Testimonial Literature and Conversations As Literary Discourse: Cuba and Nicaragua

Author(s): Eliana S. Rivero, C. Alita Kelley and Alec Kelley

Source: Latin American Perspectives , Summer, 1991, Vol. 18, No. 3, Voices of the
Voiceless in Testimonial Literature, Part I (Summer, 1991), pp. 69-79
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.

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 Testimonial Literature and
Conversations as Literary Discourse:
Cuba and Nicaragua
by
Eliana S. Rivero
Translated by C. Alita Kelley with Alec Kelley

Revolutionary literatures in Spanish America have flourished in recent

years, almost into a veritable avalanche of output. Not only must we bear in
mind the texts of countries where successful revolutions have taken place, as
Cuba or Nicaragua, but also the counterhegemonic discourses which can be
seen arising and evolving in exile or in guerrilla warfare, shedding new light
on an emerging reality.
As a corollary to this innovative context, formal literary configurations
are found which not only alter, modify, and overflow existent linguistic
molds, but also break genre boundaries and even give rise to new categories
of discourse which, within the limits of traditional literature, could be
considered suspect, unclassifiable, or simply nonexistent. The so-called
"testimonial literature" figures predominantly in the second category and was
first observed in Cuba and Nicaragua in the form of literatura de campafia'
(battlefield literature), such as diaries kept by those taking part in guerrilla
warfare, and secondly through the continued proliferation of collected papers
and reevaluations of past events, which attempted to recapture the everyday
events of the revolution from its very beginnings.
Literatura de campania has highly respectable forerunners in the writings
of nineteenth-century revolutionaries, among which figure the diaries of Jose
Marti. In our own times we hear voices from armed and clandestine struggles
in Latin America, and, as is to be expected, first-person accounts bearing
witness or interpreting events predominate, with memories and analyses

Eliana S. Rivero, born in Cuba, is a professor of Spanish at the University of Arizona. She is the
author of numerous publications on Latin American and U.S. Hispanic literatures, especially on
women authors. This article is a revised and augmented version of her earlier (1985) article. The
author thanks C. Alita de Lomelini Kelley, a poet and Ph.D. candidate in Spanish at the University
of Arizona, for translating, and Alec Kelley, professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of
Arizona, for word processing and additional editing of the manuscript. The English versions of texts
quoted are translations by Alita Kelley.

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 70, Vol. 18 No. 3, Summer 1991, 69-79
? 1991 Latin American Perspectives

69

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70 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

recollected after the triumph. Cuban literature now includes titles such as
Giron en la memoria (Giron in My Memory) by Victor Casaus (first prize by
the Casa de las Americas for testimonial literature in 1970), which marked
the recognition of this testimonial text - a collection of eyewitness observa-
tions of events 14 years earlier in the decisive victory against imperialist
aggression.
In Nicaragua a couple of years after the defeat of Somoza, the Sandinista
victory gave rise to accounts of the political and personal development of its
leaders. A work such as Comandante Omar Cabezas Lacayo's La montania
es algo mas que una inmensa estepa verde (1982) takes its place within the
recent but solid tradition of testimonial literature, albeit in a somewhat
unusual way, turning its author and main character into one of the most
discussed writers of Latin America in view of his highly artistic prose style
and the high readability of the text, which the reader "finds hard to put down"
(see Gordils, 1983). At the same time this testimonial text can be said to
represent a new mode of discourse, if one bears in mind that it was written
on request and not with literary pretensions. The text in fact is a transcription
of a tape-recorded account. Here, then, we are not only confronted with a
testimonial form outside the borders of the genre, or even its subgenres, as
regards its origin, content, and aesthetic form, but one challenging the very
essence and nature of traditional memoirs by an eyewitness narrator. Hence
the primary characteristic of "oral" literature lends to the transcribed/written
account certain definitive characteristics which determine its uniqueness.
These comments will, in part, deal with precisely those unique qualities.
The narrative - I prefer to use that term - is set forth by a personal
narrator, that is, in the first person singular, as is customary in diaries or
memoirs, and is linked in conversational dialogue with an interlocutor,
detected by the use of ta or vos, the second-person singular familiar form, or,
very rarely, the second-person plural (ustedes).

