It’s easy to criticize Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution for becoming authoritarian and failing to live up to its potential. Not as many people realize what the political and economic climate of Cuba was like before the Revolution though. The post-colonial era of Cuba during the first half of the 20th century was marked by a political style that could be called “gangsterismo”. Cuba didn’t have political parties so much as they had gangs and often the political violence spilled out of the governmental arena and into the universities, the businesses, and the streets. At the same time, Cuba was trying to find its identity as a modern nation by developing institutions of education and the fine arts. In such a small country, it is inevitable that the underclass and the rest of society would cross paths at some point. This is what happens to the unnamed protagonist in Alejo Carpentier’s novella The Chase.
The story, if you can call it that, opens with a university music student working in the ticket booth at a Havana concert hall where Beethoven’s Eroica is being performed. A man slams a bill on the counter and rushes inside just as the ticket booth is closing. Later the student is in his apartment, playing classical music on his record player. This music is heard in the distance as part of the ambient city noise a couple times throughout the novella, serving as a reminder that everything happening in between the opening and closing of the story is tethered to the concert hall.
The beginning is purposefully disorienting as the protagonist, also an unnamed student, is introduced. It takes a few pages before the narrative settles into recognizable patterns. This works effectively in portraying the lack of mental clarity suffered by the protagonist as he becomes healthy enough to evaluate his situation, realizing he has no money, and goes in search of food. He ends up stealing food from his landlady’s bedside who he then learns has died. His landlady is an Afro-Cuban woman who raised him as a nanny on his father’s sugar plantation. This transition works smoothly as his backstory is revealed. He grew up in the town of Sancti Spiritus then moved to Havana when he received a scholarship to study architecture at the university. The whole story is rooted in a theme of hindered growth and upward social mobility.
Conflict breaks out between the religious landlady and the protagonist because he develops a relationship with a prostitute named Estrella, the only named character in the whole story. Estrella, meaning “star” in Spanish, is the protagonist’s main source of hope and inspiration. He is in love with her and believes she is in love with him too. She certainly is hospitable to him, but it is hard to tell if she really loves him or if just likes him as a preferred customer. In any case, she doesn’t stop servicing clients when he comes to visit. One of those clients, ironically is the student ticket-taker at the concert hall. Estrella is in a difficult position because the Catholic neighbors want to put her in jail for prostitution, but she doesn’t believe she is doing anything immoral. She sees herself as a professional and an artist. As a strong, independent woman, she stands outside of Cuban society while simultaneously embodying that society’s conflict between high and low culture. Estrella’s house is where the protagonist goes when he is in danger. He is a fallen man in search of refuge and redemption, maybe without fully understanding what that means.
As the narrative goes on, it unfolds that the protagonist has joined a communist student gang at the university. They are involved in underworld activities like counterfeiting and assassinations. They hope to overthrow the current regime. The protagonist involves himself in an assassination plot and finds himself in jail. While being tortured he agrees to snitch on the other members of the gang and gets released. That is why he is ill at the beginning of the story. During the miseries of his illness, if you think back to previous pages, he becomes religiously preoccupied with the torture of Catholic saints. To save himself from the distress of being tortured, he seeks transcendence by reaching for the saints as if they are stars too distant to be caught, but it is possible is his indulgent fantasies about their dismemberments is what hold him back. Whatever the case may be, these visions are a result of desperation.
The most brilliant thing about this non-linear narrative is the way it folds in on itself. After finishing, the story, it fits together in a linear fashion, but the pieces have to fall together in the right order in the mind of the reader. The narrative revolves and reflects rather than sequentially laying the details out. This can be seen not only the way his thoughts about the saints during his illness foreshadow his torture in prison even though the illness sequence comes first in the narrative. It can also be seen in the disordered references to his nanny/landlady as a marker of the distance between his youth and his young adult years at university. The novella also starts with the ending of the story, but that ending is split into two with the second half of the ending coming at the end. It is easy to see how Carpentier used musical theory to compose the structure of the narrative.
