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