The prologue of Telex From Cuba, published in 2008, opens with a young girl, Everly Lederer, fascinated by the notion of a physical boundary, the Tropic of Cancer, represented as a simple line on her globe. With her unconstrained imagination, “she pictured daisy chains of seaweed stretching across the water toward a distant horizon.” When her family crosses this boundary, moving to the exciting, exotic land of Cuba from the United States, she experiences a range of new social, cultural, and physical divisions. Yet, beyond the plot, Rachel Kushner’s novel is essentially about dissembling borders, bridging otherwise distinct entities: politics and aesthetics.
With her first two novels both named National Book Award finalists, Kushner has received the recognition that most emerging authors could only dream of. To reinforce these accolades, her most recent work, The Flamethrowers, dominated many publications’ best-of-2013 fiction lists. And, as if these awards weren’t enough to connote a literary triumph, Telex From Cuba made the cover of The New York Times Book Review shortly after its release. All of this is to say, the literary world is coming to recognize the power of bringing visual attention to quintessentially political subjects.
Merging Politics and Poetics
the two texts focus on distinct moments of history in different countries and in opposing political landscapes, Kushner’s style, defined by the similarly vivid prose in the two novels, uniquely fuses her background in the arts with her political stances. In interviews, Kushner frequently cites filmmakers as principal influences on her work, and claims an interdisciplinary approach of applying the visual to the historical and political as a central characteristic of her working method. Kushner also writes for publications such as Artforum and BOMB Magazine, her identity as a writer strongly shaped by this familiarity with the visual arts.
The Flamethrowers, set in New York City, Nevada, and Italy and centering on a woman pioneering art movements in the 1970s, most clearly evinces Kushner’s understanding of the art scene. Telex From Cuba takes as its subject the lives of American executives of the United Fruit Company and their families living in Cuba in the 1950s. The influence of aesthetics in this first novel is not as explicitly manifest in the plot, but rather comes in through her mode of storytelling, which is replete with poetic imagery.
In Telex From Cuba, Kushner’s precise descriptions and unexpected metaphors capture the tropical environment of Cuba and the worry that the climate and other unfamiliar aspects of the country inspired in Americans. The swampy humidity is almost overpowering and contributes to the sense of escalating tensions as revolutionary groups nestled in nearby mountains plot assaults on the sugar plantations run by Americans. Cuba’s sweltering tropical climate, drastically different from that of the hometowns of the American businessmen in the novel, is the defining quality upon which the success of these greedy managers is predicated, since they own plantations harvesting tropical products.
Yet, this climate is one among many foreign aspects of the country, and, importantly, it is one unfamiliar characteristic that provokes uncertainty and anxiety in the adults relocating to the region. The wives of the executives constantly whine about the heat. The residents of manager’s row, the gated and guarded area where the Americans live, come together for sophisticated events at the Pan-American club, the conversations among women often tending to the topic of their shared frustration over the inaccessibility to the luxury goods in vogue in the United States. One wife is so concerned about the unfamiliar conditions of the tropics and the access to her favorite produce and food products that she packs as many canned hams and as much fancy silverware as she can before her move to Cuba.
These scenes, made memorable and thought provoking through Kushner’s attention to visual details, are among many others that enable Kushner to tackle small bits of U.S. foreign policy. Collectively, these instances of evocative behavior of the Americans serve to call attention to the nature and extent of the U.S. involvement in Cuban society, economics, and politics.
Personal History and National Legacies
Kushner originally became interested in the subject matter of Telex from Cuba after hearing stories of her mother’s experiences growing up in the nation. Kushner’s grandfather worked for a nickel-mining company and was a figure not dissimilar to the key players of the nickel-mining companies in Nicaro depicted in the novel. Kushner first researched her family history using archival materials that her grandparents accumulated and preserved. She then turned to fiction and nonfiction to immerse herself in the history leading up to the Cuban Revolution and the expulsion of American expatriates in 1958. Her six years of research ultimately culminated in a several months-long visit to Cuba.
Despite this extensive investigation and the personal impetus initially inspiring Kushner to pursue the project, the final product presents highly fictionalized characters. Quite the opposite of restricting her story to a factual retelling of her family members’ experiences, Kushner embellished and imported new characters: Raúl Castro appears as a pretty-faced, “fruity” fellow whom Cuban townspeople and Americans alike recognize as gay; Hemingway’s cameo renders the iconic author as a pansexual drunk who invites just about anyone to dance the pachanga, a portraiture not fully supported by historical facts; and Kushner has explained in several interviews that the real Christian La Mazière, a French agitator and arms dealer memorable for his dalliances with showgirls in the novel, actually worked for a fascist newspaper and was controversial but was never involved in Latin American politics. Kushner brought La Mazière, a character she first learned about in a documentary, to Cuba to experience this moment in history. And, in fact, that is how the tension between historical representation and real-life stories in her novel can be resolved, uniting research and writing: Kushner’s research extracts the essence of the moment in cultural and political history.
While undeniably a work of fiction, the intimate touch of personal histories is preserved somewhat through the narrative style. The story is largely told through the experiences of the children of the leading American businessmen, primarily Everly Lederer and K.C. Stites. This strategy of focusing on the lives of children imbues the story with a sense of innocence. Presenting children learning about the blending of American and Cuban customs and politics for the first time also relays information in such a way that encourages the reader to think independently from the mainstream, if waning, imperialistic attitudes of the United States in the 1950s. These children, brought to Cuba by their parents and raised in colonial outposts, never actively decided on this life of imperialism. In fact, their questioning of norms and divides between Americans and darker-skinned Cubans and Jamaicans renders these children as more reasonable than their adult counterparts.
The familiar trope of forbidden love appears in the novel when an adolescent Everly begins to fall in love with her family’s houseboy, Willy, a relentlessly energetic character and overall positive influence on the culture of the household. Conscious of class convention, Everly doesn’t dare mention her affection for Willy to anyone. Her enduring love for Willy prompts her to refuse to reciprocate the affection K.C. expressed towards her, despite the fact that K.C. is a well-liked friend of the family and a more suitable male companion. The subversive tendencies of the children—K.C.’s older brother figures as the most radical of the American youth running away to join the Castro brothers’ scheming—hint to the changing attitudes of the nation, the imminent Cuban revolution, and the decline of power of the Americans in Cuba.
The children provide a nearly unfiltered view of life in the bizarre, isolated colonial enclaves in Cuba, and, at moments, share sentiments more insightful than their parents could express. Paired with Kushner’s sequences of poetic images reminiscent of a Joseph Conrad novel set in an exotic land, the overall effect of the novel is to challenge common notions of U.S. foreign policy in this Cold War era, shedding a new light on a period of history that isn’t frequently retreaded in contemporary culture.