reconstitute your thinking. Repression there, per capita, is even more thorough, attentive. The Cuban people didn’t have any comfortable, Old World acquaintance with totalitarianism. They had to be broken, then taught again from Lie One. And Cuba, remember, has no permeable border. “Our unavoidable, clear condition of slavery, the fact of having been born into the muted crowing of an island, the terrifying helplessness of an island, the prison-prison-prison that is an island.”
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