Enrique Serpa Filis

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Outstanding Cuban narrator, poet, and journalist.

Enrique Serpa was born in Havana. He studied primary education in a public school in his native city, in the Cerro neighborhood, where he was a classmate of Rubén Martínez Villena. From the age of twelve, he worked as a shoemaker, typographer, and messenger for a dry cleaning business until 1916. Three years later, he left home and moved to Matanzas to work in a sugar mill, first as a cane weigher and later in the mill's offices.

In 1920 Serpa returned to Havana and, thanks to the help of Rubén Martínez Villena, obtained employment until 1921 in Fernando Ortiz's law office. Along with him, Andrés Núñez Olano, and other intellectuals, he participated in the gatherings at Café Martí and became linked to the Falange de Acción Cubana and the Grupo Minorista (1923-28). These were the years when Serpa enthusiastically read a great diversity of texts from European thought and literature (Zola, Azorín, Flaubert, Maupassant, Unamuno, Valle-Inclán, Galdós), from Latin America (Darío, Rodó), and from Cuba (Martí, Varona, Sanguily), accumulating thereby a solid self-taught culture.

In 1925, Serpa published his poetry collection La miel de las horas and won first prize for poetry in a contest held by Diario de la Marina. These early verses, of modernist taste and metaphysical symbolism, were the only ones he wrote, as he would dedicate himself thereafter exclusively to journalism and narrative.

He was editor, head of correspondents, and information officer for the newspaper El Mundo (1921-1929), as well as literary director of Chic (1925) and editor of Excelsior (1930-1952). He collaborated in other publications such as Cuba Contemporánea, Revista Bimestre Cubana, Gaceta del Caribe, Castalia, Luz, Futuro Social, El Fígaro, social, carteles, and bohemia. In 1938 he traveled to Mexico, where he wrote for El País. For his reports "Air Raid Havana-Santiago," "Gold on Isle of Pines," and "The Revolution in Mexico Will Fail," he received genre awards in contests sponsored by the Culture Department of the Secretary of Education in 1936, 1938, and 1939, respectively.

He was decorated in 1941 by the Trinidad Lions Club on the occasion of his book Días de Trinidad, and in 1942, he was awarded the Aztec Eagle decoration at the Mexican embassy in Havana. His article "Citizen Will Is Performing a Miracle, the Transformation of Pinar del Río" received the Eduardo Varela Zequeira Prize in 1943, the year he was named Honorary Son of Remedios.

In 1944, he received the title of certified journalist from the Manuel Márquez Sterling Professional School of Journalism, as well as a Certificate of Recognition from railway workers for his work on behalf of their economic demands through the pages of El País.

He was granted, in 1945, the title of Member by the National College of Journalists. In 1946, he received the Varona Prize for Journalism for his article "Postwar Meditation," and was honored in the city of Nuevitas for his journalistic articles about that locality.

In 1947, the Havana Tobacco Propaganda and Defense Commission granted him recognition, and in 1948 and 1949, he was proclaimed Honorary Son of Manzanillo and the province of Pinar del Río, respectively. Between 1952 and 1959 he resided in Paris, where he worked as press officer at the Cuban embassy in France.

In 1953, he received a Certificate of Recognition granted by the Circle of Journalists for 30 years as a member of the institution. He traveled to various countries, including the United States, Guatemala, Venezuela, Haiti, Spain, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy; and, upon his return to Cuba in 1959, he collaborated in Bohemia, Unión, El Mundo, and Mar y Pesca.

His chronicle books, including Días de Trinidad (1939), Norteamérica en guerra (1944), Presencia de España (1947), Jornadas villareñas (1962), and Historia del tabaco (unpublished), all demonstrate Serpa's poetic talent and his concern for the social realities of the most humble. In general, the prose of these books is precious and lyrical, with recherché vocabulary and abundant in metaphors.

As for Serpa's narrative work, it was characterized by a meticulous study of the psychological mechanisms that drive men. Because of this, because of the way he represented social environments, and because of his interest in bitter and anguished situations, his work has been understood under the influence of writers such as Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Maupassant. In particular, general features of the structure of his stories are the initial presentation of a conflict that is displaced by another without breaking the unity of the narrative, and the beginning of the narration in medias res, so that the background is offered in retrospect. Likewise, almost always Serpa's narrators dominate, from omniscience, the particular perspectives of the characters.

Serpa's stories revolve around three fundamental spaces: the city, the sea, and the bush. In his urban stories, more concern with the psychological than with the social has been noted; in addition to sensualist naturalism and acute eroticism. These are stories where Serpa presents characters tensed by their inner conflicts and their affective impulses.