That's to say, you go to the Front because you agree with their politics. No
matter what, scared as you are, either you stay or you don't. But it does
influence you to believe that your Front can beat Somoza, Somoza's Guards,
that you too are one of those who's going to throw Somoza out. It's more than
that, it's not just that. It doesn't strike you just when you're going to the Front;
six years after I had been working legally, not underground, when I went into
the hills I did it feeling we in the mountains were a real force, the myth, you
know, of the mountain men - strange, mysterious, unknown - you know,
Modesto, up there ... And down in the city the secret ones and we, the "legal"
ones, talked about being in the mountains like it was something out of myth,
that's where the real force was, and the arms, the best men, those who nobody
could beat, our guarantee for the future, our raft that wouldn't sink no matter

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 Rivero / CONVERSATIONS AS LITERARY DISCOURSE 71

how overpowered by the dictatorship -that's where the determination not to

give up lay.*

Throughout the book this interlocutor, who truly did exist outside the text,
melds with the image of the real person listening to the discourse, the reader
who fulfills the task of listening and wavers between being that listener/
reader and the alter ego of the narrator who bears witness, the person with
whom the textual narrator has taken part in a dialogue while reflecting and
remembering: "You go to the Front because you agree with their politics."
Here we see the primary characteristics of a particular style spoken into a
tape recorder, perhaps in the presence of a listener who is frequently ad-
dressed directly: "D'you know how I felt, then?" (24); "I want to make you
see" (27). The syntax, punctuation, and phraseology all point to this essential
trait of a spoken discourse:

I never understood, after all, if I liked being in the mountains or not; I was sorry
to leave, but I hated it all the same. Yes, I really got to hate the mountains, or
I don't know, perhaps I loved it; what the shit, I don't know what went on with
me. As it is, I started thinking about the city again; I was going to have an
operation, what could I do? They're going to send me to some other town, send
me up in the mountains again; I'm going out into the country, to the city, I'd
see the gang, I'd see Claudia. I'd make love again and the idea of making love
with Claudia or any other woman excited me, the feel of kissing a woman again,
stroking a woman, running your hands over a woman's body again, being on
a woman (1982: 155).

The elaboration of ideas is akin to that of free association with no attempt

being made to smooth out the transitions from one concept to the next, nor
to lend coherence to the narrative. Digressions arise in a similar fashion, as
do suddenly remembered fragmentary events which intermingle, from the
perspective of a true present tense of speech, the past of the historic present
with a narrative descriptive present.

I'd been about five months in the mountains before I got a look at my face; one
time a year went by without me seeing myself and when I looked in a mirror,
Hell! that wasn't me anymore, hermano! . . . Being up there makes you frown,
your jaws widen out. Ever looked at photos from the beginning of the victory?
We're all scowling and clenching our teeth like you do when you're walking.
Always scowling, like that (1982: 218).

On the other hand the narrator/recorder constantly inserts himself into the
narrative-descriptive discourse, which not only calls the reader's attention to
the time of the taping ("I'm 31 and I'm talking about 1970, '71; that'd make
me 20, 21 then [45-46]), but also to the presence of an interlocutor who is

*All quotations from Cabezas (1982) used by permission from Casa de las Am6ricas.

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72 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

