A Place Imagined
J.S. Tennant, Mrs Gargantua: Reports from Cuba
William Collins, 352pp, £20.00, ISBN 9780008447748
reviewed by Mike Gonzalez
This book is not so much a history of Cuba, as a kind of Museum of Curiosities, a collection of eccentrics and their eccentricities. Mrs Gargantua, for example, has nothing to do with Rabelais but is a gorilla of whom, more later. The author, J.S. Tennant, reminds me of the Victorian travellers who filled their drawing rooms with shrunken heads, poison-tipped arrows and African masks; not because his collection contains such exotica but rather the strange and eccentric. But the impulse is the same, from the very moment of the European discovery of the island in the framework of the search for mythical lands like the Land of Cockaigne or the Seven Cities of Cíbola which filled the imagination of the conquistadores.
What links the reports is Cuba — or perhaps it would be best to place the island’s name in inverted commas ‘Cuba’, a place imagined, invented even by generations of explorers, visitors, writers and artists across the five and a half millennia since its ‘discovery’. To his credit, Tennant starts in the island’s prehistory, that is before it was assimilated into Europe’s historical narrative. Part one of the book, entitled ‘Wildmen’, begins, as it should, with the acknowledgment of four thousand years of culture and civilisation that existed before Cuba and the Antilles were redefined by the European imagination — and before 90% of its 200,000 original inhabitants were worked and battered to death within 60 years. Yet some of their descendants survived in hiding in the centre of the island, then and later, in the face of new persecutions.The pre-Columbian world was rife with imaginary places, strange bestiaries, palaces and empires — mythologies set in motion above all by Marco Polo’s visits to the Great Khan.
As the rest of the book demonstrates, since that early encounter Cuba has repeatedly provided the setting for new myths, dreams of wondrous places and extraordinary beings. Tennant details the debates of the time of Conquest about the morality of Conquest at whose heart was the great chronicler of ‘the destruction of the Indies’, Bartolome de las Casas. The arguments were serious and formal, even as the repression was mounting outside. They are disturbingly familiar in the current context of equally indefensible ‘just wars’.
Cuba’s flourishing and surprising natural world was mapped and catalogued very sympathetically, as Tennant points out, by the great scientist Alexander von Humboldt at a critical moment in the island’s history, after the first revolution on the continent, the slave rebellion led by Toussaint Louverture on the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, which was until then the most productive source of sugar in the world. After the rising, the Haitian landowning class fled to eastern Cuba and laid the ground for Cuba’s future as a major source of the world’s sugar, produced by slave labour.
I have not forgotten Mrs Gargantua. The American connection brought tourists and profiteers to Cuba in equal measure, as well as people like Rosalia Abreu and Maria Hoyt two women with an active affection for gorillas though there was no obvious connection with Cuba other than the fact the both were very wealthy and owned large estates which could provide comfortable accommodations for apes and in Hoyt’marlins case for her gorilla Gargantua for whom she sought a gorilla bride,Toto, under the guidance of Ringling’s circus. Their ‘romance’, with all the attendant mythology, filled the yellow press and brought Cuba a probably unwanted fame. More famously, it was marlin fishing that brought Ernest Hemingway to Cuba, where his estate La Vigia commemorates his brilliant novella The Old Man and the Sea, though he probably spent more time drinking mojitos in La Floridita bar.
Cuba remained a Spanish colony until its slave troops in the Second War of Independence in 1898 drove back the colonial forces in the face of the extraordinary cruelty of the Spanish campaign under General Weyler, whose legacy was the concentration camp. But Cuba with its prosperous sugar trade had always fixated American capital, and the Independence struggle was appropriated by the U.S., who took advantage of what proved to be a pyrrhic victory over Spain by renaming the war the Spanish-American War, writing a new Cuban Constitution in English and taking control of the island, introducing racial discrimination before the ink was dry.
In 1959 it fell to the guerrilla forces of the 26th July Movement, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, to bring down the corrupt pro-American gangster government of Fulgencio Batista and raise the possibility of successful resistance to imperialism for a new Latin American generation. Threatened, besieged and abused by the American right, Cuba has earned a reputation for survival — though in October1962 it came close to destruction in the confrontation of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The rabid hatred of the American right continues with Trump and his secretary of State, Marco Rubio, the son of Cubans who fled the revolution.
