Sartre wanted to read the palm of a country he didn’t understand at all. And as a palmist, he was disastrous.
14ymedio, Yunior García Aguilera, Madrid, 20 November 2024– In these days shaken by earthquakes and cyclones, I have revisited Jean-Paul Sartre’s book Hurricane over Sugar. After finishing it, I could not help but feel a little sorry for the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Sartre wanted to read the palm of a country he did not understand at all. And as a palm reader, he turned out to be disastrous. Often, the greatest stupidity is that which accompanies intellectuals, like a blazer over the shoulders.
In his collection of reports on the nascent Castroite Cuba, Sartre was a victim of the “retinitis pigmentosa” that he himself criticized at the beginning of his articles. He fell into the same trap as those Parisians he describes in his essay Paris Under Occupation, enchanted by their own German executioners, accepting as natural what was not and being complicit in their infamy.
It is not surprising, however. Every dictatorship, however despicable its record, has always found a poet willing to sing its praises. In his book From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chávez: Intellectuals and a Century of Political Hero Worship, sociologist Paul Hollander offered an interesting study of those romances that have brought the worst autocrats and supposedly lucid thinkers together under the same covers.
Every dictatorship, no matter how despicable its record, always found some poet willing to compose its praises.
Nicolás Guillén, considered Cuba’s National Poet, was once seduced by Machado. And I am not referring to Antonio, the Sevillian poet, but to Gerardo, the dictator born in Las Villas. It is said that Guillén belonged to his censorship corps and that he had to hide from the crowd after the fall of the Machado regime. Later he would be bewitched by another, even worse dictator, on the other side of the planet. He himself composed the song to Joseph Vissarionovich “Stalin, captain / whom Shangó protects and whom Ochún protects / at your side, singing.”
Nicolás was named not only Guillén, but also Batista. Perhaps that is why he never became Castro’s favorite. And he worked hard to write the most childish poems anyone could imagine, like the one that said: “Oh, how beautiful my flag is, my little Cuban flag, without being sent from outside.” But the bearded man considered Guillén a drone incapable of producing poems to the rhythm of the harvest, as did, for example, the selfless Indio Naborí.
Cabrera Infante recounted that the poet confessed his panic to him under a mango tree. Fidel had criticized him at one of his university meetings, and the kids improvised a quasi-act of repudiation in front of his house, chanting the conguita: “Nicolá, you don’t work anymore / Nicolá, you are not a poet at all.” One day I asked Antón Arrufat about this anecdote and he told me that the writer could not be given much credit, but he did not doubt that the story was true.
Let us return to Sartre and his trip to Havana in 1960. He and Simone de Beauvoir had already been in an open relationship for just over 30 years. Sartre was her necessary love, although she would maintain countless contingent loves, devouring students, both male and female, without any discrimination. Beauvoir would confess in one of her letters to other lovers that Sartre never satisfied her sexually, but the ugly man was a genius with whom it was worth debating existentialism in and out of bed.
Havana at that time turned them on. She, perhaps, had an orgasm when Fidel Castro first shouted “Patria o Muerte” in front of 500,000 fans. Both of them got hot when Che, a cigar in his mouth, described their relationship as a “revolutionary love.” He, surely, suffered the biggest erection when he got Fidel Castro to sit his buttocks, for the first time, on a theater seat. Especially because it was one of his plays, La puta respeto (The Respectful Whore). The bearded man didn’t understand much about art, but he did about rifles, so his praise was less theatrical and more military: “I just discovered a tremendous weapon,” he told him backstage. And a blushing Sartre answered: “Well, use it.” From then on, perhaps, Fidel would assume his definitive role in the Cuban tragedy.
It is probable that neither Sartre nor his sweet Castor understood that testosterone-saturated island. But the people on the street sensed them immediately, improvising a conga that was much more suspicious and synthetic than the French intellectual’s reports: “Saltre, Simona, un dos, tres / Saltre, Simona, echen un pie.”
Hurricane over Sugar aged quickly and badly. Sartre would break with the Revolution a decade later, after the Padilla case. The employees of official thought try to justify their decision by blaming the bad influence of Carlos Franqui. What we could say is that, if Sartre and Simone were to come back to life and visit Cuba today, neither of them would find any reason to get excited. And the book would be called, without a doubt, Hurricane over Marabou.
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