The protagonist spends his last day wandering around Havana. He returns to the sight of a bombing and gets an urge to seek salvation in the confessional of a Catholic church. But his salvation is postponed because the tired priest is ready to go home for rest and tells him to come back in the morning. The internal monologue of the priest reveals his contempt for the protagonist since he is carrying the type of prayer book that is sold to practitioners of Santeria, something the priest considers to be a low form of spirituality. In the priest we see how racism, classism, and religion are mixed together in Cuban society.
After leaving the church, the protagonist realizes he is being followed. As night descends and the rain begins, he walks around Havana trying to find a place of refuge from his pursuers. We never learn who is chasing him. It could be associates of the communist gang he betrayed or it could be government agents or the police. It could be a combination of all of them considering the sleazy nature of Cuban politics in the 1950s. Ultimately, we return to the beginning with the protagonist sitting in the concert hall, listening to the symphony while nervously scheming what to do when the concert ends. Symbolically, Carpentier is saying that after political, educational, economic, religious, and social institutions have failed to save the protagonist, it is the fine arts that remain as his only chance of salvation. And even that falls short in the end as the student working at the ticket booth lets the protagonist’s pursuers into the theater so they can capture him. The arts represented by the concert hall are only a temporary respite from the chase that results in his inevitable demise. Salvation, like everything else he strives for out of desperation or misguided ambition, is an impossibility.
One interesting detail is the banknote that flits in and out of the narrative. The protagonist pays Estrella with a bill which she then uses to pay a taxi driver. Being an honest man, the taxi driver refuses to take the bill because he thinks it is counterfeit. After some arguing, she takes it back and later gives it to the protagonist because he is broke and in need of money to buy food. That is the bill he uses to pay for his entrance to the concert hall. In the end, the ticket seller gives it to a police man who wants it for evidence of counterfeiting, although the police man’s internal thoughts reveal that he recognizes the money as legal tender. Remember that the communist gang is involved in making phony money. Two things are going on here. One is that the money being passed around links several minor characters together as they cross paths, showing a cross section of Havana’s anonymous inhabitants. Second, the ambiguity of the money’s legitimacy is emblematic of the uncertain nature of the Cuban mind. The money reveals something, even if only briefly, about each person who handles it, and you can never be sure if what they are doing is honest or dishonest or if they even know what is true and what isn’t. Guessing what direction the people’s moral compasses are pointing in is nothing but a crap shoot. That can be said about any society, but in this context it serves to underline the unsettling uncertainties of Cuban life. It reminds me of Philip K. Dick who says that it is not possible to have an unambiguous moral system because morals are rooted in reality and our perceptions of reality are ambiguous. I am paraphrasing an idea from his novel The Man In the High Castle.
The Chase works because the main character’s inner turmoil is a reflection of the political corruption and social chaos of Cuba in the pre-Revolution years. Ironically, it was written before Carpentier knew the Revolution would even happen. Like the character himself, the country is rapidly sliding towards collapse and everything happening to him is directly linked to some facet of society that is going wrong. It’s a sad portrait of a promising student who get sidetracked in his studies and led astray on a path to destruction. It’s also a portrait of a city that is trying to assert itself as an upstart first world metropolis but failing because the sordid muck of vice, crime, and political corruption is holding it back. The main character and the city of Havana are progressing toward an apocalypse that shouldn’t be happening, but is anyways.
The Chase is a good book overall. It reads more like an extended prose poem than a narrative novella. But then again, this is Modernism and the plot is secondary to the progression of its elements. My main complaint is that it should have been longer and more developed. But if you are interested in the theme of the individual’s existential crisis, it serves it purpose well. And it also gives a good snapshot of how it would feel to be in Havana during the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, the dictatorship that unfortunately led to Castro’s Cuban Revolution and the establishment of a totalitarian communist state.
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