Several thousand miles north, another boy was also thinking about Spain. Fidel Castro\u2019s earliest major political memory, as he told interviewer Ignacio Ramonet, was of the war dividing his hometown of Bir\u00e1n. At the time, Spaniards made up a fifth of Cuba\u2019s population; many, like Castro\u2019s father, Don \u00c1ngel, were Galicians, who had migrated by the hundreds of thousands at the turn of the century. Spanish Civil War partisanship in immigrant-dense Bir\u00e1n was, Fidel recalled, channeled into hotly contested games of dominoes. His father, like all the teachers at his Santiago de Cuba boarding school and most of the other gallegos <\/em>on Don \u00c1ngel\u2019s farm, was an avowed Francoist. In the minority was the cook, Manuel Garc\u00eda, \u201ca fire-breathing Republican\u201d who was illiterate yet desperate to follow the Republic\u2019s fortunes. So Don \u00c1ngel\u2019s nine-year-old son, home from school for the summer of 1936, gamely read aloud to Garc\u00eda all the available newspaper coverage, every day, for hours on end. It was the first time Castro analyzed the nuts and bolts of a military campaign\u2014although of course, it would not be the last.<\/p>\n Nearly two decades later, Guevara and Castro met in Mexico City. The Argentine medic had been doing public health work with Guatemala\u2019s \u201cRevolutionary Spring,\u201d the \u00c1rbenz government\u2019s landmark democratizing project, and barely escaped the 1954 counterrevolution that destroyed it. The Cuban lawyer, meanwhile, was keen to regroup after leading the failed 1953 Moncada Barracks assault against Batista\u2019s dictatorship. Joining forces in the 26th of July Movement, the world-historical pair and their comrades needed military training. They found it at the unlikely address of 67 Country Club Avenue in Coyoac\u00e1n, courtesy of a one-eyed Spaniard named Alberto Bayo, a Republican Army combat veteran. Banished to the Americas following Franco\u2019s victory, Bayo helped train the Caribbean Legion, a motley crew of antifascists trying to overthrow local tyrants like Somoza and Trujillo, and authored a manual for waging irregular warfare. He spent six months preparing the members of the Granma expeditionary force\u2014including Guevara and Castro\u2014and when the Cuban Revolution triumphed on January 1, 1959, Bayo surely must have felt that his prior ventures, most of them failures, had found some vindication.<\/p>\n In the Anglo-American world, the Spanish Civil War is usually framed as a bungled dress rehearsal for World War II. (When David Simon, creator of The Wire<\/em>, announced a new series about US volunteers in the International Brigades, he titled it A Dry Run<\/em>.) This misapprehension owed to the politics of the Cold War, which made it more convenient to remember the whole affair in a tragic register \u00e0 la Hemingway and Orwell: the Republic as the \u201clast great cause,\u201d undermined by Soviet chicanery, undone by leftist infighting, superseded by more urgent matters in the heart of Europe. Better to forget how the Western powers hung the Republic out to dry, then let a Nazi-installed dictatorship stay on to kill and imprison dissidents for the following 30 years. The belief that 1945 was the definitive rout of fascism is increasingly difficult to sustain these days. But even at the time, that contention required memory-holing the destruction of democratic Spain.<\/p>\n In Latin America, however, forgetting the Spanish Civil War was never an option. The ties of kin, faith, culture, and commerce connecting the Hispanophone world meant Latin Americans\u2014from national political leaders down to children in the provincial towns of central Argentina or eastern Cuba\u2014experienced the war more intimately in the first place. And its relevance to their own conflicts over land, church, labor, and democratization\u2014the legacies of the feudal socioeconomic structures established, there as across the Atlantic, under imperial Spain\u2014long outlasted the Republic\u2019s fall.<\/p>\n The war, according to one Guevara biographer, the Spanish-Mexican noir novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo, was la gran herida<\/em>: the great wound. That description suggests\u2014as does Retrospective<\/em>, the latest novel by Colombian writer Juan Gabriel V\u00e1squez\u2014that we should see the Spanish Civil War not as the end of one story but as the beginning of another. Still, there\u2019s plenty of room for disagreement about where it led.<\/p>\n Retrospective<\/em> portrays the 20th century\u2019s utopias and agonies through the life of a singular individual: Sergio Cabrera C\u00e1rdenas, born in Medell\u00edn in 1950 to a Spanish father and a Colombian mother. Sergio and his sister, Marianella, share the \u201cspecial loyalty\u201d of \u201cthose who know that their life is incomprehensible to others and that the only way to be happy is to accept it without getting incensed.