Book Ban: Will Arizona Censors Be Shocked by ‘King of Cuba’?

national hispanic newsBy Robert Friedman, National Hispanic News

 “The only ones who should be censored are the censors,” says Cristina García, commenting on an Arizona school district’s banning last week of  “Dreaming in Cuban,” her 1992 novel that was a finalist for the National Book Award.

García is answering a question from the audience at a book festival on the National Mall in Washington. She then proceeds to read “for the benefit of the book banners,” one of the racier parts of her new novel, “King of Cuba.”

While the censors presumably have not yet had a chance to be shocked out of their knickers by “King of Cuba,” they did react, according to the Associated Press, to the complaints of two parents from the Sierra Vista, Arizona, school district over a sexually explicit scene from “Dreaming in Cuban,” The critically praised novel explores the ties among three generations of women during the Cuban Revolution.

The censors were acting on an Arizona law passed in 2010 to ban material deemed to “advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government, foster racial resentment or promote ethnic solidarity.”

García’s book now joins those of several other Arizona-censored authors, the great majority of whom just happen to be Hispanic, such as Sandra Cisneros, Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Díaz, Oscar Hijuelos, and Laura Esquivel. Also banned in Arizona are “Civil Disobedience,” the American classic by Henry David Thoreau, and “The Tempest,” by one W. Shakespeare.

García, whose latest work features an elderly, decrepit Cuban dictator known as El Comandante and a Castro-hating Cuban exile in his late eighties — noted in an interview that she immersed herself in the literature about and the very long-winded speeches of Fidel Castro. But when she started writing, “I just shelved all the research and focused on the man, trying to write about what makes him tick. In the end, I’m a novelist. I had to write a character, not a history book.”

Born in Havana on the Fourth of July (1958), García left the island at two, and has since lived in New York, California and Texas, where she currently chairs creative writing at Texas State University-San Marcos.

So just how Cuban is she?

“At this point, I think I’m as much a New Yorker and a Californian as a Cuban. But Cuba is the generator of my fiction.”

Come to think of it, the essence of her being most likely is in her fiction. “Who I am, what I’m obsessed by. I think this comes out more on the pages than in my life.”

García has been criticized in the past by the more virulent Cuban exile groups for not taking an activist position against Castro’s Cuba.

She acknowledges that she hasn’t been vocal in her opposition. “I’ve maintained an independent stance,” she says. “I’m not anybody’s spokesman. I couldn’t be less interested in that. This is a big black-and-white fight (between the Castro lovers and haters) that has been going on for 60 years, but it’s not where most people live. It doesn’t capture the complexities of what’s really happening.”

She last visited Cuba two years ago and did find the revolution “in its last gasp. Cubans are calling their government a gerontocracy. They say, ‘These old guys are not letting us live’. They’re ready for a change. They want to participate more in how their future unfolds,” says García.

This article was first published in National Hispanic News.

Robert Friedman, former Washington, D.C., correspondent for the daily San Juan Star, which discontinued publication in 2008, writes freelance.

[Photo courtesy Hispanic Link]

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