This July, Cuba erupted into its widest protests in a generation. News reports credit food and medicine shortages and summer power outages as the catalysts for the demonstrations which have been countered by a government crackdown involving mass arrests and summary trials, sparking an international outcry.
Dariel Suarez’s novel The Playwright’s House reads like a prologue to these events. There are no mass protests in the novel, which is set more than a decade earlier, but the conditions that create resistance are in the foreground: a deprived populace and a government clamping down on dissent. When we first meet the novel’s protagonist, attorney Serguey Blanco, dissent is the farthest thing from his mind. Through his influential mentor Gimenez, he is ensconced in an elegant apartment in a coveted district of Havana, a lifestyle above his station. “It was a rare kind of Cuban inheritance: a loan, bereft of their familial history,” Suarez writes, and though Serguey and his wife did not own the furnishings, “in time he and Anabel could take emotional possession.” He lives a cozy upper-middle-class life, surfing over the day-to-day troubles of his fellow citizens:
“For some time now, Serguey had been able to elude immersion in many of the gritty, dispiriting aspects of life in Cuba. There was the hunger and sickness and persecution, the ‘aspirin to cure everything’ and ‘only pair of shoes’ and ‘inner tube rafts’ reality of it, which was no longer his reality. There was the deadpan bureaucracy, which he regularly circumvented thanks to his connections … Serguey’s ambitions, particularly after he had met Gimenez, were all branched from a singular goal: to remove himself from the Cuba most people knew, the Cuba in which he’d grown up, the Cuba in which his father and brother still lived.”
In deference to the bourgeois trappings of his career, he maintains an aloof relationship with his father, Felipe, a famous theater director and playwright, and a near-hostile one with his brother, Victor, a small-time criminal. Those familial bonds, thin as they are, force Serguey to confront his complacency when Felipe is mysteriously arrested on political charges. Once he’s named an enemy of the state, Felipe becomes a radioactive isotope, dangerous to those associated with him. Serguey has managed a nice life by avoiding the gaze of state power. Once the eye is on him, everything changes.
The setup has a Tolstoyan power: give a character a pronounced but understandable flaw, then set society’s forces to work against it. But this novel is not a reductive screenwriting-101 version of that technique, a pairing of pro- and antagonist. As in the great social novels, Suarez takes a broad survey of the territory, sending Serguey and Victor to root around in the city and country, the upper crust and the lower rungs, the challenged arts community and a loose network of underground activists.
The initial question of the novel is: how much fight does Serguey have in him? His early reaction is “to resign himself to a lack of control over the circumstances … He realized that the gravity of his father’s arrest hadn’t truly affected him. A son should’ve been devastated, terrified, irate. He hadn’t instinctively rushed to the nearest police police station, as Victor had suggested, or the State Security offices, as he had contemplated.”
That question is well explored, but there’s another one lurking that’s even more intriguing: how much dissent is possible in an authoritarian state like Cuba? This is the darkened boundary Serguey and Victor must explore, without knowing which steps might exert enough pressure to benefit their father and which will simply clamp an anchor to their legs. Government control is not absolute, but their leverage with State Security is negligible — just a choice to denounce their father and consign him to prison, or to defend him and set the arm of the state upon themselves.
As Suarez writes:
“Get brave enough and you might win some prison time. Serguey had always known how the system was designed and assembled, how it was put into effect and to what ends. Not until his father’s arrest had he been compelled to concede and confront its flaws, its irrationality.”
Most avenues to advocate for Felipe are pre-closed: the government controls the media and Internet access is limited and monitored. The brothers must tread carefully as they meet with bloggers who can broadcast Felipe’s imprisonment abroad, and call for international backup with the atrophied remnants of the Catholic church. Their recourse is not in working against Cuba but in working around Cuba.
Suarez’s portrait of the country — not its people, but its government — is a dismal one, and as in his story collection A Kind of Solitude, characters must face the question of whether to leave the island. Even if they can exert enough pressure to free Felipe, they have reason to fear how hard and swift the blowback will be. I wonder what they would make of the recent protests. They would certainly understand the impetus behind them, but it’s hard to say how much appetite they have left for hope. It’s likely they’d have no single answer because The Playwright’s House is not a single answer kind of book. It trades in complexity. Serguey, his wife Anabel, and Victor, would most likely argue with one another and with their own uncertainties.
The Playwright’s House is a tapestry of contradictions. The intolerable must be tolerated. Unwinnable bets must be wagered. As many governments around the world, both communist and capitalist, trend authoritarian, the novel serves as a stark warning: much of what we consider unthinkable is not. Once a state starts clamping down on freedoms, the vise is very difficult to prise open.
While its implications are international, though, this is very particularly a novel of Cuba, and it’s a tribute to the people living there. I want to say its characters are resilient, and they are. I want to say they are brave, and that’s true. But to say so risks flattening them into heroic caricatures of The People, and that’s not what Dariel Suarez has done. His characters, in their messy humanity, are family to each other and will feel like family to the reader. Like family, they squabble. They hope and lose hope and regain it. They fail each other and redeem themselves. Their resilience is not a noble blessing bestowed upon them; it’s simply required by the bureaucratic quagmire in which they find themselves.
Moral complexity can be lost when a novel has an antagonist as unyielding as the Cuban government is to the Blanco family — but here the lid placed upon society, and upon these characters in particular, creates a high pressure world in which the importance of every action is magnified. What makes this book special is the balance between political commentary, moral examination, and exploration of human relationships. None of these threads suffers at the hands of any of the others. They’re woven together inextricably, each reinforcing the next.
[Published by Red Hen Press on June 25, 2021, 336 pages, $18.95 paperback]