THE CUBAN COMEDY

A young poet’s muse is slowly stifled as the Castro regime takes power in Cuba.

If this novel by the veteran poet, novelist, and translator (The Island Kingdom, 2015, etc.) qualifies as a “comedy,” it’s of the most melancholy and bittersweet sort. Its hero, Elena, has grown up in a rural patch of the island, the daughter of the maker of an infamously potent firewater. Dad suggests that her budding love of poetry at 17 is the real danger, though. She’s “infected with something more terminal than death,” and he means it: Elena’s verse for a time turns the town into sex-obsessed layabouts and catches the attention of Daniel, a mesmerizing “Bard of the Revolution” who awards her a national poetry prize. In the interior and for a time in Havana, Elena’s life feels charmed and strange in ways that evoke the 1960s Latin Boom. Her father’s cousin is a healer who speaks in a patois of Latin, Spanish, French, and English; she falls for a comically well-endowed man who quits his firewater habit before they marry, have a daughter, and he dies; in Havana, she’s taken in by a couple that keeps a coop full of pigeons and a parrot with the fraught name of Pity. The peculiarity of the narrative becomes deliberately straightforward, though, after she marries Daniel and he falls afoul of Communist leaders and is detained by State Security. Tales of lust and exorcism and flight fade from the narrative, replaced by Elena’s despair that poetry gained her only “a husband in jail and the sword of the state dangling over her.” Rather than get into particulars of how everyday life changed in Cuba by the early '60s, Medina memorably conjures a stark change in atmosphere.

A bleak fable that honors the poetic spirit, recognizing lyricism and metaphor as dangerous tools of defiance.