Short stories
Condenados de Condado
Not translated into English
Norberto Fuentes · 1968
Synopsis
Twenty-five short stories on the armed struggle against the insurgents of the Escambray, in the early sixties. The characters return from one story to the next and form a mosaic. Militiamen and bandits are not sharply divided: some revolutionaries prove contradictory or treacherous, some enemies have positive traits, and the epic tone at times turns to parody. The title echoes Frantz Fanon's Les Damnés de la terre.
Context
The collection was awarded a prize in 1968 by the Havana jury of the continental competition, and Antonio Benítez Rojo immediately stressed its unity. It then counts as part of the narrativa de la violencia, but the armed forces' magazine attacks it for its portrait of the revolutionaries, and Luis Pavón Tamayo ranks its author among those who distort reality; Guillermo Rodríguez Rivera defended it in 1969. Leonardo Candiano compares it with Jesús Díaz's Años duros, which are more Manichaean. The Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México reissued it in 1991.
Who it is for
Very short stories, in Cuban Spanish, to be read as a whole; no French translation.
Prizes and reception
Casa de las Américas short story prize in 1968, praised the same year by Antonio Benítez Rojo.