truly there, and to the space in which the recording is actually being made.
"We went in, it was a small ranch house, about like this room, say five meters
by five" (154). The "intrusive narrator" thus gives the text a high degree of
intimacy, making the reader get close and turning him or her into an
"accomplice;" textual/real distance is eliminated by this process of reader
involvement.2 No less present is the direct reference to the oral discourse at
the moment of taping, which springs suddenly from the memory of the
guerrilla fighter. "And that afternoon when we realized, I went to my
hammock in the shade, to my champa, to think over all this I've just told
you" (132). The speech, faithfully recorded on tape, transcribed and "writ-
ten," is punctuated by a repeated series of interlocutive signs, mainly inter-
jections or verbal directives which stress for a reader of the text the sometimes
phatic (contact-oriented) function of these markers: "Y'know?" "See?" "Get
me?" "You follow?" "Look here" "Like I said" (18, 20, 26, 34, 56, 75). It
becomes obvious that these words or phrases are inscribed in the register of
popular speech, a common trait of testimonial discourse noted in recent
studies (Casaus, 1986b: 333-342).
Thus the reader is constantly taken out of the narrated world and turned
into a spectator or listener of a tape, and, moreover, made to fulfill the role
of an ideal co-interlocutor alongside the real person actually conducting the
interview and running the tape recorder. The testimonial discourse of La
montafna not only creates new forms in its approach to the subgenre of
memoirs, but also constitutes a spiral discourse turning on itself, totally
deautomatizing the process of reaction in the reader, who is frequently called
on to act as accomplice by means of his or her empirical counterpart -the
interviewer.3
But what truly distinguishes testimonial discourse from other discoursive
literary forms, such as fiction, are not essentially those traits dealt with above,
albeit briefly, but rather the nature of the testimonial narrator, who gives life
and order to the text; that is to say, the erasing of the distance between the
true author, his empirical figure as profiled in the text, and the enunciative
voice of the textual narrator. This is the truly different trait of this pioneer
literature, which takes its stance in the concrete and biographical world of
experience in order to produce, nevertheless, a discourse which assimilates
many of the external, formal characteristics of the fictional narrator of a truly
"imaginary" text. Analysis of this basic category, central to the narrative no
matter what its type, is, however, an exploration of deeper theoretical
ramifications, which have been dealt with elsewhere (see Rivero, 1987).
Suffice to say that considering La montafia as a literary text has been and
continues to be determined by the reader's aesthetic response, although this

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 Rivero / CONVERSATIONS AS LITERARY DISCOURSE 73

could be labelled in some quarters as an impressionistic reaction which still

leaves the task of interpretation to the critics of revolutionary texts. The poetic
content of such passages is difficult to deny:

When I went to the mountains I was in love with Claudia. Her love for me was
something sublime, something not subject to measurement and size, as Che
used to say; I'd put into our relationship the most constructive, most creative,
a man can have. Out of our relationship I'd built a city, a beautiful city; let's
say that the relationship between Claudia and me was a beginning and an end,
the alpha and omega of whatever a man can conceive of as regards love. That's
to say, Claudia, my relationship with her, became a banner for me up there in
the mountains, a flag I held over my head, which didn't get tangled in the vines,
which I didn't let fall, or get wet, or get muddy; I mean after her, after my love
relationship with her, after that there was jungle, after that there was what my
mind hadn't computed yet, and my mind before I went into the mountains
hadn't computed the jungle, nor the mountains. So I slept with my banner, I
kept it safe, I folded it up and put it under my head like a pillow and went to
sleep (Cabezas, 1982: 210).

But to identify discoursive fragments as important aesthetically pleasing

forms is only the first step towards the analysis which these pages intend to
foster.
Other discourses reveal totally different modes of expression which,
nevertheless, also serve to illustrate the basic character of re-creating the
political struggle presented by many testimonial works. Pablo: con elfilo de
la hoja by Victor Casaus, published in 1983 but recipient of the Testimonial
Prize from the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba in 1979, stands out in
Cuban testimonial literature. The text, a montage of different testimonies, is
a continuing dialogue by 21 persons/witnesses, including the title character;
some were dead and some still alive when the book was composed. The
fragments of writing are taken from letters, speeches, essays, headings and
texts of newspaper articles by authors both known and unknown; the ac-
counts by living witnesses are transcriptions of interviews made by the
author, who identifies the speakers in an introduction which also serves to
set the scene. In this way a choral counterpoint of voices is achieved that
gradually profiles the historic context in which Pablo de la Torriente Brau, a
fighter against the Machado dictatorship in the 1930s and member of the
International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, was formed, grew up,
and was active. The body of what I refer to as "discoursive artifacts" also
include the graphic testimony provided by photographs of the period, as well
as reproductions of documents such as identification cards or baptismal
certificates. It might be said that these visual representations are "testimonial
objects," which fulfill an intratextual function of bearing silent witness; they

