Enrique Labrador Ruiz

He was born on May 11, 1902 in Sagua la Grande, province of Las Villas, and died on November 10, 1991, in Miami.

Self-taught in his education. He began his career in journalism. At age 16 he started as a correspondent for Havana newspapers in the town of Cruces and in 1919 he was a correspondent for El Sol de Cienfuegos, where he managed the section "Pasavolantas". According to Elio Alba-Buffil "... When El Sol moved to the capital of the republic, on December 23, 1923, the young Labrador who had barely turned 21 traveled to Havana on the train where the newspaper and its staff were being transported".

From this moment on, he begins to collaborate with newspapers and magazines of the capital in which he will remain throughout his life. Among them we can mention: (national): Mundial, Chic, Noticias de Arte, Social, Revista Cubana, La Gaceta de Cuba, Espuela de Plata, Orígenes, Bohemia, Habana, Carteles, Gaceta del Caribe, Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional, Alerta, El Debate, Información, Diario de la Marina, Pueblo, El País, Hoy, El Mundo; (foreign): Américas (USA), Atenea (Chile), Babel (Santiago de Chile), Boletín de la Biblioteca Nacional de México, Claridad (Buenos Aires), El Imparcial (Guatemala), Fábula (Argentina), El Mercurio (Santiago de Chile), El Nacional (Caracas), Repertorio Americano (San José, Costa Rica), Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional (San Salvador), Revista de Indias (Bogotá), Universidad de Antioquia (Medellín, Colombia), et. al. Quickly established in the intellectual world of his time, Labrador undertakes the crusade to challenge the lethargy of Cuban letters, dulled by tellurism. Thus emerge what he called "gaseous novels": El Laberinto de sí mismo (1933), Cresival (1936) and Anteo (1940).

The "gaseous" works constitute the moment of rupture with our narrative tradition. It is the decade in which the transgressive needs of narration begin to consolidate, with the experimentation of avant-garde prose in Alejo Carpentier (Ecue-Yamba-O (1933)) and Lino Novás Calvo (El Negrero (1933)). Labrador Ruiz's "personal aesthetic", strongly influenced by Modernism and by European and Ibero-American avant-garde literature, makes the prologues to Cresival and Anteo, and many of his articles, true programs of renovation, in which he clarifies essential aspects of the modern novel. In his work "Notas en torno a una personal estética", published in Universidad de Antioquía (No. 44, :615-617, Feb-Mar, 1944), he says:

"... I could tell you that to create in this way I have relied only on the edges of a reality profoundly tactile to my senses; hidden and vibrátile edges, barely perceptible to the bite of a sluggish or evasive pen, since I am inclined as a rule toward what has been least easy to register in a pulse that is governed under the spur of the transitory, the fleeting and the unleashed ... And all of this because the world around me is very dear to me; because I love that contradicted and fatalistic world whose tight weave envelops us in a perpetual atmosphere of anguish; because I am part of that atmosphere, and because I am always inclined to analyze in it even that which is most difficult to be hidden from its collective destiny (...)".

In 1937 he publishes his book of poems Grimpolario. In reality this precedes his novels and in an original way—very much in tune with the formal experimentation of avant-garde prose—he presents it in a dialogue from El Laberinto..., in the same way that said dialogue appears transcribed in the porch of Grimpolario. This volume reveals in its structure a development in seeing; that is, the trajectory, the course of an absorption in what is observed, in the dynamics of the "enigma of daily living". It maintains from Romanticism the lyrical attachment and the weighing of the subjective, and from Naturalism, Impressionism and the "new aesthetic sensibilities", observation in bursts that densifies the tones and establishes the impermanent, according to the unveiling of dark sides of a reality claimed in its existential sordidness—"agonistic", according to the author's term—by a new canon of the artistic and the beautiful. Grimpolario is the radiating center of his fictional themes. It is the marrow, moreover, of contents, as El Laberinto... is of experimentation in the "ways of making".

