Caribbean Quarterly

A Journal of Caribbean Culture

ISSN: 0008-6495 (Print) 2470-6302 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcbq20

An Aesthetics of the Caribbean Basin: The

Carpentier Perspective

Lloyd King

To cite this article: Lloyd King (1985) An Aesthetics of the Caribbean Basin: The Carpentier
Perspective, Caribbean Quarterly, 31:1, 64-72, DOI: 10.1080/00086495.1985.11672064

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00086495.1985.11672064

Published online: 03 Feb 2016.

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 AN AESTHETICS OF THE CARIBBEAN BASIN:
THE CARPENTIER PERSPECTIVE

by

LLOYD KING

There is a symbolic appropriateness in the fact that Alejo Carpentier died in Paris and was
buried in Cuba. But his ashes belong to the Caribbean Sea or perhaps to what another
novelist, Jean Rhys, called The Wild Sargasso Sea to denote the alternative Middle Passage
- not the one to Africa but to Europe. Born in Havana to Franco-Russian immigrant but
middle-class parents, Carpentier regularly commuted from the Caribbean to Europe,
living alternately in Havana, Paris and Caracas. Not surprisingly, his fiction deals with
travellers, a familiar emblem of his work being the "Camino de Santiago", the medieval
pilgrim's route to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, by extension, the road along which
every man pursued his restless Quest. Except that the modern pilgrim seems to seek a
shrine which had started to become illusory, for he journeys in a post-Nietzchean age when
the death of God had already been proclaimed. Threatened with the rootlessness of the
traveller, Carpentier reacted by anchoring his sight in the architecture of landscapes and
the stylistic fixity of buildings or the emblematic ruins of the past. Where another
novelist might delight in accumulating the sociological circumstance or the psychological
nuance, Carpentier sought to be a cultural ecologist recovering ideas from landscapes
and finding symbolic meanings in the actions of Caribbean and European men, as he
imaginatively probed at the documented weight of the past. His landscapes and characters
become earners of the documented weight of an aesthetics and a politics.

Europe and the Americas

The philosopher against whose vision the Caribbean writer has tended to struggle,
whether consciously or unconsciously, particularly if he is a writer, who like Carpentier
is concerned with History, is surely Hegel. It WllS Hegel who first endowed History with
its very special significance. As Lionel Trilling rather amusingly put it:
When God died, as by common consent he did, how-
ever slowly the explicit news of his demise reached
us, history undertook to provide the beginnings
which men once thought necessary to the authen-
ticity of the world and of themselves ... the great
narrative historians in some considerable degree main-
 65

tained the weightiness of things by thickening the

past, making it exigent, imperative, a sanction of
authority, an assurance of destiny .1

Hegel did not, like Nietzche, proclaim the death of God but he found Him manifest in
history as World Spirit. In his Philosophy of History, he asserted in that confident manner
proper to nineteenth century Europe that (a) the History of the World presents us with a
rational process, with the World Spirit starting to manifest itself in the East, moving to
Greece and finding its current apotheosis in Europe, particularly in its Germanic Protest-
ant section, (b) Africa had no historical part of the world nor did the indigenous Ameri-
can peoples since such peoples were deficient in the tools and appliances of progress and
(c) the New World in so far as it has received the impress of Europe ''was merely an echo
of the Old World". 2 The terms of his Hegelian model have continued to obsess the Carib-
bean consciousness in its double form: History as an assurance of destiny and its obverse,
History as Absurdity. Carpentier can be seen to enter the dialogue between Europe and
America in the twenties, at a time when the Hegelian model and its counterpart Cartesian
rationality were both being seriously questioned after the First World War when
Europeans turned from subjecting Third World natives to the barbarism lurking within
its "civilizing mission" and directed their aggression against each other, and of course
later followed up with Nazism and the Second World War.
The prophet of Europe's decline was another German philosopher, Oswald Spengler
whose Decline of the West had a significant impact on Spanish America. The critic
Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria has argued that Spengler's work had a crucial influence on
Carpentier when he sought to assess America's relationship to Europe:
Spengler provided the philosophical ground on which
to stake the autonomy of Latin American culture and
deny its filial relation to Europe. Spengler's cyclic
conception of the history of cultures kindled the
hope that if Europe was in decline, Latin America
must be in an earlier, more promising stage of her
own independent evolution. 3
Echevarria's assessment, it must be said, is only partially acceptable. Spengler's most
direct influence can most directly be seen in certain essays of two Mexican intellectuals
Alfonso Reyes and Jose Vasconcelos. In the essays collected under the title, La ultima
Tule, Reyes shows that for him, the notion of the decline of the West suggested that
America was destined to be the future abode of the World Spirit since it had always been
open to the heritage of Europe. And since an American had no nationalist prejudices of
the sort that blocked a French intellectual from being receptive to an English idea, the
American could be more authentically European and America as "La Ultima Tule"
historically that mythic region in which the European mind had situated Utopia and the
Future would be well placed to bear the burden of civilization.4 Vasconcelos on the other
hand was more Latin Americanist in perspective in that in his essay La raza cosmica, even
if he accepted the notion of a westward drift of civilization, he nevertheless tied Latin
America to the Latin part of Europe, dissociating this cultural region, not only from
Anglo-Germanic Protestant Europe, but also from Anglo-Saxon Protestant North
66

