PBS documentary, ‘Letters to Eloísa,’ focuses on prominent Cuban writer’s life of repression| Opinion

In 1991, twenty five years after it was removed from book shelves, José Lezama Lima’s masterful and a controversially homoerotic Paradiso was again published in Cuba.

By then, the novel, translated into every major language had become legendary, and a new generation of Cubans lined up to get their hands on a copy of a book synonymous with rebellion against decades of institutionalized homophobia and political and cultural repression.

The collapse of the Soviet Union had left Cuba bereft of natural allies and to survive, the revolution needed to cleanse the Stalinist excesses of yore. What better way than to return Cuba’s most prominent, and silenced intellectual, to the literary pantheon of the subtly repentant revolution.

To be fair, Lezama’s rescue was already underway, Paradiso’s international success had earned Lezama worldwide recognition, and students at the University of Havana, where Lezama’s work was forbidden, had rediscovered his writings. Lezama, had become a symbol of rebellion, and passages of Paradiso had achieved mythical status.

But the official restoration of Lezama was another matter. Lezama was being resurrected not as a rebel, but as a revolutionary, who had been the victim of “errors” committed by overzealous petty officials during a discrete period of time benignly referred to as “el quinquenio gris” (the grey five year period).

Emphasized were Lezama’s early enthusiasm for the revolution as welcomed the advent of a new “imaginary era,” where Cuban culture would flourish, and the fact that Orígenes, Lezama’s literary journal, had been created as an alternative to the corruption and Americanizing modernization of the Cuban Republic. His Ché Guevara, Comandante Nuestro, written in 1967, was the cherry on top.

But letters written to his beloved sisters Eloísa and Rosita living in exile told another story; of bitter frustration with scarcities and the disastrous state of the Cuban economy and growing misgivings about the revolutionary state’s infringement on personal and artistic freedom. “I have recalled Nietzsche’s phrase from the Zarathustra, ‘the desert is growing’,” wrote Lezama in 1963. “What an apt phrase for our times…if there is no freedom there is no possibility…if there is no freedom there can be no truth.”

The truth those letters told compelled me to make the documentary Letters to Eloísa — which will air Friday on PBS in Miami — to shine a light on an obscured literary genius and, in the spirit of justice, much as Eloísa had done when she decided to publish the letters hoping to set the record straight.

When Lezama died in Havana, on Aug. 9, 1976, Eloísa had re-read her brother’s letters with the intention of sharing with the world the tender brother she knew. What she discovered in her brother’s writing was the growing despair of a man trapped alone in a hot and humid Havana home, separated from everyone and everything that had given his life meaning.

The arc of the life laid out before her was a tragedy that began with Paradiso’s publication and continued on to his death. It was the story a brother pining to reunite with his sister, and a government which stubbornly denied him every opportunity to do so; of a literally genius unable to publish his work, or to assume his place alongside other writers of the Latin American boom.

It was also the story of a man who valued friendship above all and found himself surrounded by “loneliness and more loneliness,” as only very few dared risk the reprisals associated with visiting Lezama, reading or even quoting him. “I live in fear, overwhelmed by melancholy,” he would write Eloísa in 1971.

I was fortunate to have made two short visits to Cuba between 2011 and 2013, a time when a breeze of freedom blew across Havana coinciding with Lezama’s centenary celebrations in December 2010.

I visited Lezama’s home, spoke to Lezama’s friends, was given recordings and photographs. Knowing that in Cuba nothing is permanent, I kept those interviews and materials as a treasure, always hoping that one day, I could go back, dig deeper, learn more. By the time I was able to begin making this documentary the doors to Cuba had shut. I was denied any further access.

Among those to lend their voice to Letters to Eloísa, during one of those two short visits, the late Cuban poet César López spoke of the need to avoid a repetition of the 70s and 80s in Cuba: “We have been cruel, cruel to the most vulnerable creatures and must remain vigilant that nothing like this will ever be repeated.”

The return of overt censorship and repression in Cuba proved his words to be prophetic.

Adriana Bosch is an award-winning filmmaker whose career spans more than 30 years. Letters to Eloísa, which first premiered at the Miami Film Festival, will be shown on the PBS VOCES series in Miami on Friday, Oct. 15 at 10 p.m. ET (check local listings).

This story was originally published October 11, 2021 at 12:00 AM.