Telex from Cuba: A Novel
Rachel Kushner
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 1416561048
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From the National Book Award Finalist and New York Times bestselling author of The Flamethrowers, an astonishingly wise, ambitious, and riveting novel set in the American community in Cuba during the years leading up to Castro's revolution—a place that was a paradise for a time and for a few. The first novel to tell the story of the Americans who were driven out in 1958, this is a masterful debut with a unique and necessary lens into US-Cuba relations.
Young Everly Lederer and K.C. Stites come of age in Oriente Province, where the Americans tend their own fiefdom—three hundred thousand acres of United Fruit Company sugarcane that surround their gated enclave. If the rural tropics are a child's dreamworld, Everly and K.C. nevertheless have keen eyes for the indulgences and betrayals of the grown-ups around them—the mordant drinking and illicit loves, the race hierarchies and violence.
In Havana, a thousand kilometers and a world away from the American colony, a cabaret dancer meets a French agitator named Christian de La Mazière, whose seductive demeanor can't mask his shameful past. Together they become enmeshed in the brewing political underground. When Fidel and Raúl Castro lead a revolt from the mountains above the cane plantation, torching the sugar and kidnapping a boat full of "yanqui" revelers, K.C. and Everly begin to discover the brutality that keeps the colony humming. Though their parents remain blissfully untouched by the forces of history, the children hear the whispers of what is to come.
Kushner's first novel is a tour de force, haunting and compelling, with the urgency of a telex from a forgotten time and place.
have a glorious harvest. “This revolution,” Castro said, “is for the cane cutters. It’s time for them to take their cut. And for Cuba to take hers.” He said the revolution was beginning, but that it wouldn’t be an easy process, that it was a road full of danger. “So many times now,” he said, “our revolution has been betrayed. In 1898, when the Americans invited themselves to rape our Cuba like a waterfront whore. Disposable, syphilitic, and worthy only of contempt. In 1952, when Batista
shape of softballs, with nubby-textured glass and ruffle-edged bottle caps like on bottles of cola. A whole case of the Bacardi, and I’ve never once dipped into any of it. I don’t think of it as something meant to be drunk, but a relic like all the other relics of our life in Cuba that I keep in this room, my den here in Tampa. Del didn’t express much interest in Mother and Daddy’s stuff. The older son flies the coop. It’s a classical model. The younger one stays in the nest, his mother’s boy.
squirming on your lap. I like being coquettish and slutty. Giggly and deferent. I like to fantasize about a man just like you watching me take my clothes off. I think about it when I’m alone, and I have to put my own little girl hands in my underwear, just to stop the longing to be on your lap. Gullibility was beside the point: hearing these things was a performance the men were paying for. They didn’t really want to know what she liked, and it never would have occurred to her to tell them. But
Phillip might explain it to her. 14 Christmas in Havana The morning we were leaving, Del kept us waiting. His bags were packed and in the hall with mine and Mother and Daddy’s, but there was no sign of him. Crushing season was set to begin just after the New Year, and people were going to Havana or Miami or New York to get a proper holiday before the sugar mill started running around the clock. This was December of 1957, just before the big cane fire. Before anything, really, had
kidnapping is that? The rebels managed to look like real heroes—romantic-type revolutionaries—right there in the pages of Life magazine. It would have been quite a scandal that they had an American boy on their side. And not just any boy, but a poster child for American “imperialismo”—Delmore Stites, son of Malcolm Stites, manager of the United Fruit Company’s Cuba Division. I fiddled with the radio set and finally got Rebelde. It sounded like they’d closed down the highway east of Camagüey.