Edmundo Desnoes and Underdevelopment

Edmundo Desnoes’ novel Memorias del subdesarrollo continues to speak to us. Beyond its relationship with cinema through the film of the same name, the enduring relevance of its dialogues and conflicts invites us to reflect from the present. Is underdevelopment something acquired and inherited, or something that is developed? Within the novel's analytical framework lies the establishment of narratives transversal to human society—issues that were the talk of intellectuals in the 1960s: one's role before history, the possibility of critique within emancipation processes, and the place of individuality. Undoubtedly, revisiting a volume like this pulls us out of our comfort zone and casts any kind of lukewarmness into the fire.

Desnoes gained prominence through this novel in the debates of those years. With electrifying power, the work presents the diary of a disillusioned writer who undergoes a process of declassing as the early years of the revolutionary process advance. He goes from being a member of Havana's middle bourgeoisie who traveled to Europe or the United States for pleasure, to an average, unemployed man who lives off the rent from his apartment as a result of the Urban Reform. Within this shift in meaning, a paradox persists: man will always be an entity dependent on circumstances; he cannot escape his environment; he is bound to the conditions of meaning production. At this point, the novel is existentialist, but not in a Sartrean line—rather a Camusian one. Camus possessed an inward gaze that perhaps we do not find in Sartre. He observed others, but from within himself, and this is especially evident in The Stranger. In that work, the protagonist's vision is crossed by a feeling of uprootedness that nonetheless illuminates areas of conflict. Here I emphasize the possibility that existential fiction can pave the way for something more than the pleasure of reading—namely, critical thought.

If literature continues to speak to us, it is because of its themes, and this novel tells us much about a person's uprootedness. Sometimes it is unjustified; other times, it behaves in a contemptible manner. But almost always it is about a human being walking along the razor's edge of their moment, having to choose, even if they do not wish to. Underdevelopment is not a material condition but a state of consciousness, a cultural phenomenon, a process of participation in the debate of life. Desnoes prevents us from falling into simple readings; he asks us to move toward the critical zones where a social conscience lives. His character, perhaps a kind of alter ego, does not build a fortress but rather feels exposed to new conditions and understands that what he is experiencing is something new. Yet he feels he does not belong, that this justice is not his, that his time has passed. And here the novel gives us another nuance: the bourgeois is also human. His suffering, though arising from privilege, is made of the same substance as the processes of change. Desnoes places his character at various crossroads, all as a result of the social process. From a dispute with a peasant family to a fight with his wife, who is even more bourgeois than he is, despite coming from humbler origins. In the light of time, the narrative of the early Revolution may seem extemporaneous, strange, out of category. Yet, as the work itself says: in underdevelopment, nothing has continuity. There is no single vector of meaning that explains it; one cannot wield a single truth.

Edmundo Desnoes is a controversial figure in Cuban literature. His persistence in polemical themes, his bifurcation regarding political positioning—these are experiences that stand apart. The novel addresses the conflicts of the early Revolution, when a new epos was being configured. I say this in the sense of Greek epic and the discourse of the ethical on a historical level. Desnoes also had the fortune that his work was adapted by one of the geniuses of Cuban cinema, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, so the story has two parallel rivers of meaning. The adaptation adds nothing to what is told, but it offers us a visual panorama. We will always see Corrieri as an iconic figure on his balcony with a telescope, peering at the city.

Memorias del subdesarrollo creates an extra illumination, one that approaches critical realism, the accurate analysis of contradictions, and does not view the political process through a complacent prism. Underdevelopment is there, and in its presence there is more than a phenomenon: there lies the essence of centuries of colonialism. The greatness of a work is to tell, from the small and the everyday, that which transcends it.

Reading the works of the past helps us understand ourselves, to carry categories toward critical panoramas of the present. This one is no exception. It would be worthwhile to republish Desnoes in our most recent collections and offer him to the public.

Translated by Sergio A. Paneque Díaz / CubaSí Translation Staff