In 1950 he publishes La sangre hambrienta, which earned him the National Novel Prize from the Direction of Culture of Cuba's Ministry of Education. Apparently, in this work it seems that the author deviates from his gaseous style, linking himself more to the ways of the so-called "novels of the land". However, what Labrador achieves is to demonstrate the humanistic height of regional and national themes treated with his own voice and gesture, as the Colombian Tomás Carrasquilla had already done. That is, the universalization of the tragedy of Man from any latitude expressed within the linguistic context that frames his reply to the discourse of Culture, Nation and History.

Labrador's characters remain trapped in the "labyrinth" of their anxious, "desirous" lives; it is the "hungers" that connect the essence of his production in general, the tragic nature of beings stripped and marked by their agonistic destiny. Notable in this work—which Carpentier chose among the 10 most important Cuban novels—is the treatment of feminine and racial issues.

His collection of short stories consists of three books: Carne de Quimera (1947), Trailer de sueños (1949) and El Gallo en el Espejo (1953). One of the bastions of Enrique Labrador Ruiz in the configuration of his subjects is the ambiguity between fantasy and reality. This aspect along with the linguistic work, linked to meticulous knowledge of the language and its semantic capillaries, constitute the great nucleus of these stories, in which the accent of the accursed writer exaggerates the corners of humor, with the ironic and sarcastic. The oneiric situations, the doubling of the subject and its dispersion within a plot of psychic nebulae, the ambiguity of the human condition through "popular speech", that "little fable-telling world" that covers with its poisoned tegument innocence and goodness and, finally, "desire", intensity of repression that juggles with madness and constantly dialogues with the axioms of convention, is the thread that guides his fictions.

Notable in his short story collection are: "La Almohada China", "Spondylus Imperialis", "Conejito Ulán"—anthologized by antonomasia and national short story award "Hernández Catá"—, "Cinqueños", "Tu sombrero", "Reparada", "El Gallo en el Espejo" and "El Viento y la Torre".

If the Modernist imprint left in Labrador a commitment to "rare" themes and "linguistic battle", which sought in the chronicle promptness, essence and a certain lyrical voluptuousness in writing—"... Rubén moved what is called the fossils of fin-de-siècle poetics. That Indian put to music the great rhetoricians who reveled in boring tirades. Gómez Carrillo, a Guatemalan, the nervous chronicle; Valle-Inclán, the grotesque, amorous fiction. I read and read, but parallel to that I was doing my own things"—the essayistic vein, also promoted by this movement and intensified in the avant-gardes, was a genre he cultivated, given its hypercritic character in a century surprised by the overthrow of the great apparatus of History, in which the unity of events is, precisely, discontinuity and rupture with all logic that induces speculative immobility and hinders philosophical digression. That is, as Pedro Aullón del Haro said about the essay and with regard to Robert Musil and The Man Without Qualities: "... With it /essay/ one attempts to give an answer not only to the crisis of the story and the novel, but to the crisis of theoretical and systematic thought, that is, to the crisis of absolute certainties of science and philosophy that dominates the fin-de-siècle...". With this aspect we have referred to a specificity of his narrative discourse, furthermore, we insist on the essay in its generic sense.

Hence his books: Manera de vivir (Pequeño expediente literario) (1941), Papel de fumar (Cenizas de Conversación) (1945), El Pan de los Muertos (1950) and Cartas a la Carte (1991). The first of these is a well-aimed program of the avant-garde in Cuban novels. In general, it is a bitter critique of the cultural environment and the pauperism of letters, run aground by a false concept of the national, the autochthonous and the original. There are excessive and in bad taste judgments, but the text is essential as testimony to the decadence of intellectual interests in the republican period. Papel de fumar maintains this same line, although it restricts its speculations toward concrete matters of knowledge, using dialogue, a reinforcer of points of view that divert conceptual interest toward conjecture.