\u201d By the time Sergio turns 22 and Marianella 19, the trials they have endured include being abandoned in Mao\u2019s China by their parents, Fausto and Luz Elena, and becoming Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. They also include being summoned back to Colombia to wage guerrilla warfare in the jungle and risking their lives to leave it all behind.1<\/a><\/sup> Sergio despairs at being a victim of his circumstances but seizes his destiny by becoming a director. His movies include classics like The Strategy of the Snail<\/em> (1993), about Bogot\u00e1 tenants fighting their landlord with the help of a Spanish anarchist played by his father, Fausto, and Time Out<\/em> (1998), in which Colombian guerrillas and police cease fire to watch the World Cup.<\/p>\n The novel\u2019s protagonist is a real, living person\u2014in 2022, he was appointed Colombia\u2019s ambassador to China\u2014and all this did indeed take place. An author\u2019s note explains that V\u00e1squez recorded 30 hours of conversations over seven years and exchanged innumerable emails and texts with Sergio and his circle, incorporating their photographs, artifacts, and diary entries. \u201cThe act of fiction,\u201d he writes, \u201chas been to extract the figure of this novel from the huge mountain of Sergio Cabrera\u2019s experience.\u201d Whether readers should attribute its interpretations of that experience to V\u00e1squez or Cabrera is a question muddied, perhaps intentionally, by the form. Either way, the book ultimately treats the unusual lives of Sergio and Marianella not as edge cases, but as exemplars of what it takes to be the misadventures of the Latin American left. The ties of kin, faith, culture, and commerce connecting the Hispanophone world meant Latin Americans experienced the Spanish Civil War more intimately in the first place.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n <\/p>\n Retrospective<\/em> begins in 2016, with Sergio headed to Barcelona for a film festival honoring his life\u2019s work. (On the side, he aims to spend some time working on his troubled marriage\u2014this transpires largely via WhatsApp\u2014and reconciling with an estranged son from a prior marriage.) It is a natural opportunity to volver la vista atr\u00e1s<\/em>, as Antonio Machado\u2019s poem Caminante, no hay camino<\/em>, a throughline of the book, has it: \u201cAs we walk we make our way \/ And turning our gaze to look back \/ We see the path that never \/ Again shall we tread.\u201d But as Sergio arrives, Fausto suddenly dies, forcing the filmmaker to also reckon with his artistic and emotional debts to his charismatic ideologue of a father. The balance sheet of their relationship is, Sergio concludes, \u201cnot positive.\u201d Yet he also knows, guiltily, that none of the experiences that made his life worth novelizing would have transpired absent the structuring force of Fausto\u2019s passions: \u201chad I not grown up in his world.\u201d<\/p>\n That world\u2019s crucible was the Spanish Civil War. Fausto\u2014scarcely older than Castro and Guevara\u2014is recruited by his beloved Uncle Felipe, a Republican, into battles against monarchy and fascism, making for a terrifying but thrilling adolescence spent bouncing from Madrid to Barcelona to Paris. Only later does Fausto learn that the Paris detour had been a rebuke to Felipe for confronting his superiors over their conduct of the war; we are told that \u201csometimes the Republicans\u2019 worst enemies were other Republicans.\u201d In the context of the novel, Fausto\u2019s failure to internalize this axiom associated with the Republican cause is meant to establish his inability, or refusal, to temper his zealotry with evidence or doubt.<\/p>\n The Republic falls, and its partisans scatter before the Franco dictatorship\u2019s murderous recriminations. Like tens of thousands of other families, the Cabreras flee into a precarious Latin American exile, winding up in Colombia. There, Fausto discovers his gift for acting and recitation, making his name as an interpreter of iconic Spanish Civil War poets like Miguel Hern\u00e1ndez, Le\u00f3n Felipe, and, of course, Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca, a chance meeting with whom, years before Lorca\u2019s execution by the Nationalists, Fausto spins into a tale of anointment. He frequents Bogot\u00e1\u2019s Spanish Republican Cultural Center, where exiles eat tortilla<\/em> and drink sherry, curse the General\u00edsimo, and discuss, anxiously, the guerrillas forming in Colombia\u2019s east. \u201cEverything is too similar, you see,\u201d warns Uncle Felipe. \u201cSomething heavy is going to happen here.