Various Positions (1996)
“This had been under the auspices of Batista; in 1959 Fidel Castro had come to power and Cohen wanted to see the socialist revolution firsthand. He took a bus to Miami in late March, and then flew to Havana, which was hot and quietly disintegrating. It was 1961 and Castro was facing off with the Americans. “I am wild for all kinds of violence,” Cohen had said before leaving. He later confessed that he went not so much to support Castro as to pursue a fiction: “I had this mythology of this famous... civil war in my mind. I thought maybe this was my Spanish civil war, but it was a shabby kind of support. It was really mostly curiosity and a sense of adventure.”
Cohen’s departure created confusion at McClelland & Stewart: “the day you left for Cuba, the page proofs [of Spice-Box] came in, and now I am wondering what we had better do,” wrote his editor. On March 30 Cohen was on a Pan American flight from Miami to Havana. Thirty-one years earlier, almost to the day, García Lorca had made a trip to Cuba, and part of Cohen’s attraction to the country, as it had been with Columbia University, was that it had excited his literary mentor.MoreLess
Cohen’s departure created confusion at McClelland & Stewart: “the day you left for Cuba, the page proofs [of Spice-Box] came in, and now I am wondering what we had better do,” wrote his editor. On March 30 Cohen was on a Pan American flight from Miami to Havana. Thirty-one years earlier, almost to the day, García Lorca had made a trip to Cuba, and part of Cohen’s attraction to the country, as it had been with Columbia University, was that it had excited his literary mentor.MoreLess
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