‘I Breathe Through Memory’, Gastón Baquero’s Letters to Lydia Cabrera

The poet went into exile in the Spanish capital, and Cabrera in the United States. Both were part of a Republic that had gone down the drain.

’Slave Ship’, by Manuel Mendive (1976). / National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 28 December 2024 – How could Lydia Cabrera and Gastón Baquero speak to each other except as two Napoleonic marshals after Waterloo, or as two old gods banished by new gods? Reconstructing at least a segment of this conversation, as Ernesto Hernández Busto has done for the publishing house Betania, is not just philology: it is a profession of faith.

The presence of the exile in any era is silent. One wants to exist quietly and not attract attention. Baquero broke that myth with his correspondence and with the Creole lunches that he presided over in Madrid – “topped off with a tamarind drink” – which ended up becoming a tradition for his disciples.

The poet went into exile in the Spanish capital; and Cabrera in the United States (“a country she never really liked”). Both were part of a Republic that had gone down the drain, not only as a political project but also as a possibility. For Hernández Busto, Cabrera is “the great loner of Cuban literature.” A staunch anti-communist, what place could she have in Castro’s new order? She survived thanks to the jewels she had taken out of Cuba.

“Both lived long lives, with somewhat sad old ages, which revolved around those two poles of Cuban exile: Madrid and Miami”

“Both lived long lives, with somewhat sad old ages, which revolved around those two poles of Cuban exile: Madrid and Miami,” Hernández Busto sums up in his prologue. The originals of the Letters are among the Lydia Cabrera Papers of the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami library. The book is available for free download at this link.

In the first letter, which Hernández Busto estimates was sent around 1978, Baquero comments on the literary “perversity” that Alejo Carpentier’s The Rite of Spring represents for him . “It is the book that Castro had been demanding for a long time to consider it complete,” he says.

Between anecdotes and gossip about friends and enemies, Baquero outlines several ideas about the past. The first, about the demonization of the Republic promoted by Castroism, is precisely what Carpentier’s book does not forgive. “Scoundrelisms like this one by Alejo help Castro a lot, who justifies all his crimes by painting a country that, according to that painting, deserved to be destroyed,” he writes.

The cult of the frustrated nation takes on, in the letters, an almost religious flight

The cult of the frustrated nation takes on an almost religious dimension in the letters. “Lidia: you did very well to be born on May 20,” he says in 1982. “You are prenatal ready. You were born on the day of the birth of the Republic, and you and I know how marvelous the word Republic tastes, the Republic.”

Another idea is the distinction between the exile and the dissident. “A dissident is, for example, Carlos Franqui, he of Revolución,” he tells Cabrera that same year. “I don’t know how I would feel in that meeting with people, compatriots yes, but at a distance, who are here in Madrid and we have never met. They consider themselves the great democrats, betrayed (very late, in some cases, by the way) by the bonísimo fidelito.”

Years and years of correspondence leave unforgettable scenes and comments. Lydia and Eugenio Florit dancing a danzón; more of Carpentier’s mischief; Lorenzo García Vega’s “son of a bitch”; Nicolás Guillén’s “comemierdería*”; mutual friends, lost, quarreled or dead.

In 1978, Baquero had been in Madrid for almost 20 years, an exile that had not extinguished his “creoleness,” he warned his correspondent. That year he obtained Spanish citizenship, but he remained in the imaginary territory of the Island: “I live in memory, I breathe through memory.”

*Translator’s note: comemierdería: literally (one could say), shit-eating-ness. The dictionary offers: mediocrity, pedantry, stupidity, dipshit.

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