\u201d<\/p>\n That \u201csomething heavy\u201d was a political murder that would change the course of Colombian history. On April 9, 1948, the popular left-liberal presidential candidate Jorge Eli\u00e9cer Gait\u00e1n\u2014running on a platform of agrarian reform and economic redistribution not dissimilar to that of the lost Spanish Republic\u2014was assassinated. (Fidel Castro happened to be in Bogot\u00e1, with an appointment to meet Gait\u00e1n, when the murder took place; he joined the protests after.) Gait\u00e1n\u2019s killing, a subject V\u00e1squez has explored at length in other novels, unleashes \u201cLa Violencia,\u201d a decade of partisan brutality that claims hundreds of thousands of lives. In 1950, just as Laureano G\u00f3mez, a clericofascist Franco acolyte, ascends unopposed to the presidency, Fausto and Luz Elena welcome their firstborn, Sergio: the novel\u2019s protagonist.<\/p>\n\n Retrospective<\/em> does not dwell on it, but this dynamic\u2014the crushing of popular, ardently held postwar political expectations for democracy and economic justice\u2014becomes all too familiar to Latin Americans in the ensuing years. Reformers aim to redress the inequality and oligarchic corruption that stunt their countries\u2019 development and undermine their national sovereignty; they know from observing the Republic\u2019s demise that they, likewise, will face vicious backlash from within and without. Another exemplary case, unmentioned in the novel, unfolded soon after in Guatemala, when homegrown Falangists joined with the United Fruit Company and the CIA to depose Jacobo \u00c1rbenz, yielding nearly 40 years of dictatorship. The survivors, observers, and inheritors of these dashed aspirations were polarized and radicalized. Their enemies were emboldened.<\/p>\n Enter the Cuban Revolution of 1959. It is what Fausto \u201chad dreamed of for his republican Spain, his defeated Spain, the Spain that seemed unable to do with Franco what Castro and Guevara had done with Batista.\u201d Leftists around the continent try to replicate it; the Cubans know a hard line is needed to defend it. \u201cCuba will not be another Guatemala,\u201d Che vows as the revolution turns, like the Republic before it, toward the USSR. As the old left gives way to the new, however, Retrospective<\/em> seldom asks readers to think about why people felt impelled to use radical means to change their worlds, or about what they were up against. Instead, it invites them to observe the moral errors, as crystallized in Sergio and Marianella\u2019s decidedly unusual collection of experiences, that are committed in the process. The novel\u2019s central emotional problem is the entanglement of politics and parental abandonment, and its historical and political analysis is clouded by its main character\u2019s ambivalence and pain.<\/p>\n Fausto, seeing a world on the march toward liberation, relocates the family to China, arriving just after the Great Leap Forward\u2019s mass starvation and chaos. They move into the \u201cFriendship Hotel,\u201d a state-run housing unit for solidaristic fellow travelers from all over the world. Sergio and Marianella dutifully adopt Maoism, working in communes and factories, eager to please their parents with the strength of their devotion. Then, abruptly, Fausto and Luz Elena announce that they are returning to Colombia to join a Maoist armed wing of the Communist Party. The children, 16 and 14, are informed that they will stay behind. In her diary, Marianella rationalizes furiously, writing, \u201cChairman Mao, I love you most! I can do without my father and mother, but I cannot do without your great ideology!\u201d Sergio, however, longs to ask Luz Elena: \u201cAt what point do parents reach the conviction that the revolution can educate their children better than they can themselves?\u201d<\/p>\n Alone in Beijing when the Cultural Revolution begins, Sergio and Marianella become Red Guards, then imperiled shut-ins as antiforeigner sentiment mounts. They begin to perceive the hypocrisies, the violence, the sterility of the social cataclysm unfolding around them. And before the children have a chance to work through the implications of it all, their parents summon them back to Colombia to join yet another revolution, the idea being for the whole Cabrera family to share its firsthand knowledge of China\u2019s revolutionary processes to advance their country\u2019s own armed struggle. \u201cWhat greater happiness,\u201d Fausto writes, \u201ccould a father feel?\u201d<\/p>\n Three grim years with the Ej\u00e9rcito Popular de Liberaci\u00f3n, a small Maoist guerrilla organization born in the context of the Sino-Soviet split and dedicated to the concept of a protracted people\u2019s war, follow. Reborn as Comrades Ra\u00fal and Sol, Sergio and Marianella are better versed in Maoist theory than the other cadres. But the distance between Yun\u2019an and the R\u00edo Cauca is unbridgeable, the Chinese experience meaningless to the Colombian peasants the EPL is supposedly liberating, Mao in the Andes no more than \u201ca figure made of words.