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74 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

constitute irrefutable proof of identity for the main protagonist. The 20

witnesses complement and provide counterpoint to Pablo's "voice," which
is revealed through chronicles, articles, books, unpublished letters, the pages
of an unfinished diary, and the jottings in his Cuaderno de guerra (War
Notebook). The "voices" of the witnesses relate in the text, in fragmentary
fashion, moments in their lives and the historic episodes which it was their
fortune to share in Pablo's life. Virtually all the accounts come from tape
recordings which were put together and presented in book form:

Sanjurjo
Arrested in Havana, I was sent to the Presidio Modelo [model penitentiary on
the Isle of Pines] and disembarked on this very jetty: Columpo jetty. I belonged
to the second batch of political prisoners. Pablo arrived with the first batch:
'the first 24,' we used to call them. The Barcelo brothers, Matias and Bartolo,
were with me in the second.

Bartolo

When we arrived on the Isla de Pinos in the second batch [of prisoners] they
sent us straight to the Presidio's mental ward. That's where we met up with the
first lot. Pablo had arrived with them and so had my brother Gabriel. They
came off the boat on this very jetty.

Pablo
The jetty belonging to the prison is on Columpo beach. That's where the
Cordilleras, or batches of prisoners, disembark. These are men who may never
see the sea again, or if they do, it will be with eyes weary of seeing the same
palm trees, the same eternal hillock with its banana groves.... A fine, bright
sand like the dust that rises in the rays of sunlight when the house is being
swept, that is the sand of Columpo beach. . . .
The escort finally arrived in two trucks. They called the roll on the jetty and
we said a friendly goodbye to the people on the boat.

Roa
The group of prisoners marches towards the trucks. With us there's a platoon
of soldiers with an officer who has a grim and sinister look. I march next to
Pablo de la Torriente Brau.

Pablo
Rautl Roa was at my side as we marched and he said - How many do you think
that guy's killed? - and he nodded towards a black sergeant who was almost
next to us (Casaus 1983: 94).*

As can be seen, in this series of five accounts, two are by Pablo, one by
Rau(l Roa, one by Jose Sanjurjo, and the other by Bartolo Barcelo, all

*A1l quotations from Casaus (1983) are copyright ? Victor Casaus, 1983, and usedby permission
of the Uni6n de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba.

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 Rivero / CONVERSATIONS AS LITERARY DISCOURSE 75

companions during the years of struggle against Gerardo Machado's dicta-

torship in Cuba. That was the time when student unrest was growing and a
leftist front was consolidating against the repression. Imprisonment on the
Isle of Pines is presented from four different points of view, like shots by
movie cameras, and this multiplicity of viewpoints is maintained throughout
the discourses in the book.4 The living quality of the text is reinforced by
discourse markers, such as "on this very jetty," by the former prisoners. The
interviews actually took place on that selfsame jetty 40 years after the fact
and were carried out by the author/interviewer/listener Victor Casaus.
Textual elements are ordered into 12 chapters which follow chronologi-
cally the life of Pablo de la Torriente Brau. The temporal sequence, conse-
quently, is linear, even though multiple viewpoints are shown at any given
moment of narrated/recorded time. The 12 sections mark periods in Pablo's
life, divided, above all, by the political development of both the man and his
country. The chapter titled "Con el filo de la hoja" ("With the Edge of the
Blade") refers to his work as a reporter for the newspaper Ahora, the only
publication to confront the dictatorship in power, the voice of the intelligen-
tsia, and the gathering place for participants in the ideological struggle. An
account by the poet Jose Zacarias Tallet, over 80 years old at the time of
Casaus' interview, lends credence to the moment and to the specific image
representing the title chapter. Pablo's political struggle combines the use of
arms and a literary vocation, the word hoja in Spanish meaning both blade
and page, sharpened for both action and protest.

Tallet
The things that appeared in Ahora were not printed in those days in any other
Cuban newspaper. When it first came out we subtitled it "The newspaper of
the Revolution." And when the Grau government fell, we moved closer to
Guiteras, who was helping the paper financially, just as the Medical Federation
was- they were giving us financial support too. That paper really lashed out.
And often it was Pablo who cracked the whip (Casaus, 1983: 155).

