What does Paul Morand have to do with Cuban publishing houses? How does the current panorama appear? Do they respond harmoniously to catalogues of authors and works, according to the complex legacy of the twentieth century and up to the present day? A graceful vision—a point of departure—is provided by an agile French writer of the last century.
It is the ironic repertory left to us by Paul Morand, the perceptive Parisian cosmopolitan—also famous as a bon vivant. He said that for the publishing house Gallimard there were four kinds of authors: those who arrive and take care of their own books; the crowned ones, whose prizes pay for the publicity; those of the house, who have their small local clientele; and those authors whom nobody looks after, whose books remain little known or ignored.
It seems that all commercial publishing houses on the planet fit their authors into the classification of the controversial French writer, for it is known that during the Second World War he worked with the Vichy regime, which meant that he had to wait until memories had faded—or tolerance had increased—before entering the French Academy in 1968. Though he himself, by virtue of the quality and circulation of his varied work, would occupy a place in the first class: that of those who arrive and take care of their own books.
Of course, state publishing houses, those sponsored by some patron or foundation, and academic presses—almost always university presses—alter the assortment, not always for the benefit of the murky universe of readers, today even more nebulous because of cheap digital versions and the dissimilar products—many of them deceptive—of artificial intelligence (AI). To include authors and works within this other class requires critical flexibility in judgment, since there is a bit of everything: a broad spectrum that calls for prudence, for not swinging at a bad pitch—as they say in baseball—because being a published or unpublished author today, in 2026, is of no importance, except to that unsinkable platoon of academics or members of writers’ associations who display their ridiculum vitae as a passport to posterity.
To avoid commonplaces—Marcel Proust made innumerable efforts to get himself published—I will name writers I have occasionally known and recount one or another anecdote that suggests placing them in one of the four classes; classes full of nuances according to period and country.
Among those who arrive and take care of their own books, I know the relevant case of Alejo Carpentier, the only Cuban writer to have been among the finalists for the Nobel Prize and the first Latin American to receive the Cervantes Prize, in 1977. Carpentier always took care to place his books not only in Spanish-speaking circles, but also in European publishing houses, especially French ones. He knew which doors to knock on and, like many writers, did not fail to make use of his diplomatic posts—he was Cultural Counselor of Cuba in France—to carry out promotional efforts, something I find valid when, of course, the authors in question possess talent.
Ambrosio Fornet once told me that Carpentier was very careful in reviewing proofs, which he returned to the printer while demanding—almost like Balzac or Flaubert—that he be allowed to remove a sentence or adjective, add a phrase… Was it Borges who said that books are handed over, never finished? The author of Los pasos perdidos exemplifies that respect for himself and for the reader.
From the second class—the crowned writers, whose prizes pay for the publicity—it occurs to me, among a wide variety of candidates, to illustrate the category with Gabriel García Márquez, who published Cien años de soledad when he was thirty-nine years old—he was born in 1927—and received the Nobel Prize at fifty-five, in 1982. Severo Sarduy told me that his literary agent, that Catalan legend named Carmen Balcells, argued with him at the Frankfurt Book Fair over the sale of the French rights to Crónica de una muerte anunciada. The bidding among several French publishing houses, conducted by Carmen Balcells, culminated in the equivalent of half a million dollars as an advance simply for signing the contract, one extra dollar for every copy sold, and, of course, the ten percent established by law on the retail price. The publicity was crowned, naturally, by an interview in which, with “great secrecy” (sic), the date on which the excellent novel would appear was announced. I assume that on the cover the author’s name appeared in larger letters than the title. The publicity paid for the “prizes,” the editions of the bestseller.
For the writers “of the house, who have their small local clientele,” I have many examples, which could even be arranged by generation. This class does not distinguish—it is worth clarifying—between rich and poor markets, nor between cities of greater or lesser purchasing power in relation to their size. Paul Morand gives no clue, nor does he even refer to his years as a diplomat in Switzerland; or earlier, when his trips to New York between 1925 and 1929 gave him material for writing a marvelously sharp and entertaining chronicle of the so-called Iron Babel, that Manhattan he describes and narrates as few have known how to do, a book published in 1930 and still read with pleasure today.
