THE CUBAN BESTSELLER LIST : Hot Cakes in Havana

The shelves in most of Cuba’s bookstores have lamentably few books on them these days. La Moderna Poesia, Havana’s best-known general interest bookstore, looks all but shut down with scant books lining its extensive walls. Customers read by natural light coming in through doors and windows; the few light bulbs that remain are almost always out.

Across the street, Cervantes, the venerable second-hand bookstore, fares slightly better. Cuba has no shortage of recyclable books, and with its big window fronting on Obispo Street, sunlight fills the place.

Next to Cervantes sits Havana’s only profitable bookstore. It sells for dollars only, no pesos allowed, and its customers--foreigners and privileged Cubans--can select from a bigger spread of material than at the other two stores, and with plenty of lights in air-conditioned comfort. For years it was called Maxim Gorky, with a plentiful stock in Russian.

With resources such as paper and ink depressingly low, Cuba, a country that prided itself on a wide range of domestic and foreign titles, has had to limit its output severely. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and Cuba’s other Eastern-bloc trading partners has created widespread problems, one of which is that the country’s publishing industry, like every other enterprise, has had to scramble to stay in business. Many new books are simply reprints of previous releases. The book trade has turned to Mexico--and to a lesser extent Spain and Venezuela--for co-publishing ventures, joint projects that reduce typesetting, production and printing costs.

I’ve been keeping track of Cuba’s book trade for a number of years now. When I travel there, it is often the country’s writers union that proffers me a visa, and its members have slight hesitation in giving me the latest intrigue in writing, printing, distribution and restraint.

Back home, I follow the world of Cuban publishing through the distorted lens of the Bestseller List.

The bestseller list, printed weekly in “Bohemia” magazine, comes from the Cuban Book Institute, the government agency that oversees the production and distribution end of the country’s dozen or so publishing houses. Last year “The List” was pared from 10 books to eight--half fiction, half nonfiction--and the weekly advertisement for recent releases now highlights only four new titles instead of nine.

Cuba’s all-time best-selling author has been dead almost 100 years. Jose Marti, the poet-essayist-philosopher, raised money, shipped arms and worked tirelessly on behalf of Cuban independence from Spain a century ago. Today, Cuba continues to publish his prodigious output as if the country were one huge Marti-of-the-Month Club.

The formula that produces The List in Cuba is as mysterious there as ours is here. Since 1959, Cuba has averaged more than 1,300 new titles a year, 40% of which are school texts. I saw my friend Jorge Daubar’s name on The List one week and dropped in to visit at his home in the Vedado section of Havana. His fictionalized biography of Jose Raul Capablanca, Cuba’s international chess champion in the 1920s, had just been released. Daubar’s day had started with a call from a friend at the Cuban Book Institute. “You’re on The List!” he said. “You’re No. 2 on the nonfiction list!”

“I couldn’t get too excited about it,” Daubar told me. “The bestseller list here is a joke. Almost every book released gets on The List. Besides, they put ‘Capablanca’ on the wrong list. It’s fiction.”

Is Cuba’s bestseller list a fiction as well? It’s hard to say--along with print runs, sales, reorders and notoriety, politics plays a role, too. The titles that turn up are unpredictable, to say the least. Detective thrillers and books set during the Revolution are the usual mainstays of the fiction and nonfiction lists, respectively, but the best-selling novel for 1992 was “Ivanhoe” (1819) by Walter Scott.

Many authors from the States have made The List in Cuba since the Revolution, including Twain, Poe, Bradbury, Whitman, Bierce, Puzo, Salinger and, of course, Hemingway. “Despite the blockade, invasions, biological warfare and economic strangulation,” the Cuban author Lisandro Otero has written, “the Cuban people know to distinguish between the government in Washington and its literary works.” Within the last couple of years I’ve seen Horace McCoy’s “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (originally published in 1935), “Absalom Absalom!” (1936), “Lassie Come Home” (1940)--and “Rabbit Redux” (1971), which held firm on The List last fall for five weeks.

Otero, who has counted Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene among his friends, has been a long-time figure in the upper echelons of the cultural bureaucracy, known in the past for his firm line against wayward writers. Last year he landed in hot water for a couple of pieces published abroad advocating changes at home. Publication of his most recent novel, “Tree of Life,” was delayed, and only with strong intercession were its 10,000 copies released. It sold briskly, but curiously never made The List. Otero, who knows of such things, faulted his new status as judgmental of the regime for his omission.

Bestsellers are displayed on the front table in bookstores, and traditionally, new books of note and their authors would be introduced to the public at a ceremony on Obispo Street on Saturday afternoons. That is rarely the case any more. Now books are often introduced through excerpts in the magazine Bohemia. The most recent book in the magazine, serialized in its entirety, was “A Kernel of Corn,” an interview with Fidel Castro conducted by the Nicaraguan Tomas Borges, which has occupied the No. 1 slot on the nonfiction list for most of this year. (It is worth noting that Castro never occupies a slot other than No. 1; he’s either at the top or not on The List at all.)

“Paradiso,” Jose Lezama Lima’s mid-1960s novel that deals with Havana’s erotic underground, was hidden away the first time it was released. More recently the author, who died in 1976, has been eulogized in the Cuban press, and “Paradiso” has been reissued; it made The List. One of the very few pieces of fiction published of late that realistically portrays undercurrents in contemporary Havana is “The Woods, the Wolf, and the New Man” (1991) by Senel Paz. It proved so popular that when the novella’s initial small print run quickly sold out, many students at the University of Havana painstakingly copied it by hand, word for word, and passed it on to others.

Authors who have abandoned their homeland are almost never published, let alone make The List. Daina Chaviano, a science-fiction writer whose stories I had always enjoyed, was pulled from stores as soon as she defected in the spring of 1991. Guillermo Cabrera Infante, one of Cuba’s best writers, left for London in the mid-’60s, and while his themes have often remained Cuban, his sales have not.

There are exceptions to every Cuban rule, however, so the only constant on The List is unpredictability. Jorge Daubar, the author of “Capablanca,” now lives in Miami, where he works for a government agency by day and is active in an anti-Castro group by night. A mystery he left behind, “In Search of the Truth,” was published last year after his defection. He laughed when I told him it had stayed on The List for five weeks. “I guess they don’t know I’ve left the country.”