Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada: A Novel of Cuba

Una novela llena de simbolismo donde cada personaje es una imagen de la realidad cubana; los padres de Yocandra, viejos, enagenados y decepcionados representan a la revolución cubana en su triunfo, esperanzas y decandencia; el Nihilista, intelectual perseguido, vigilado y censurado por un regimen que no apoya y aborrece hasta desearle su desaparición; el Traidor, el clásico oportunista, trepador de la revolución que ahora en su decadencia se aparta por miedo a ser perjudicado en un cambio; la Gusana, la que en vista de la miseria se ve forzada a la emigración; el Lince, típico cubano rápido y espabilado que sabe improvisar para sobrevivir; Hernia, persona incapacitada para sobrevivir la situación de decadencia absoluta y solo hace quejarse y por fín Yocandra-Patria, persona que dejó de creer e identificarce con la realidad circundante y solo vegeta en una cotidianidad absurda y vacía. Como casi la mayoría de las obras de Zoé, su narrativa está plagada de erotismo, morbosidad, humor, denuncia social y política pero sobre todo es una mezcla entre realismo mágico y testimonio.

Zoe Valdes was born in Cuba in 1959 and fled to France in 1995. Overnight, she has vaulted to the first rank of contemporary Latin American novelists. "Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada" (Arcade Publishing: 1997) was her first novel published in English. "I Gave You All I Had" (Arcade Publishing: 1999), which existed in manuscript as early as 1995, and "My Father's Foot" (Planeta: 2002) have recently added to her reputation.Told in the first person, "Yocandra" is a brief, rich, wrenching, serio-comic, episodic, film-influenced, belle-lettristic piece of performance art, in which the narrator's voice is, happily, always present.Thrust out of a magic-realist Purgatory in a cycle of petition and rejection, Yocandra is confined to Castro's Cuba. A person's name may be important, but apparently not in Cuba. Yocandra exchanges one name, the name of her country, for the name of a muse in a failed effort to buy love. All of the other major characters in the book lack proper names. Her two lovers bear nicknames -- the Traitor and the Nihilist -- which reflect their relationship to the Cuban state. Like characters in a Bergman film, they meet and play a game of chess together while Yocandra suffers a spiritual crisis. Her father, a Communist Party hack, destroys a treasure trove of homoerotic art because it offends his orthodox machismo views. Her girlfriend, the Worm, escapes to Spain, where her life with a belching fat man becomes as strained as that of a character in an Almodovar film. Yocandra's lost love, the Lynx, stumbles upon a nighttime sailing expedition to Miami, willingly joins in, and alone survives a storm when he lashes himself to stray timber and floats free.This is a Cuba in which Communist ideology and bureaucracy have bred poverty, corruption, and disconnects in the extreme. In the background of Yocandra's story, neighborhood vigilantes search excrement-strewn dumpsters for signs of political disloyalty, bicyclists who pedal to forget are branded loose women, the data entry clerk at Yocandra's literary journal creates her database anew each day when the power cuts out before she saves her work, everyone barters everything of value for what passes for food, and the sea pounds relentlessly and the sun continues hypnotically to shine.Sex plays a prominent part in "Yocandra." (Valdes has said that, growing up fatherless and without money in Cuba, she had sex instead of toys.) Devotees of erotic fiction told from a woman's perspective may appreciate the clinical description of Yocandra's lovemaking with the Nihilist, whose perfect body includes a perfectly used thirteen-inch tool. But if the scene is erotic, it is not because there is any affection, much less love, passing between the two. Sex without love -- like literature without words, pride without accomplishment, work without labor, birth without creation -- is a staple of Yocandra's daily life in Cuba. This is a provocative book, written with style by an author to contend with.

El libro se trata de una mujer cubana buscando forma de vivir los frutos de la herencia de una revolucion al que ella nunca pertenecio. Encuentra solamente promesas vacias y una vida llena de nada. No hay diferencia entre vivir y sobrevivir. Quizas gente consiga su escritura ofensiva porque no esconde ningun detalle en sus descripciones, pero estas descripciones son necesarias. El libro no tendria la fuerza que tiene sin el famoso capitulo ocho. En pocas paginas llega a explicar tanto lo social como lo personal para una ciudadana cubana durante el periodo especial con el sabor de escritor exiliado. Perfecto para cualquiera que quiera aprender algo sobre el sentimiento de alguien que vivio la Cuba despues de que se acabaron todos los suenos revolucionarios y lo unico que sobro fue una isla a la deriva. El final deja a uno con sentimientos incompletos, pero cualquiera que sepa algo de literatura va a captar que esta es la mision de la autora. No habia final al tunel en que Cuba se encontraba en esa epoca. El libro es una joya para literatura moderna latinoamericana.

Zoe Valdes has been able to articulate, in a literary fasion, what I have sought to do for the last five years since I spent a year a half in Cuba and left unable to express what I had seen, heard and experienced. She highlights the contradictions brilliantly, illustrates how the regime has suppressed individuality and personal initiative and has produced an island of crazy old fools, (like her mother) men who can only repeat the same paranoid line over and over, (like the great leader) hyper-sexualized youth, (what else is there to do? How else to relax?) prostitutes, prisoners, young people for whom the threat of sharks and drowning is better than staying on the island, the wretching pain of losing all your friends to exile, the Hernia (what a great metaphor!). There is so much in this little book -- I would like to re-read it, and recommend it to anyone who wants to know what life is like on the island in this decade. This book, reflecting life in Cuba, is very, very sad and somewhat hopeless yet it must be read.

as a cubanmerican, cuban by birth, american by choice, i was moved beyond words by ms. valdes narrative of the cuban tragedy. tragedy because even though i live in the land of freedom and opportunity, there is always present in my heart, the anguish and the uncertainty for the ones left behind in the island. be it by their choice or by the designs of their destiny. ms. v., captures this so very well. i also was able to enjoy very much her comparasion of her old lover, the writer who charmed and bought the youthful yocandra her schooling and all the other things the revolution could not give its people, but only the priviliged ones at the top could. it is always the same story. the old man could only write the same sentence over and over. like mr. castro, who can only repeat the same empty promises over and over again without any respect for his people who have been hearing them for the past 4 decades. I was deeply moved by yocandra's telephone conversation when her rafter friend after he arrives in miami and narrates to her his ordeal leaving everything behind in the paradise of nada and facing the caribean ocean with strangers while his only baggage was his hope for a better life. that to me sums up all the words that as a refugee i wished i could have said so many times, over and over. i would like to read this book in spanish but i don't think is available now. please bring more books of tis caliber. i am quite tired of reading about our despotic hispanic machos and about how little we have done about them until these past two decades. gracias.