Narrative
Persona Non Grata: An Envoy in Castro's Cuba
Persona non grata
Jorge Edwards · 1973
Synopsis
Salvador Allende's government sends the author, a left-wing writer, to restore relations between Chile and Cuba and to open the first Chilean embassy in Havana. As chargé d'affaires, he associates with Cuban writers who have fallen into disgrace and are watched by State Security, and worries about the hold of power over culture, while the affair of the poet Heberto Padilla breaks out, arrested in March 1971 then forced into a public self-criticism. The book, according to its presentation, shows him as the first Latin American writer to see that the revolution was going badly.
Context
Completed in Paris at the beginning of 1973, the book appeared in Barcelona from Barral the same year; the complete version, with a prologue by the author, appeared only in 1983 from Seix Barral, according to Memoria Chilena. It was banned in Cuba as in Chile, and Edwards called it one of the most censored books of its time. The Chilean left judged it counter-revolutionary; García Márquez and Cortázar avoided its author, reports Cubanet. Plon published it in French in 1976, and Bodley Head in English in 1977 under the title Persona Non Grata: An Envoy in Castro's Cuba.
Who it is for
An account of a stay, lively and well documented, which assumes some knowledge of Cuban history; translated into French and English.
Prizes and reception
A book that earned its author the lasting hostility of a large part of the Latin American left.
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