The Trump regime has identified with the anti-Castro Cubans of Miami, who vote for him in exchange for the maintenance of a relentless campaign that has now lasted 67 years. The island’s population continues to confront the scarcity of food, electricity, water. Tourism is now the island’s main source of revenue, but fewer and fewer visitors arrive with the hope of rediscovering the revolutionary impulse. Tennant, by contrast has done his research, has understood Cuban literature and culture, and seems to have a genuine passion for the island and its people.
What links the reports is Cuba — or perhaps it would be best to place the island’s name in inverted commas ‘Cuba’, a place imagined, invented even by generations of explorers, visitors, writers and artists across the five and a half millennia since its ‘discovery’. To his credit, Tennant starts in the island’s prehistory, that is before it was assimilated into Europe’s historical narrative. Part one of the book, entitled ‘Wildmen’, begins, as it should, with the acknowledgment of four thousand years of culture and civilisation that existed before Cuba and the Antilles were redefined by the European imagination — and before 90% of its 200,000 original inhabitants were worked and battered to death within 60 years. Yet some of their descendants survived in hiding in the centre of the island, then and later, in the face of new persecutions.The pre-Columbian world was rife with imaginary places, strange bestiaries, palaces and empires — mythologies set in motion above all by Marco Polo’s visits to the Great Khan.
As the rest of the book demonstrates, since that early encounter Cuba has repeatedly provided the setting for new myths, dreams of wondrous places and extraordinary beings. Tennant details the debates of the time of Conquest about the morality of Conquest at whose heart was the great chronicler of ‘the destruction of the Indies’, Bartolome de las Casas. The arguments were serious and formal, even as the repression was mounting outside. They are disturbingly familiar in the current context of equally indefensible ‘just wars’.
Cuba’s flourishing and surprising natural world was mapped and catalogued very sympathetically, as Tennant points out, by the great scientist Alexander von Humboldt at a critical moment in the island’s history, after the first revolution on the continent, the slave rebellion led by Toussaint Louverture on the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, which was until then the most productive source of sugar in the world. After the rising, the Haitian landowning class fled to eastern Cuba and laid the ground for Cuba’s future as a major source of the world’s sugar, produced by slave labour.
I have not forgotten Mrs Gargantua. The American connection brought tourists and profiteers to Cuba in equal measure, as well as people like Rosalia Abreu and Maria Hoyt two women with an active affection for gorillas though there was no obvious connection with Cuba other than the fact the both were very wealthy and owned large estates which could provide comfortable accommodations for apes and in Hoyt’marlins case for her gorilla Gargantua for whom she sought a gorilla bride,Toto, under the guidance of Ringling’s circus. Their ‘romance’, with all the attendant mythology, filled the yellow press and brought Cuba a probably unwanted fame. More famously, it was marlin fishing that brought Ernest Hemingway to Cuba, where his estate La Vigia commemorates his brilliant novella The Old Man and the Sea, though he probably spent more time drinking mojitos in La Floridita bar.
Cuba remained a Spanish colony until its slave troops in the Second War of Independence in 1898 drove back the colonial forces in the face of the extraordinary cruelty of the Spanish campaign under General Weyler, whose legacy was the concentration camp. But Cuba with its prosperous sugar trade had always fixated American capital, and the Independence struggle was appropriated by the U.S., who took advantage of what proved to be a pyrrhic victory over Spain by renaming the war the Spanish-American War, writing a new Cuban Constitution in English and taking control of the island, introducing racial discrimination before the ink was dry.
In 1959 it fell to the guerrilla forces of the 26th July Movement, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, to bring down the corrupt pro-American gangster government of Fulgencio Batista and raise the possibility of successful resistance to imperialism for a new Latin American generation. Threatened, besieged and abused by the American right, Cuba has earned a reputation for survival — though in October1962 it came close to destruction in the confrontation of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The rabid hatred of the American right continues with Trump and his secretary of State, Marco Rubio, the son of Cubans who fled the revolution.
The Trump regime has identified with the anti-Castro Cubans of Miami, who vote for him in exchange for the maintenance of a relentless campaign that has now lasted 67 years. The island’s population continues to confront the scarcity of food, electricity, water. Tourism is now the island’s main source of revenue, but fewer and fewer visitors arrive with the hope of rediscovering the revolutionary impulse. Tennant, by contrast has done his research, has understood Cuban literature and culture, and seems to have a genuine passion for the island and its people.