"Biografia de un cimarron" and the Novel of the Cuban Revolution

Hay cosas que yo no me explico de la vida. Todo eso que tiene que ver con la naturaleza para mi esta muy oscuro, y lo de los dioses mas. Ellos son los llamados a originar todos esos fen6menos que uno ve, que yo vide y que es positivo que han existido. Los dioses son caprichosos e inconformes. Por eso aqui han pasado tantas cosas raras. These are the opening lines of Miguel Barnet's Biografia de un cimarron, confusedly, yet significantly translated into English as The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave.l But who speaks here, the old runaway slave or the young Cuban anthropologist? Is the book a biography, as the original title proclaims, an autobiography, as the English title reads, or a documentary novel, as it is generally classified? I hope to show in what follows the pertinence of these questions with regard to Cuban literature by analyzing the documentary novel, one of the most popular forms of narrative to emerge in Cuba since the triumph of the Revolution. I also hope to show through such an analysis, which will focus mainly on Barnet's book, the role that Cuban literature of the Revolution plays today in the context of Latin American literature. As is well known, the questions posed above are fundamental ones in anthropology. They are the questions that Claude Levi-Strauss asks throughout Tristes tropiques, and they address fundamental concerns in the social sciences: how can I ever know the other, yet remain myself?2 In the literary realm the problem