Arts and Literature of Cuba

excerpt (translated by W. Nick Hill) reveals some of Montejo’s superstitions: In the forest I got used to living with the trees. They also have their sounds because the leaves whistle in the wind. There is a tree with a big white leaf. At night it seems like a bird. In my opinion, that tree spoke. . . . Trees have shadows too. The shadows don’t do harm, though at night you shouldn’t walk on them. I think the shadows of trees are like a man’s spirit. The spirit is a reflection of the soul. You can see that. Biography of a Runaway Slave was a huge success, and Barnet followed up with several other testimonio novels. In 1969’s Canción de Rachel ( Rachel’s Song ), the protagonist—a Havana nightclub singer during the 1920s and 1930s—was a composite of several real-life people. Barnet used printed sources to gather their stories. Gallego (1981) used the same method to depict the life of an immigrant to Cuba from the impoverished Spanish region of Galicia during the early part of the 20th century. La vida real ( Real Life ), published in 1986, chronicled the lives of Cuban workers in the United States in the years before the Cuban Revolution. In addition to his testimonial literature, Barnet has also published 10 volumes of poetry and several volumes of essays and ethnographic studies. He’s also been a professor of ethnog- raphy at the University of Havana. Leonardo Padura Fuentes: Of Crime and Cuba Outside of Cuba, Leonardo Padura Fuentes might be the island’s best-known living writer. His crime novels have been translated into more than 20 languages. He’s won a prestigious

Fiction 39