I begin the illustration of this third class with the colophon of a book that is now easy to recognize. It reads: “This book, Dador, poems by José Lezama Lima, was finished printing on the thirtieth day of December, nineteen hundred and sixty, the edition being under the care of the foreman, Roberto Blanco, in the printing workshops of Úcar, García, S.A., located at number fifteen Teniente Rey Street, in the city of San Cristóbal de La Habana, Cuba.”
The printers Úcar García S.A. established a friendly relationship with their clients, to the point that some of them signed a contract that allowed them to pay in installments—as if they were buying a dining-room set or a bicycle—for the book they wished to publish, according to its length, print run, type of paper, soft or hard cover, delivery time, and other details.
Sales, of course, were the author’s responsibility. That is to say: they belonged to his “small local clientele.” This included copies for public libraries, bookstores, relatives, friends inside and outside the country, packages with copies that would remain in some display case, closet, or home bookshelf, awaiting new readers. So it happened with Dador and earlier, since the 1940s, with the magazines and most of the books we now know as belonging to the Grupo Orígenes, paid for by each writer, by collections among friends, and by some patron, such as José Rodríguez Feo and later Mario Parajón.
For the class of authors whom nobody looks after, and whose books remain little known or ignored, I keep in affective memory several Mexican writers I was pleased to know during my years in Puebla or earlier, when from Havana I would travel to Villahermosa, Tabasco, invited to the Jornadas Internacionales Carlos Pellicer. Their efforts to make themselves known led them, with many sacrifices, to create publishing houses such as LunArena, directed by the married couple formed by the writers Miraceti Jiménez and Víctor Rojas, together with a group that included—among others—the poet Enrique de Jesús Pimentel, the talented short-story writer Alejandro Meneses, the narrator and essayist Beatriz Meyer, and Armando Pinto, translator, director of the BUAP journal Crítica, and a feared intellectual.
Meanwhile Villahermosa, the city of rivers and lagoons where none other than José Gorostiza—Muerte sin fin—and José Carlos Becerra—El otoño recorre las islas—were born, had barely three decades ago the publishing house Hora y Veinte, where, among others, the Tabascan poet Ramón Bolívar published, almost unknown among Mexican poets of his generation.
I return to Paul Morand and Cuba: the wall of lamentations generally offered by the daily survival of the immense majority of Cubans in the sad country of right now needs no argument, where the desolations make us marvel at the strong vocation and will of its artists and writers. Old and small publishing houses—in the fifteen provinces—subsist miraculously. And that is no exaggeration.
It is in exile—above all in the United States and Spain—where Cuban literature lives and grows with force, as can be eloquently seen around Universal, founded in 1965 by Juan Manuel Salvat in Miami. That tradition is re-created there today—among several others—by Ediciones Furtivas. Verbum and Betania in Madrid, or Aduana Vieja in Valencia, increase their flow without discrimination against any literary genre, such as literature for children and young adults; without distinctions of age, sex, race, aesthetic ideas, philosophical inclinations… The catalogue of Casa Vacía in Richmond, Virginia—founded in 2016 by Pablo de Cuba Soria—presents writers currently living in Havana, such as Daniel Céspedes Góngora and Alberto Garrandés…; in Miami: María Elena Hernández Caballero, Rosie Inguanzo, Alfredo Triff…; in Bayamo: Hugo Fabel Zamora López, to whom it awarded the international poetry prize—among 250 books submitted—and published his book Matar al Buda; in Caracas: Octavio Armand…
None excludes authors from other Spanish-speaking countries or from other languages. Nor has any of them—let it be said plainly—been able to avoid entirely the sweaty sieges of mediocrity. Moreover, more commercial publishing houses recognized in international book circuits also welcome Cuban authors: Tusquets publishes, among its novelists, Abilio Estévez, Leonardo Padura, and Antonio José Ponte; Ena Lucía Portela appears with Siruela… Pre-Textos is publishing the biography of José Lezama Lima written by Ernesto Hernández Busto… The prestigious Fondo de Cultura Económica of Mexico—another example outside the country—honors itself by publishing Cubans, even though it is a government dependency.
Current figures of authors and books allow one to conclude—after eloquent comparisons—that it is here, among the transterrados, that the rich and diverse inheritance of the Cuban book grows. Paul Morand would agree, although his somewhat close affiliation with totalitarianisms might have made him myopic before Castro-communism, as happened, and still happens, to certain European intellectuals. His classification, however, remains useful. We are in one of the four classes, for better or worse, or who knows what for.