America. Defying the Hegelian model without naming it, he also exalted America, as the
title of his essay proclaims, because it was a land of miscegenation, involving Africans and
indigenous peoples. 5 In an essay in the forties, written in Venezuela, Carpentier writes
very much as one who like Vasconcelos believed that the "genius of his race" was Latin
but a Latin stock on which had been grafted "certain ethnic contributions, certain mis-
cegenations, particular historical, social and telluric imperatives". 6 It is a perspective very
much reflected in the meditations of the protagonist-narrator of his novel Los pasos
perdidos {1953).
In fact, far from denying America's filial relation to Europe, Carpentier's fiction was
constantly devoted to an exploration of the relations between Europe and America which
he considered to involve a quite dynamic process. During a visit to Haiti, in 1943, he tells
in an essay, how he came to conceive of "the possibility of transferring certain European
truths to our latitudes, going counter to those who, travelling against the sun's trajectory,
wished to carry out truths where, up to thirty years ago, there was a lack both of under-
standing and judgement to see them in their proper perspectives. 7 As late as 1974, in
his novel El recurso del metodo, a title which indicates the author's desire to mock
Descartes' Discourse on Method Carpentier displayed his obsession with testing or trans-
ferring European truths in an American environment, in this case not only Cartesian
rationalism but also Marxist dialectical thought or at least Marxist insights into neo-
colonial Spanish-American republics.

The Emergence of the Afrocreole

Altogether more than any other Caribbean or Spanish-American writer, Carpentier
seems to have been tormented, perhaps as a result of his own antecedents, by the nature
of America's relationship to Europe which determined to deal with the conception of the
New World as a mere echo of the old. From the very start of his career, it is obvious that
if Carpentier accepted Spenglerian notions about European decadence, he could be in no
doubt of the deep disorder of life in the plantation society of which he was a part. His
earliest interests therefore were Afrocuban-cult primitivism and European avant garde
experimentalism. Jorge Manach has explained some factors which generated the vogue for
Afrocubanism, as cultivated by a young white generation in revolt, in the following
manner: "We encouraged Afrocreole happenings because we saw in them a silent insur-
gency, an attempt to crack the crust of our petrified society." 8 What Manach fails to
state is the salient fact that up until the Cuban Revolution, Cuba was an openly racist
society and those who genuinely valued the Afrocuban folk genius were subject to abuse
of every kind. Carpentier was one such and writing in the thirties about his experiences he
had this to say:
When I think of the bitter moments, the struggles, the
sarcasms, the withheld greetings which eight years ago
were my lot because of my determination to conse-
crate my modest efforts to the defence and promo-
tion of Afrocuban rhythms! 9
He had been willing to assert that the Afrocuban "son" was a musical form just like a
Sonata or Symphony, and had eagerly co-operated with the Cuban composers Amadeo
Roldan and Alejandro Garcia Caturla, who incorporated Afrocuban rhythms in their art
 67

