Cuban writers or Cuban American writers like Blanco
who live outside the island and write in English. Others
Aparicio has translated include Achy Obejas, Nena Tor-
res, and Rosa Lowinger.
His job, he says, is to make sure these works are part
of the Cuban literary canon. The Cuban people are,
after all, spread across continents, in a diaspora where
two million Cubans call the United States home. Three
hundred thousand reside in other countries like Spain,
France, Mexico, Italy, Canada, Puerto Rico, Venezuela,
and other Latin American and Caribbean countries.
When you ask Aparicio where he is from, he quotes
the legend Celia Cruz, in Spanish: “No me pidan defin-
ición, caballero. Es que yo pertenezco al mundo” ( D o n’t
ask me to define myself, folks. I belong to the world).
But, in fact, Aparicio is from Guanabacoa, just
outside of Havana on the other side of the bay, birth-
place of the Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona and the
renowned singer Rita Montaner. He was raised in Cen-
tro Habana, where his mother was a school principal
and his father a university professor who later became
a political prisoner from 1966 to 1972. At the age of
twelve, Aparicio left Cuba, but Cuba did not leave him.
“I live in Cuba. I’ve always lived in Cuba,” he says, quot-
ing the poet Heberto Padilla, whom he translated into
English at the age of nineteen.
“Translating Padilla when I was nineteen was par-
ticularly emotional,” said Aparicio, “given the injustices
against him by the Cuban government and the fact that
my own father was a political prisoner at the time,
suffering similar injustices.” In the late 1960s and ’70s,
Padilla spoke out against the oppressive Castro regime
and for this was punished, jailed, and surveilled. He
died at sixty-eight, an exile, in Auburn, Alabama. The
“Padilla Affair” changed the way some outsiders viewed
Cuba. International writers like Susan Sontag and Jean-
Paul Sartre rose up in protest. The ordeal was, according
to the New York Times, “the event that forever changed
the way they [authors like Susan Sontag and Sartre]
viewed Castro’s Cuba.”
On the surface, things have changed. A Cuban
author like Leonardo Padura is seemingly everywhere.
He is a national hero in Cuba, a celebrity. One of the
writers that has, somehow, seemingly escaped the cen-
sorship of the regime. There’s even an HBO show based
on his work called Four Seasons in Havana. The show
takes on his central protagonist, a hard-boiled Cuban
detective named Conde.
Many have said that perhaps the safety of Padura’s
pen lies in the fact that he’s never blatantly anti-Castro
and his social critiques are veiled beneath the smoke of
his characters’ cigars. For many translators of Cuba, this
sentence is, in and of itself, frustrating because it points
to the inescapable political element of translating an
island that has lived under a dictatorship for so long.
Padura’s translator, Anna Kushner, points to the fact that
when Padura leaves Cuba he does not have the luxury
to talk about “process” like many other writers. He is
immediately asked about politics instead.
The paradox of Padura is, of course, that—while
there are smoke and mirrors—the diction, the language
itself, is precise, painterly, both poetic and quotidian
in the way Cuban Spanish is. “He’s really descriptive,”
says Kushner. “I can’t think of many instances where I
c a n’t picture [Padura’s writing].” Kushner herself is as
precise. When she was translating Padura’s The Man
Who Loved Dogs (2014), a novel about the assassination
of Leon Trotsky by Ramón Mercader in Mexico City in
1940, Kushner lived in Paris, where a large part of the
book’s action takes place. There was a moment when
Padura included a long mirror at the Ritz, and Kushner
went to see it, to get it right. Later, when she translated
Padura’s Heretics (2017), which partially takes place in
artist studios, she consulted two art historian friends
and an artist (see W LT, Sept. 2017, 76). “I would pick
their brains about superspecific paint compounds,”
says Kushner. She then reminds us that Padura lives in
Cuba, where the world doesn’t sit at his fingertips; he
has to seek it out. “He does a lot of meticulous research,”
says Kushner, “and uses materials from a wide array ofWithout these
decoders, the
voice of an
island would
be lost in the
battle between
surface and
reality.The brave and swift-tongued who
are translating Cuba right now are
carrying an island across a slippery
border, swimming in misperception.
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