\u201d Ra\u00fal\/Sergio considers deserting, then dismisses the thought for fear of disappointing his mother, who by now is in prison, and his father, to whom he aches to prove his revolutionary worth. But the EPL\u2019s abuses and moral transgressions pile up: sectarianism, sexual violence, pointless missions, lives squandered. All four Cabreras are betrayed by EPL leadership in devastating ways, leading them to make their first-ever fully collective family decision: to leave. The belief that 1945 was the definitive rout of fascism is increasingly difficult to sustain these days. But even at the time, that contention required memory-holing the destruction of democratic Spain.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n <\/p>\n Decades later, Sergio strolls through Barcelona with the estranged son, Ra\u00fal, upon whom he bestowed his EPL nom de guerre. <\/em>Pondering the tangled relationship of his early life to his later artistic choices, he recalls the 2014 premiere of his film Everybody Leaves<\/em>, about a Cuban custody fight that reveals itself to be a battle over ideology and ends with \u201ca handful of destroyed lives,\u201d including that of the child\u2019s father, who perishes in the Mariel boatlift. The screening, in Havana, coincides with the Colombian peace negotiations, hosted by Castro; there to conclude a half-century of bloodshed, guerrilla commanders and government negotiators alike attend Sergio\u2019s premiere. Sergio tells the commanders they belong in jail for the pain they have brought to ordinary Colombians. \u201cWell, let\u2019s go to jail,\u201d one replies. \u201cBut then we should all go. Because a war is not fought from only one side.\u201d Sergio is frustrated: he \u201cknew that, of course.\u201d But he laments \u201chow difficult it was to explain to someone who\u2019d suffered violence from only one of the sides.\u201d The point rings true\u2014not least because it constitutes the novel\u2019s perspectival blind spot.<\/p>\n Sergio\u2019s need to transmute his childhood psychological wounds into political critique ends up undermining the place of his stated values in his art. Confidants try to talk him out of making the film, knowing it will be used to undermine an already threadbare Cuban Revolution, and because \u201cwe\u201d\u2014leftists\u2014\u201cdon\u2019t wash our dirty linen in public.\u201d Sergio retorts, \u201cAnd what happens if nobody does the laundry at home?\u201d When Fausto calls Everybody Leaves<\/em> \u201ca slap in the face, Sergio Fausto, of everything you and I did in this life,\u201d his son struggles to express that the film is simply \u201cthe story of a little girl, Nieve, whose life goes off the rails due to a state interfering in the lives of its citizens; it resembled what he\u2019d been through too closely to let it pass. Nieve in Cuba was what he\u2019d been in China: a child at the mercy. \u2026 But of what? He couldn\u2019t explain any of that.\u201d<\/p>\n Throughout his youth, Sergio is tormented by his perception of being carried on currents he neither sees nor shapes, his life\u2019s narrative \u201cwritten by someone else.\u201d Given his unique circumstances, this makes sense. But in projecting those feelings, and the particularities of the Chinese and Colombian contexts, onto an entire continent, he denies a vast swath of people from an enormous and varied array of social movements the dignity and integrity of the choices they made as they fought for democracy and citizenship within profoundly unequal societies. \u201cA whole generation of Latin Americans whose lives were pawned for an enormous cause,\u201d Sergio muses. The word \u201cpawned\u201d reveals the extent to which he reasons outward from his own experience. Showing Ra\u00fal some of his old photos from China, he points out a family of visiting Uruguayans who later joined the Tupamaros; their revolution was defeated and their people killed. Didn\u2019t they also feel, Sergio wonders\u2014or, better said, needs to believe\u2014that \u201csomeone had stolen years of their lives?\u201d<\/p>\n Retrospective<\/em> has a theory of history, perhaps V\u00e1squez\u2019s or perhaps Cabrera\u2019s. It emerges in Sergio\u2019s characterization of his film Everybody Leaves<\/em> as a parable of<\/p>\n the meticulous way men and women were mercilessly crushed under the leveler of history: Cuban history, in this case, except that Cuban history was never just the history of Cuba; it was also the history of the United States, the history of the Soviet Union, the history of a war we call cold in spite of the fires it ignited all over the continent\u2014in Cuba and Nicaragua, in Guatemala and Chile, and also in Colombia. \u2026 No, history was not a leveler in Latin America: it was a flamethrower, and it kept burning the continent as if the operator had gone mad and no one was brave enough to stop him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n But who operates the flamethrower? \u201cHistory\u201d is not an actor, and the only real agents in this novel are the revolutionaries, who are portrayed as misbegotten at best, malevolent at worst: the \u201cmen going into battle together,\u201d who, per Vasily Grossman, the anti-Stalinist Soviet critic who is one of Sergio\u2019s favorite writers, \u201chate each other more than they do their common enemy.