HAVANA, Cuba.- When there were no longer any doubts that the Castros of Birán were the owners of Cuba and everything it contained, including its citizens who, after January 1959, automatically ceased to be so, the writer José Lezama Lima appeared among the first “regulated” by the Havana dictatorship. There is no shortage of those who say that the writer hated airplanes and for that reason he refused to travel; but his own sister, Eloísa, with whom he maintained profuse communication through letters, assured that Lezama was not allowed to leave Cuba.
The creator of the Orígenes group became one of the intellectuals most watched by Castroism. His person, his circle of friends and even his correspondence were carefully observed because Fidel Castro was, in addition to being egotistical and narcissistic, a subject who was very afraid of resonances. His henchmen scrutinized Lezama, but intellectuals from around the world were closely following the scrutiny.
Along with Alejo Carpentier and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Lezama Lima is considered an essential name in Cuban literature. His narrative style, fascinating for many, insurmountable for others, continues to be the object of study by the most well-versed researchers in Hispanic letters.
paradise, his best known novel, was published during the call boom literary work of the sixties of the 20th century and ended up being the realization of his creative genius, of that intense neo-baroque style that can be disconcerting for some readers. The work of José Lezama Lima has been compared with that of Latin American authors who also led that literary outbreak of the 1960s, including Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Márquez or Jorge Luis Borges.
The great Lezama, devoted to the idealism of Plato, thoroughly familiar with the work of Luis de Góngora, a scholar wherever he was, ended up being indomitable for a resentful tyrant who came down from the Sierra promising all kinds of liberties.
Death of Narcissus, paradise, Fragments to your magnet, giver… They turned out to be too much for the rustic commissioners of culture, who, unable to understand the genius, nor to see in his masterpiece more than a “dangerous homoeroticism” that had to be extirpated from the matrix of a Revolution of the macho and for the macho, decided to silence him. , to bury him alive, to distance his influence from the young intellectuals who, despite the censorship, continued to persecute his books.
Lezama led a collected existence. He read and wrote with delight while the revolutionary process swept away everything in its path. The significance of his literary legacy is a fact, even if he was condemned to ostracism during the last ten years of his life, and even if the same cultural commissioners who had censored him later published his works and tried to fill him up. honors postmortem to wash the face of the Cuban regime.
Today December 19 marks one more anniversary of the birth of the Maestro, one of the few intellectuals who did not applaud Fidel Castro like a seal. José Lezama Lima was saved by his work at a time when there were only two alternatives: adulation or oblivion.
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