The two final chapters, which sum up Pablo's struggle, most closely approx-
imate the evocation of a poetic text. "Otra vez en el exilio" ("Exile Once
Again") and "Espania" ("Spain") gather testimony of his second stay in the
United States - New York - and his final departure to the antifascist war in
the Peninsula. The first of these chapters presents graphic testimony in the
form of front pages from student and workers' newspapers which announce,
in English, Pablo's escape from the death sentence that then-Colonel Fulgencio
Batista declared would apply to leaders of the resistance. Selections from a
political speech made by Pablo in New York invoke the spirit of Marti, his
illustrious forerunner in the fight against tyranny, and refer to the revolution

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76 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

which, 40 years later, still is engaged to free the people now enslaved under
a pseudo-republic.

Pablo
It's a pleasure to speak about Cuba today, here in the heart of Harlem, the heart
of this island of Manhattan, the cruel, barbarous, inhumane capital of capital-
ism. It's a pleasure to speak here today because I see hundreds of dark-skinned
faces, unknown faces, anxious to hear what is happening there, for even though
it is ambushed by the silence of accomplices in the capitalist press, echoes still
reach us here of the tragedy of a people capable of learning anything except to
live without fighting for its freedom (1983: 192).

The grammatical present tense of the speech heightens the eyewitness

qualities: "here" and "today" place the reader/listener in a never-ending
present, which goes on into the future of the definitive Revolution. Temporal
and spatial markers point to the special character of a testimony which uses
a scene brought up to the present, captured by reproductions of texts and
artifacts, to produce in the reader/viewer an effect not unlike the audiovisual
images of a film reel. The present pertinence of the word "revolutionary" is
the bulwark of this discourse, which foresees the future from the perspective
of a man condemned to exile.

Pablo: Letter from Afar

I have put forth a thesis which has been most successful in meetings. Others
before me have proposed it, but it has never at any time been more true than
at present: let it be known that Cuba today is the main battlefield in the fight
against Yankee imperialism in the whole of America, and that it is there that
all revolutionary efforts of this continent must be concentrated, since the defeat
of imperialism in Cuba will mean, ipsofacto, its general weakening throughout
America, and particularly in the Caribbean (Casaus, 1983: 192).

Victorina and Maydagdn: Crosswords

Maydagan

During those months a Cuban reporter was here, a revolutionary, a great

comrade in all ways. Pablo de la Torriente Brau. He's here in the photo.
Remember him?

Victorina
Now I do, now I remember. It's been a long time since then. I had to leave
Buitrago. I was in Hoyo de Manzanares, in the surgical hospital, with the 10th
division-that's where the International Brigades were too (Casaus, 1983:
226-227).

Victorina's testimony leads up to and accompanies the most emotionally

evocative moments on the next-to-last page, where a final dramatic chorus
brings to a close the preceding counterpoint. Two dead men "converse:"

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 Rivero / CONVERSATIONS AS LITERARY DISCOURSE 77

Comandante Candon, a Cuban who fell in the struggle, and Miguel

Hernandez, the beloved poet from Orihuela, whose death in the Spanish
fascist prisons make him a figure almost akin to that of Federico Garcia
Lorca; his literary testimony about Pablo appears in his "Teatro de guerra"
(Theater of War) and "Elegia segunda" (Second Elegy). Thus the specifically
testimonial discourse is placed parallel to the poetic discourse, because both
refer to the death of the Cuban fighter. The eyewitness account by Pablo
introduces the poet of the Spanish Republic, his comrade both in the struggle
and in cultural tasks:

Pablo: Letter from Afar

I think I spent all of the 23rd in Alcala.
I discovered a poet in the battalion. Miguel Hernandez is a boy who represents
all that's the best of the Spanish; he was in a company of sappers. I named him
Chief of the Department of Culture and we worked together on plans for
publishing the brigade newspaper and on setting up one or two 'mural
newspapers' (Casaus, 1983: 230-231).

The poet reacts to the death of the Cuban writer and commissar in both prose
and verse:

Miguel Hernandez
Better said: Yes, I did see him again, but he was dead. A two-day old corpse
needing a shave; fallen, on a hillock, a hail of lead through his breast. Pablo is
one of the most peaceful dead I've seen; it was as if nothing had happened to him ...