music compositions. For Carpentier had hoped to promote a Cuban version of a Latin-
American style, inspired perhaps by the experiments with Brazilian music of Heitor
Villobos and, as strongly, by Igor Stravinsky's use of Russian folk material. He saw the
vital linkage as a matter of the relation between craft and subject matter and in 1931
could write: "it is necessary that youth in America should have a thorough knowledge of
the representative values of modern European art and literature, not in order to carry out
a shameful labour of imitation and to write, as so many writers without imagination or
character have done, pale replicas of some overseas model but rather in order to seek to
understand the technique~ inside out by analysis and fmd constructive methods able to
convey with greater power our Latin American thoughts and sensibilities." (Cronicas, 2,
p. 482) Indeed after he escaped into exile in Paris, fleeing the regime of the dictator
Gerardo Machado, Carpentier acted as something of a cultural broker, sending back
reports on the happenings in the metropolis, introducing his readers to Surrealism, Picasso
and other notable matters.
Nevertheless, even while he believed that an enlightened awareness of European
experimentation was vital to "the arduous task of creating an art both American and
universal", 10 he always detested imitation. In his prologue to El reino de este mundo he
not only criticized the Surrealists but poured scorn on their American imitators, and in
Los pasos perdidos, the narrator mocks at three young Venezuelan artists for whom Paris
was a Mecca. The paradox lies in the polemical relationship he always maintained with
European culture. For elsewhere he would declare: "Surrealism made a deep impression
on me. It taught me to see textures, aspects of American life I had not noticed." 11 Yet
the most stinging criticism he had to make of the "nativist" tradition as cultivated by an
earlier generation of writers such as Romulo Gallegos was that they were imitating the
nativist novels of European writers such as Ladislan Raymont (Nobel Prize winner for
Literature), Panait Istrati and Knut Hamsun.
In fact, Carpentier thought that the nativist writer's failure lay in his shallow hold
on native history, and by history he meant not only the accounts of professional histori-
ans but the myths, the songs, indeed the superstitions of the folk, all that made up their
traditional culture, for it all constituted for him "a civilization or way of life ... that was
truly an art of social living"} 2 This is borne out by Carpentier's frrst novel Ecue
Yamba 0, in which he sought to exalt Afrocuban ritual belief as a value in itself and as a
way of life that with its instinctive spontaneity provided an almost automatic critique of
the Americanized, debased and passionless life of the Havana bourgeoisie. It was a novel
innovative in its attempt to fuse the language of Futurism and documentary-style material
for it included photographs of Afrocuban ritual objects. Like the later novel, El reino de
este mundo (1949) it shows Carpentier functioning as a Caribbean writer, as one who
believed, as Sylvia Wynter would put it, "that the African heritage has been the crucible
of the cultural deposits of the immigrant peoples" of the Caribbean. (New World Quar-
terly, p. 14)
A Latin American Identity
Not satisfied with his first novel, Carpentier, while in exile, spent many years read-
ing American historical texts:
I felt an intense desire to express the American world.
I did not know how as yet. But the difficulty of the
68

task due to my ignorance of American essences spur-

red me on. For many years I dedicated myself to
reading everything about America from the letters of
Christopher Colombus, taking in the Inca Garcilaso
down to eighteenth century authors. (Valoracion
multiple p. 63)
Carpentier's own search for his and a Latin Caribbean identity had to go beyond the neo-
African crucible theory. Seeking an assurance of Caribbean destiny, he seemed to discover,
if we can judge from the fiction, the Caribbean as a fluid space towards which European
cultural and economic impulses flowed, having to deal with the resistant power of the
neo-African presence in slavery and the magic of the New World land/seascape. If the
Conquest left a Hispanic impress on Spanish America, for Carpentier the truly modern
shaping moment lay round about the juncture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
This was the era when the Latin Caribbean simultaneously inherited the progressivist and
radical perspectives of the Encyclopedie and the nationalist-imperialist expansionism of
the French, and adjusted them to the vagaries of a provincial context. The Frenchman
Vector Hugues, one of the protagonists of El Siglo de las luces, is a prototype of the New
World caudillo promising liberation only to impose a new internal colonialism. History as
possibility is always being undermined by history as absurdity.
Carpentier's conception of the prototypical both in terms of character and situation
is absolutely crucial for an understanding of the process whereby he translated his obses-
sions about American essences into literary terms. In ''Perfiles del hombre americano",
(1954) Carpentier explained his perspective on the prototypical. In Spanish America, he
noted, the Conquest had established a common colonial pattern with the diffusion of
the same songs, popular poetry and dances and as well as these, the typical rural occupa-
tions of herding, mining and fishing. For example, a Venezuelan plainsman and a Cuban
farmhand had much the same characteristics, except that the former is much more of a
folk musician and poet, has a richer folklore and lives in a more dramatic landscape.
Therefore, he was willing to argue that a novel about a plainsman could cover what one
might write about a farmhand and be more universal in reference at the same time;
"tendrfa mas elementos de universalidad que una novela sobre el guajiro" (Letra y solfa,
p. 123). Although Carpentier did not attempt a novel about the Venezuelan "Ilanero",
this perspective certainly helps to explain how, though Cuban novelist, he set his first
really significant piece of fiction, El reino de este mundo, in Haiti. The Haitian struggle
for independence was the richest, most dramatic instance of the black man's quest for
liberation from the dread grip of slavery: more epic in context, more sharply etched in its
historic rhythms, an exemplary image of Caribbean experience as a recurring sequence of
guerrilla ideals and tides of betrayal.

