‘I would rather go on being underdeveloped.’ Rereading and recontextualising Edmundo Desnoes's 1965 novel Memorias del subdesarrollo

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.12.2.0329
• Published date: 01 December 2020
• Date: 01 December 2020
• Pages: 329-350
• Author: William Rowlandson
• Subject Matter: Desnoes, Memorias ,Cuba,revolution,Missile Crisis,nuclear,catastrophe,climate change,decarbonisation

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ACADEMIC ARTICLE

‘I WOULD RATHER GO ON BEING

UNDERDEVELOPED.’ REREADING AND

RECONTEXTUALISING EDMUNDO

DESNOES’S 1965 NOVEL MEMORIAS DEL

SUBDESARROLLO

William Rowlandson

University of Kent, UK

William Rowlandson is Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies at the University of Kent,

Canterbury, UK. His research and teaching interests include the perception of the Revolution

outside Cuba in the early 1960s, and the strategies employed by Cuban citizens for responding

the shortages and privations of the Special Period. His most recent book is recent book is

Sartre in Cuba: Cuba in Sartre (Palgrave 2018).

Abstract

This article follows two lines of inquiry. First, it provides a rereading of the novel

Memorias del subdesarrollo (Desnoes 1965), suggesting that the protagonist, Sergio, is

affected by the threat of nuclear war throughout the novel and that this fear dominates

the text from the outset, and not just the novel’s ending during the Missile Crisis of

October 1962. It argues that Sergio’s state of anxiety and inertia derive as much from this

fear as from his intellectual detachment and problematic relationship with the Cuban

Revolution, where critical attention has tended to focus. This rereading gives texture

to Sergio’s inaction and nihilism, revealing a coherent response of an individual to the

threat of catastrophe. Secondly, this article sets this rereading against a new context

of catastrophe: that of climate change, ecosystem collapse and species extinction. In

this context an overlooked revolutionary fervour is detected in Sergio that provides a

reading of hope in the narrative that, when read analogously against the present, may

reflect a sense of hope against calamity.

330 ACADEMIC ARTICLE – WILLIAM ROWLANDSON

InternatIonal Journal of Cuban StudIeS 12.2 WInter 2020

Keywords: Desnoes, Memorias, Cuba, revolution, Missile Crisis, nuclear, catastrophe,

climate change, decarbonisation

The nuclear mushroom is watching me with a smile!

Desnoes, Memories of Underdevelopment

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s 1968 film Memorias del subdesarrollo is a staple of

many Latin American programmes in European and the US universities, and is

indispensable for any Cuba-focused course. In over a decade teaching the film at

the University of Kent, UK, I have explored with numerous groups multiple

aspects of Sergio’s character and his state of anxiety and ennui, considering him

against the turbulent backdrop of Cuban history between the Bay of Pigs inva-

sion of April 1961 and the Missile Crisis of October 1962, exploring the social

tensions, politics, geopolitics, class, race and gender inequality, and the ‘desgar-

ramiento’ (Chanan 1990: 9) of the bourgeois stumbling reluctantly towards

revolutionary consciousness.

Recently, however, seminar discussions have shifted direction, and attention

has turned to Sergio’s sombre response to the film Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

and to the final scenes during the Missile Crisis. In these discussions, the element

of catastrophe has been foregrounded, the specific historical drama depriori-

tised, Sergio’s apathy and inertia perceived not only in relation to that time and

that place but also to a transhistorical context of imminent disaster. The film is

changing before my eyes. Sergio’s trysts and ruminations are increasingly sucked,

eschatologically, towards the film’s dark concluding frames. Catastrophe is the

ultimate motivation for his demotivation. His inertia is not only because he is

trapped between the old and the new political and social orders, not only because

his literary aspirations have faded, not only because he retains – and wishes to

retain – his class, race and gender privilege, and not only because he is uncon-

vinced by revolutionary rhetoric, but because he fears that all action is ultimately

and imminently futile in the presence of nuclear cataclysm.

These ideas have prompted me to focus my attention on the novel upon which

the film’s screenplay was developed, both written by Edmundo Desnoes.1 This is

1 The novel receives less attention than the film, which is unsurprising given the excel-

lence of the film and its impact and influence, given Gutiérrez Alea’s claims that

Desnoes ‘worked over his novel as if it were raw material’ (Burton 1990: 188), and

given Desnoes’s claim that the film was richer than the novel. He even added features

from the film to later editions of the novel, including in English (translated by him),

published after the film’s release.