El Pan de los muertos is a collection of chronicles with extraordinary artistic value. They are sketches of national and international figures who filled his journalistic reports. In them one feels the vindication and respect for contemporaries whom he admired and castigated—in some cases—with acrimony. It is an essential and beautiful book of homage to his greatest school: journalism.

Finally, Cartas a la Carte. He called it "pre-posthumous" and in reality it was. Juana Rosa Pita, an excellent poet and friend of the writer, was in charge of editing this text that tightropes between the line of the labyrinths. Written in the manner of letters—46 in total—the essay and narration prevail, which brings to the surface the painful dread of silence, of absence; they are letters to any addressee who wishes to hear the word incarnate in solitude. Beyond diatribes and outbursts, we perceive the vibration of what is lost, the insularity trapped in the erratic and uncertain memory of every labyrinth.

In the newspaper La Nación of Caracas, on February 24, 1978, Labrador, once the path of exile had been completed, writes Fecha, one of his most moving essays with which we wish to close this brief sketch of one of the most important innovators of our narrative:

"That land of wonders I also had. But like all things in my life, fragment, project, achievement and soon a lump of snow in my hands. It was the thing without second, the one that suited all dreams and fifty years later it still gleams in opaque sky, troubled torch. What love! I looked at its habit of biting star, its perfect impermanence, its breath of long tail, the brilliance of its golden hair, the achievement of all dawns, glittering, tying my step to its bridle and I, the assaulter of dreams, the one who looks toward impossible bedrooms established a stellar accounting. Where did you want to take me, to be mine and everyone's?. Born from an ethereal rib, from the rib of Martí, you came to confuse me in the dawns of everywhere, in the shadow of all days, before contrary winds, under clouds of turbid water, ardent peace and overloaded root of madness, through endless transits, toward events not occurred, fiber of light, misty metal, slightly lunar year, trap of amorous crickets, curdled dreams, scattered dreams, other dreams in awakenings of anguish. Homeland, Homeland. It was the tradewind of my torridness, the transhumant idleness, the burner of so much diffuse ice. I loved you in my way, between secret shouts, bites of irony, a hand to find you so far, so far from all hope as to only find you in the vicinity of death. I saw you repudiated among cliffs of affronts, under clouds of opprobrium and the green air of my intact love went to seek you, in my way, guttural, spectral, asking myself, but am I cursed? Incandescent, flashing, with the arrogance of a high-eave pigeon, I put my hand on your waist and began to tremble. Well restricted, abundant, I thought that God made me for these supreme things and my petulant presence has been broken. It is not I who will take your hand but rather the underside of your floating tunic to kiss it in silence. What more? You traveled through my tangled tenderness of lion, between claws of heated honey, all, total, whole, and never did I put hand upon you, nor finger, nor glance, that did not sigh first. Many years later what do I see of you? That you still await me now that I am worth nothing, that I have nothing, in a territory of crispate peace, in your master cloud, tactile, and after all with a chest as fragile as that of the translucent madonnas. I surrender, I prostrate myself and draw from my somewhat tarnished jacket tears of one who thinks he is cursed, tears that surprise me because they are only of God. He who at last is back from everything, from everything must take example, that is so.

Go childhood of a naughty schoolboy, of very little study, to find and know you once and for all, unhappy child. It is not a day of weeping. I raise the pen vaguely, what remains of a crumb of reflection and it crisps the air and its sound. What sound!. Sordidness of bouquet of maddened fireflies. All would wish to kiss the Master's brow—according to their judgment—but all consume the fire of a forest, which is easier—according to their judgment—. Hour of avatars and stubborn dilemmas. Sphinx, herds, and a bowl of light for the poverty of the path. See and not see, sumac voluptuous glasses, burned water, how far will the instance of departure reach? I divine this breath of Caracas; after it, what?. Let what flows from me stand upright in this valley of haughty flower. Let my flower be Caracas, as it was of the Grande; my xenoglossia, my transparency, and may it receive my soul wounded by knots of silence".

Source: CubaLiteraria