woman!’ Which I did, by leaving her at her mother’s house so I could devote myself fully to the spreading of the new faith.”
Holmes and Grimod were glad to see him put on his hat and bow in farewell.
“If you run into a white rhino one day,” he whispered, moving away, “let it come to you without fear: praise God and tell yourself that it is Bournissac resurrected!”
The Bitter Poison of Evil Passions
Arnaud lights a Montecristo and watches as the coils of smoke rise in a spiral, then stagnate halfway to the ceiling. He is dreaming the long nightmare of his sleeping wife; pen in hand, he makes up stories, aware of only one and dizzy with its absence.
Yvrose Beaubrun, Dulcie had told him, would read for two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon. The morning was dedicated to a kind of press review of the local papers. A selection of miscellaneous news items, for the most part, but also regional and international politics, never forgetting the “poem of the day,” which always went over well. After the lunch break, he devoted himself to novels. The factory women—there were also men, but the women were in the majority—compensated him for his services by producing on his behalf as many cigars as he would have if he had worked beside them for the duration of the reading; often a few more, to thank him for the emotions that he was so good at conveying to them. The choice of the title was theirs: Yvrose arrived with a pile of books and read a dozen pages from one of the authors whose work remained in the running after ferocious negotiations; if any of the workers expressed boredom, the book was immediately abandoned. He would quickly begin another. When the magic set in, the whole workshop was captivated by the story, and from then on no one was allowed to interrupt the reading until the end of the book.
Reading aloud is at least as old as the rule of Saint Benoît, who enforced lectio divina among the monks of Monte Cassino, but its first appearance in a tobacco factory was in the nineteenth century, in Havana. The idea, it seems, came from a Spaniard, Jacinto de Salas y Quiroga, who visited Cuba in the 1830s; this humanist had seen it as a way of educating the slaves who were sorting beans on a coffee plantation. The project was not carried out, instead bearing fruit when it was found, thirty years later, in the prisons of the capital. Through certain incarcerated torcedores, who were released feeling that they had benefited from the readings, the practice was introduced in 1865 at the factory El Figaro, supported by a weekly paper devoted to artisans, La Aurora, whose creators were advertising their reformist spirit. “Today,” a columnist had written that week, “in the very heart of the factories, during the most important working hours, the laborers are keeping their imaginations busy, inquiring into the scientific and philosophical truths best suited to their era. They are talking and discussing; they are reading the works of excellent modern writers and consulting one another on the points that surpass their understanding; and finally, they are doing what they can to learn and to move forward on the path of civilization.”
At the end of the same article, however, this great momentum faltered, showing the all too familiar limits of philanthropy. The reading was educational, certainly, and enriching to those to whom it was addressed, but only if certain things were read: the workers at El Figaro had to take care, since they were paying the reader with their own labor, that they were read works worthy of being studied, with teachings that “do not plant the bitter poison of evil passions in their hearts.” Worthy of being studied . . . All of the bosses’ fears were contained in that phrase, and all of their blindness. How did they not understand that there was more rebellion in Edmond Dantès than in Marx’s entire body of work? Once the workers escaped into literature, no one would be able to pull them out of it, not because they were being read Bakunin or Proudhon, but because they could see in the books, as in a mirror, the reflection of their own misery.
This first initiative snowballed with a speed no one had foreseen. At the end of 1866, the five hundred tobacco plants of Havana—more than fifteen thousand workers, seventy-five percent of whom were illiterate—held reading platforms. This became all the plants on the island, then in Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, and Tampa. In 1868, after the voluntary expatriation of the Cuban owners, fleeing the chaos of the first war of independence against Spain, there were readers from the factories of Key West up to New York, but also in Mexico, A Coruña, San Sebastián, and Seville!
“In Seville!” said Dulcie, her eyes glowing with pride. “Do you see?”
She never tired of telling him about the peaceful action of the cigar makers who had preceded her. These women had not been content with “good” authors, they had profited from all books without distinguishing between Dumas and Bakunin by anything other than the pleasure these authors gave them. And the light. It was through their attentive listening that the spirit of revolution had been infused, that a hope had begun to be born. The readings had been banned an incalculable number of times, but each time they had fought to rekindle the fire. In 1870, three hundred of these women, exiles in Tampa, had written to the author of Les Misérables to appeal to his sense of justice; Hugo had responded: “Women of Cuba, I hear your cries. Despairing, you have contacted me. Fugitives, martyrs, widows, orphans, you turn to an outcast; those who no longer have a home call to their aid one who no longer has a homeland. Certainly, we are oppressed; you have lost your voice, and I have lost mine; your voices moan, mine cautions. This is all we have left. Who are we? We are weakness. No, we are strength. Because you are moral strength, and I am conscience. [. . .] All I have within me is that force, but it is enough. And you do well in contacting me. I will speak for Cuba as I spoke for Crete. No nation has the right to hold another under its thumb, no more Cuba under Spain’s than Gibraltar under England’s. One people does not own another people any more than one man owns another man. [. . .] Spain is a noble, admirable nation, and I love it; but I cannot love it more than France. And, if France still had Haiti, the same way I say to Spain: Give up Cuba!, I would say to France: Give up Haiti! [. . .] Women of Cuba, who have so eloquently shared with me your troubles and suffering, do not doubt, your persevering homeland will be paid back for its pain, so much blood will not have been spilled in vain, and one day magnificent Cuba will rise up, free and sovereign among its august sisters, the republics of America.”
It was as if Jean Valjean himself had replied to them.
Arnaud lifted his eyes to his collection of cigars. How could he not see them, rolled with tobacco leaves, as if archived within the banded cylinders, as the thousands of pages recited over all the years in the dampness of the workshops. A library of papyrus that, in its admirable disorder, made neighbors of Byron, Mark Twain, Dante, Walter Scott, Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, José Martí, Nicolás Guillén, Dickens, Boccaccio, Pérez Galdós, José Hernández’s Martín Fierro, Charlotte Brontë, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Blasco Ibáñez, Edgar Allan Poe, Maxim Gorky, Tolstoy, Nietzsche’s The Antichrist, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Darwin, Émile Zola, Engels, Gustave Flaubert, Pierre Loti, Dostoevsky, Marx, Errico Malatesta, John Stuart Mill, George Sand, Turgenev, Maupassant, Camille Flammarion, Lugones, the twenty volumes of the Young Person’s Treasury or Encyclopedia of Knowledge, the twenty-one volumes of the Collection of Best Spanish Writers, Calderón’s Life Is a Dream, Armando Palacio Valdés, Kropotkin, Chateaubriand, Schiller, Quevedo, Proudhon, Juana Inés de la Cruz . . . This mashing together of “good” and “bad” books was only a tiny portion of what Dulcie had in her head, of that great wave of stories and myths that had broken over Caribbean manufacturing.
All historians acknowledge this reading craze as one of the engines of the independence of 1898, and then the revolution.
As unlikely as it seemed, the readings in the factories continued under Castro without any major changes,
