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Fiction 39
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