Arts and Literature of Cuba

top of the hill, an Afro-Cuban man comes upon a magic staff that, he believes, will bring him good fortune. But it ultimately beats to death the people in his village, including the man’s family. He wanders through the night before throwing himself and the staff into a well. “This is the Well of Yaguajay,” Cabrera writes (the translation is by Lisa Wyant). The black women knew the story. They told it to their children who, enchanted by fear, went to throw stones into the silence at the bottom. . . . A deaf splashing that dissolved the fallen stars, and the Drowned One came back whole, two open and desperate hands climbing up on the smell of mint leaves. . . . Too late to save them- selves, too late for their cries to be heard, alone in their dream at the well, the hands that appeared over the edge seized them, cold and hard like stone, and plunged them to the terrifying bottom of unspeakable secrets. Alejo Carpentier: Magical Realist “For what is the history of Latin America,” Alejo Carpentier wrote, “but a chronicle of magical realism ?” That memorable question provided the label for a narrative style that would become popular during the “Boom,” a flourishing of Latin American fiction during the 1960s and 1970s. Carpentier was both a practitioner of magical realism and a major influence on the Boom generation, which included such celebrated writers as the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, and the Argentine Julio Cortázar. A towering figure of Cuban letters, Alejo Carpentier was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1904. His father was French and his mother Russian, but they moved to Havana when their

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Arts and Literature of Cuba