Worm's-Eye View

INCONSOLABLE MEMORIES by Edmundo Desnoes. 155 pages. New American Library. $4.50.

This book, first published in 1965 in Cuba, is less compelling as fiction than as reportage from that near, yet remote island. Among its surprises is the fact that it was published at all, since the protagonist often criticizes the Cuban revolution, cares more about girls than about politics, and is a self-confessed gusano, or worm (the regime's word for its enemies). It holds considerable fascination as a highly personal worm's-eye view of Castro's domain.

American Smell. The novel's hero is a 39-year-old Cuban named Malabre, whose furniture store, apartment building and car have been expropriated by the government. In compensation, Malabre gets a monthly pension that is supposed to continue for 13 years, though he suspects it will not. Both his parents and his wife are "90-milers," that is, Cubans who have fled across the narrow channel to the U.S. Malabre stayed behind because "I already know the States: but what's happening here is a mystery to me." He drifts through the Havana streets under the "diarrhea of our tropical sun," and picks up amenable girls such as Elena, who has decided opinions. She says the "American smell" is the "smell of nylons, toothpaste, lipstick, deodorant, detergent and stuff like that. Americans have a peculiar smell and Russians stink."

In Malabre's Cuba, there is "no longer bourgeois variety for the happy few, only flat socialist equality for all." The convent school that his wife once attend ed is now the Lenin Workers Training Center, and the elegant home of a former friend now houses an embassy. The greatest change is the appearance of an entirely new vocabulary. Tracatran, a new coinage onomatopoetically suggesting machinelike response, refers to a person who carries out orders implacably; parquear la tinosa means "to park the buzzard," or pass the buck; saram-pionado, or "measled," describes someone who shows a rash of too much Marxist-Leninist theory.

Historical Rush. The book comes to life most in the final pages, dealing with the missile crisis. Malabre, frightened and exhilarated, is in bed with his newest mistress, Noemi, when he hears the radio voice of John F. Kennedy announcing the quarantine. As army tanks rumble through the streets, Malabre reflects that Cuba is "no longer an insignificant colony, we've already rushed into history, we have the same weapons that the Russians and Americans rattle at each other."

Author Desnoes, 37, was working as a journalist in New York when Castro took power, and went home of his own accord because "I never would be anybody outside my country." He now lives in Havana and is an editor of Cuba's national book-publishing company. The novel seems to give a picture of Castro's Cuba, warts and all: the endless waiting in lines, bureaucratic inefficiency, food shortages, paucity of merchandise in stores, and such trivial but revealing irritations as delays in deliveries of soft drinks because there are no corks for the bottles.

The appearance of this book suggests that Cuban censorship is relatively tolerant of "self-criticism," particularly in fiction. Besides, the underlying tone is not really anti-Castro; it is apolitical. Malabre is a typical declasse, a man who loathes his fellow bourgeois but cannot fit himself into the proletariat. The revolution goes on without his help or hindrance, though he makes frequent but feeble efforts to write stories in the accepted style of "socialist realism." He seems to prove that though political systems come and go, the alienated man--or worm--never changes.

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