\u201d That is one possible takeaway from how V\u00e1squez unfurls his tale, from Spain to Cuba to China to Colombia.<\/p>\n Still, it is a decidedly nondialectical story of revolution that has much to say about what happened and less to say about why. It echoes the classic Cold War interpretation of the Spanish Civil War as above all a fratricide of the left, relying upon a reading of Homage to Catalonia<\/em> that, as the historian Paul Preston points out, even Orwell himself came to regret<\/a>. In dwelling on the malign influence of the Comintern\u2019s goons and the travails of left-wing sectarianism, Orwell\u2019s famous but limited account, Preston writes, \u201cmakes it too easy to forget that the Spanish Republic was defeated by Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, and the self-interest and pusillanimity of the British, French and American governments.\u201d V\u00e1squez\u2019s novel does something comparable for the postwar era\u2014haunted, like the Cabrera family itself, by the ghosts of Spain.<\/p>\n Another takeaway would foreground fascism. Starting with the form it took under Franco, this particular right-wing ideological formation outlived World War II\u2014with US support\u2014and thereafter modeled, for generations of Latin American revanchists, how to crush demands for social change. Pinochet made the connection forthrightly in proclaiming his overthrow of Allende \u201ca further stage of the same conflict which erupted into the Spanish Civil War<\/a>.\u201d As the historian Greg Grandin writes, noting Colombia\u2019s FARC and Peru\u2019s Shining Path as significant exceptions, \u201cconsidering the repression it suffered throughout the twentieth century, the Latin American left on the whole responded with extraordinary restraint, almost in inverse proportion to the torment inflicted on it by the state, domestic elites, and the United States.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup> The point is not to exonerate leftists for the torments that they themselves inflicted. Instead, it should be to try to understand why they opted for such austere and often violently foreshortened lives of militancy in the first place. After all, as V\u00e1squez illustrates, guerrilla warfare is often awful: in a memorable scene, Ra\u00fal cuts a dead capybara from the belly of a three-yard-long boa constrictor and boils it into a greasy soup to fend off starvation. Who wouldn\u2019t prefer Allende\u2019s genteel socialismo con sabor a empanada y vino tinto<\/em>, socialism with the flavor of empanadas and red wine, if given the choice? Or the democratic reformism of \u00c1rbenz, or Gait\u00e1n? A continent today riddled with mass graves and still the most economically unequal region on earth attests to how powerfully that vision threatened the status quo.<\/p>\n A glimpse of this legacy appears as Retrospective <\/em>draws to a close, when it describes the successful 2016 referendum campaign against the Colombian peace accords. Right-wing misinformation carries the day: that the accords were an attack on the Christian family, that they promoted an unholy \u201cideology of gender,\u201d that their ratification would yield a communist dictatorship. By now, Fausto is an isolated and disillusioned old man, but in a family discussion of the referendum he breaks his now-characteristic silence. \u201cThey said the same thing when I was thirty,\u201d he remarks. \u201cAnd when I was fifteen as well, now that I think of it. That little trick seems so silly, but it has worked many times.\u201d<\/p>\n Latin America\u2019s own conflicts over land, Church, labor, and democratization were played out, across the Atlantic, for all to see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":61215,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2497],"tags":[717,1683,56,2269,2486,2268,14,336,2126,150,1165,149],"pbpartner":[],"section":[1147],"pbseries":[],"class_list":["post-61208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-civil-war","tag-colombia","tag-cuba","tag-dictatorship","tag-francisco-franco","tag-guatemala","tag-history","tag-latin-america","tag-leftism","tag-novel","tag-riverhead","tag-spain","section-literature-in-translation"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n \n The Weapon of Child Separation<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
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<\/a>\n \n Iv\u00f3n Padilla-Rodr\u00edguez <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n
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<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n \n \u201cA Second Enlightenment\u201d: Greg Grandin on Latin America, the United States, and the Creation of Social-Democratic Modernity<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
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<\/a>\n \n Alexander Avi\u00f1a <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n <\/p>\n