'I'll stay in Spain, compafiero,'

you said, with a gesture of love.
And finally, without your thundering warrior presence,
you've stayed here on the grass, upon the soil of Spain
(Casaus, 1983: 233-234).

The visual effect of the texts is achieved through emphasizing the "arti-
fact" nature of these nontraditional testimonial discourses; using multiple
type faces, different size type, heavy and light printing, all combined in the
graphic objects, so to speak. In this way the plastic character of the "artifacts"
produces filmic effects in the book, akin to the actualized chorus of testimo-
nial voices: two different art forms converge in the same "written" docu-
ment. Thus the image of Pablo de la Torriente Brau, the hero who both bears
witness and is witnessed, is shaped in a dynamic replaying of devices which
combines both drama and narration: the moving evocation of the fighter/
reporter enters into a virtual dialogue with a creative approximation to the
history of his revolutionary, literary, and human trajectories.
From reading these and other illustrations of the genre, it is evident that
testimonial literature has had a pivotal role to play on the revolutionary

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78 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

discourse being produced in Latin America in the 1980s. At the end of the
decade, most countries involved in political struggle within and without their
own borders, or caught up in the institutionalization of a revolutionary
process, have seen the proliferation of writings which attest to a "historical
propensity" in their authors. This tendency is logically explained by the
necessity of witnessing both personal and societal transformation on a
first-hand basis, but also by the blurring of intergeneric boundaries that
postmodern literary forms continue to exhibit.
Undoubtedly, a broadening of the limits for the "high culture" canon has
been accomplished in a manner which leaves no doubt as to the necessities
of popular information, entertainment, and education. The modes in which
artistic discourse has been embodied encompass a wide variety of nontradi-
tional forms, even in the plastic and aural modalities (namely, textile and
musical representations of popular struggles in countries such as Chile, Peru,
and Uruguay). Literature is keeping pace with innovation, reform, and
revolution: one more sign that the profound social changes taking place in
Latin America during the last quarter of a century are not only vitally
significant to the peoples they liberate, but also for the artistic formal
experimentation which is at the root of human aesthetic evolution. In this
context, testimonial literature has proven to be a liberating tool in more than
one sense.

NOTES

1. Phrase coined by the Cuban essayist and critic, Ambrosio Fornet.

2. "Another beautiful characteristic of this book is the feeling of intimacy that one experi-
ences when reading it. You feel as if the author is speaking to you personally. There is a closeness,
a relationship of proximity, intimacy, established between reader and author which is very
important" (extract from an interview by Eduardo Romero G6mez, broadcast by Radio Sandino,
in Lizandro Chavez Alfaro and Gioconda Belli, 1986b: 333-342).
3. Omar Cabezas himself identifies the true interlocutors here as, first, the Mexican Pilar
Arias, and, later, the Panamanian Nazarena Navas, both women. The person responsible for
transcribing the tape was "Dofia Lilian" (Jir6n Rivas), Cabezas' private secretary at the Ministry
of the Interior, in 1981. For the above data as well as other interesting comments on taping versus
writing a text, see the interview with Yanis Gordils (1983).
4. The similarity with film technique is not coincidental. Casaus is a well-known Cuban film
director, whose works include the documentary entitled Pablo. The author himself has pointed
to the parallel between testimony as a "literary" genre and the documentary as a cinematographic
genre (1986a). In this context, the reader may recall the film Reds, about the life of John Reed,
where 10 or more eyewitnesses to events reproduced on the screen gave their accounts. These
were then interpolated into the "historical" scenes.

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 Rivero / CONVERSATIONS AS LITERARY DISCOURSE 79

REFERENCES

Cabezas Lacayo, Omar

1982La montafia es algo mds que una inmensa estepa verde. Havana: Casa de las Americas.
All references are to this edition. Recipient of the 1982 Casa de las Americas prize in
testimonial literature.
Casaus, Victor
1970 Gir6n en la memoria. Havana: Casa de las Americas. First prize for testimonial
literature, Casa de las Americas, 1970.
1983 Pablo: con el filo de la hoja. Havana: Uni6n de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba. All
references are to this edition.
1986a "Defensa del testimonio," pp. 328-330 in Rend Jara and Hemrn Vidal (eds.),
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