Within this tendency belong some stories such as "Prostitution," which is a stark tale about this social problem in the capital; "Bureaucrats," where the characters are employees of public offices who live constantly under threat of dismissal; and "Party Night," whose protagonist, a poet and storyteller of humble origin, finds himself trapped in a contradictory relationship of attraction and hatred toward the upper bourgeoisie.

In his sea stories, Serpa's prose strips itself of aestheticism and makes use above all of simple, bare, and direct language, and is more interested in social conflicts than in psychological explorations. These narratives are aimed, above all, at denouncing the exploitation in which men live. Examples of this tendency would be anthological stories such as "The Needle," in which the germ of a narrative like Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea has been seen, as well as "Shark Fins," which has been translated into numerous languages and published in various countries.

Finally, in his bush stories, Serpa delights in the description of Cuban countryside and attends to moral conflicts related to themes such as Cubans' struggles for their freedom ("The Deserter" and "Against Duty"), or the vicissitudes of a small-town judge who must do everything to survive (specifically those narratives, eighteen in total, that make up his unpublished book Stories of a Judge).

With his first volume of stories, Felisa and I (1937), Enrique Serpa remained still linked to the naturalism that characterized Cuban narrative of the early twentieth century, although he already breaks with some of those patterns, especially through the psychological treatment of characters. This volume demonstrates that Serpa, from his early narratives, was concerned with social issues linked to misery, police abuses, job insecurity, and prostitution, and that it was always his purpose to denounce the contradictions, anomalies, or errors of his time and his country. Often, economic situations or the abuses to which Serpa's characters are subjected are the triggers for them to react explosively, even if it costs them their lives. This is the case with one of his best stories, "Shark Fins," whose structure is dynamized by temporal jumps, and whose narrator is situated in the perspective of the protagonist character to make the fisherman's precarious economic situation and his confrontation with the police apparatus much more intimate and dramatic. This volume of stories is also made up of other narratives where the author's intention is to criticize negative human attitudes such as malice, prejudices against women, and intellectual opportunism; while in others what matters is the intimate contradictions of tormented beings, indecisive and besieged by fear.

Published in 1951, Serpa's second book of stories was titled Party Night. In this case, it is a volume where pessimism and bitterness become deeper in the continuous effort to organize the stories based on the psychological processes of the characters. In general, in this book one speaks of the impossibility of human fulfillment and feelings of insecurity, fear, distrust, hatred, revenge, jealousy, and envy. The story that gives the book its title insists, once again, on the degradation and opportunism of a writer annulled by society.

In 1940, Serpa won third prize in the story category in a contest held by the Corporate Council of Education, Health, and Welfare, and with "Hatred" he received the Alfonso Hernández Catá National Story Prize in 1951. His last foray into the short story was the book Stories of a Judge, which, although unpublished, contains narratives that Serpa published in some magazines of the '60s. This is a book where he ventures into critical regionalism not previously seen in his work. His project in this case was to form a volume halfway between a collection of stories and an episodic novel.

Serpa's first novel, Contraband, won him the National Novel Prize in 1939 and the Antonio Bachiller y Morales Prize, awarded by a survey of the newspaper Avance in 1952. This is without doubt Serpa's masterpiece, and it is one of the most interesting and intense sea novels in Cuban literature. The action takes place approximately in 1927 and deals with the smuggling of rum from Cuba to the United States in the context of Prohibition. However, the reading it aims for is more totalizing, since in general the novel also tells us about the social relations that occur between the dispossessed fishermen, headed by the character Cornúa, and the Admiral owner of the boat where they work. By the treatment of settings and environments, of the characters—some of whom are caught in pathological states—and of the sordid events in which they become trapped, Contraband reveals itself as a naturalist novel indebted to Zola's narrative. However, it was novel for Cuban narrative, in the context of the 1930s, the incorporation of techniques such as stream of consciousness, which responds to his interest in psychological explorations.

With The Trap, a novel published in 1956 and written during his stay in Paris, Serpa was interested in gangster clashes between armed political groups that emerged in Cuba following the struggle against Machado. It is a novel where the Havana environment is represented from its different strata, although characters and situations are idealized. Because of the latter, it has been accused of being a superficial work that does not delve into the true consequences of the situation of horror and violence it presents. In this novel Serpa reiterates themes such as the desperation and inner emptiness of the characters, especially his two protagonists, Fileno and Marcelo Miró, both condemned to a tragic existence and a useless death.

He was an excellent photographer. In the mid-30s, with a Retina first and a Leica afterward, he took photos of all the places his journalistic work took him, and used them to illustrate his reports. He even had his darkroom, where he developed, printed, and enlarged them. As a curious note, Núñez Jiménez used some in one of his pamphlets, and Bohemia put the photo of a tobacco grower on its cover.

Source: EnCaribe.org