Telex from Cuba

Looked at from a certain angle, Cuba in the 1950s, before the revolution, was a luxury playground for middle-class Americans who, by virtue of their “whiteness,” enjoyed big houses, staffs of servants, exclusive cocktail parties, and fashionable leisure activities. Observed from another perspective, such privilege was bankrolled by the exploitation of the native people and their resources. Rachel Kushner’s 2008 novel, Telex from Cuba, combines these perspectives, employing several points of view to tell the story of a white community living in mid-century Oriente Province. Two American expat children – K.C. Stites and Everly Landerer – constitute the novel’s first-person and limited third-person points of view, respectively. Their narratives, along with that of a more omniscient narrator, grapple with the complex connections between race, class, and identity.

K.C. Stites narrates the first chapter. He recalls January 1958, when Castro’s guerrillas set ablaze the sugarcane fields owned by his father’s multinational United Fruit Company. Fifty years have passed since his childhood in Cuba, and K.C.’s story is a remembrance of things lost. In his recollections, Malcolm Stites, his father and top executive at United Fruit, cuts a genteel figure as a latter-day plantation master. He “wore a white duck suit, … lived in a house full of servants,” and left his children in the care of Jamaican nannies. When K.C.’s benevolent, but class-conscious mother worries that their Haitian laborers live in shacks without plumbing, her husband proudly reminds her that his company pays higher wages than Cuban-owned companies.

At age eight, K.C. becomes friends with Curtis, the son of the plantation overseer, Hatch Allain. The large, boisterous Allain family, crammed into a squat house near the mill, are definitely lower-class, albeit white. It’s rumored that Hatch fled to Cuba after committing murder in Louisiana. K.C. notes how Curtis’s family eats, talks, dresses, and behaves with less civility and more unruliness than his own. As a young boy, he’s attracted to the Allains’ unrestrained domestic life and spends a lot of time with them. K.C.’s parents disapprove of his friendship with Curtis and make him wash off in the garage immediately upon returning from his visits to the Allains. Of course, company social events, such as yacht outings or parties at the Pan-American Club, exclude people like the Allains. But K.C. suggests, “they wouldn’t have wanted to go to those events” anyway, because it wasn’t in their nature to enjoy refined activities. Curtis eventually piques K.C.’s internalized elitism when he calls Cuba a “loser’s paradise,” implicitly discrediting the Stites family’s superior status. K.C. punches Curtis, and their friendship cools.



In 1952, a week after the coup that installed Fulgencio Baptista’s US-backed dictatorship, nine-year-old Everly Lederer arrives from Tennessee. Her family is relocating to Nicaro, where her father will manage the nickel processing plant. Sporting coke-bottle eyeglasses and bright red hair, adventurous Everly imagines life in Cuba as something from the pages of Treasure Island. Her mother, Marjorie, is socially ambitious and devotes herself to mastering proper etiquette. Unfortunately, neither Everly nor Nicaro lends themselves to Marjorie’s cause. Unlike nearby Preston, the Stites’ fashionable town, Nicaro is tarnished with grime from its factory operations, and the air is red with suspended nickel oxide. Lacking a golf club, the aspiring elites of Nicaro make do with socializing at the hunting lodge of brothel-owner-turned-millionaire, Lito Gonzalez. There, the expat wives bemoan their poor shopping options, and everyone drinks too much. The respectable families of Preston and Nicaro do mingle socially, and Everly and K.C. become friends, but Everly’s strongest attachment is to her family’s well-educated, Haitian house-servant, Willy.

Meanwhile, in Havana, more political intrigue brews. Rachel K., a burlesque dancer who claims a French identity and a long list of political lovers, takes up with a mysterious arms-dealer from France, La Maziere, who’s hoping to find – or create – a market for weapons. By 1957, the dictator Batista is vulnerable. His collusion with the American companies to enrich himself angers many Cubans, and his mixed racial heritage makes him unpopular with the American expats. Fidel Castro is organizing guerrilla revolutionaries in the hills. K.C.’s older brother, Del, runs off to join them, a development that prefigures doom for white control in Cuba, though the whites themselves naively consider their dynasty secure.

The time is ripe for Rachel K. and La Maziere, using her charms and his contacts, to set in motion a flow of money and arms to Castro. As a publicity stunt, Castro’s rebel forces abduct several white company men, including Everly’s father, and after sufficient media attention, release them unharmed. Emboldened, the revolutionaries set fire to fields of United Fruit sugarcane and take over towns in Oriente Province. But even as the guerrilla army surrounds Preston, K.C.’s father refuses to admit any real threat to their colonial lifestyle; at his suggestion, the town holds a holiday dance. Bombs blast the social club. Though no one is seriously injured, the expats finally realize their glory days are over. They evacuate the country. Fidel Castro ousts Batista and nationalizes United Fruit Company. K.C. never returns to Cuba, confessing, “We went down there and we took.” Everly eventually goes back to Preston and locates Willy. She wires him money occasionally and returns to Cuba several times to visit Willy and his wife.



The theme of identity emerges throughout the novel. Rachel K. believes “that people are born every minute of their lives, and what they are in each of those minutes is what they are completely.” Everly muses that people come to Cuba to reinvent themselves. Watching her sister draw and erase features on her blank-faced doll, Scribbles, Everly considers the advantages of facelessness. To have no face, “to erase it and go around like that” – wouldn’t such inscrutability make you free? Everly’s thoughts are those of a child who wishes to be free to create her self. But how appearances, racial or otherwise, trap one in a prescribed identity is a question for us all to consider.