Carpentier's New Worldism

In this way, Carpentier sought to construct his own view of New Worldism, its pos-
sible weakness being that it tends to flatten the idiosyncracies of the various republics,
simplify the question of the indigenous Indian populations and the specificity of the indi-
vidual country's historical experience. Its shakiness showed up in El recurso del m~todo
where Carpentier imagined a patchwork country and a caudillo with features drawn from
 69

various Spanish Caribbean Republics, Cuba, Guatemala, Venezuela. But this approach
defmed a disposition of Carpentier's mind, so that he would write of Venezuela:
Getting to know Venezuela completed my vision of
America, since this country is like that of the Conti-
nent. You find theFe its great rivers, its interminable
plains, its gigantic mountains, the forest. Venezuelan
soil for me was a grounding in American soil and
venturing into its forests was to experience the
Fourth Day of Creation ... To go up the Orinoco is
to travel backwards in time." (Valoraci6n multiple,
p. 27)
Nevertheless, what seems to have ignited the Venezuelan experience so that the novel Los
pasos perdidos would be written was the interaction of Venezuelan realities and Carpen-
tier's polemical response to Jean Paul Sartre and existentialism. For example, certain ten-
dencies of Sartre's treatment of space as characterized by the critic Joseph Halpern can
equally well be applied to Carpentier's novels, from El reino de este mundo onwards.
Halpern notes that in Sartre's novels space seems to generate a decipherable message
within a consistently schematized Mcor and that there is a tendency to set meanings
within a system which limits interpretive possibilities, "reinforcing clearly designated
donations". 13 Gonzalez Echevarria has noted that in Los pasos perdidos, Sartrean con-
cepts as authenticity surface in the novel and "the predicament of the protagonist, caught
between a search for his essence in the past and a commitment to the present-in-history is
clearly Sartrean" (Pilgrim at home, p. 159). It is a novel, in fact, in which one senses in
the background the presence not only· of Sartre but of Camus and Malraux, in the play
between authenticity and alienation, in the narrator's self-conscious association with the
mythological figures Sisyphus and Prometheus, and in the nature of his relationship to
Adventure. Carpentier's view that "it is perfectly possible to escape from Time" (Valor-
acion multiple, p. 27), repeated by the protagonist of Los pasos perdidos is closer to
the Malraux of The Royal Way than to the Sartre of Nausea, for Roquentin insists from
the standpoint of nausea that the escape into adventure is a doomed attempt to use the
tools of culture against culture itself, since the adventurer proves his fraudulen~ in his
inability to surrender one of civilization's comforts, the writing of the book of his ex-
ploits. This view is close to that expressed by T. E. Lawrence in The Seven Pillars of
Wisdom, for Lawrence felt that a life of inner complexity made adventure fraudulent
since "the modern adventurer's actions ramify not into a story but into a portrait of his
sensibility, an aggrandized mythology of his self awareness". 14
The Carpentier perspective is one in which the crucible of the cultural deposits of
the immigrant Caribbean peoples is the Caribbean Basin ·as a geographical entity and a
New World landscape informed by both indigenous and immigrant myths. It may be
worthwhile here to consider how the notion of "lo real maravilloso" fits into the Carpen-
tier schema. First of all, in a talk, given in Caracas in 1975, Carpentier made it clear that
his "lo real maravilloso" is not to be confused with "el realismo magico", or magic realism.
Lo real maravilloso, he said, refers "to certain incidents which have happened in America,
certain characteristics of the landscape, certain elements which have nurtured my
work". 15 For example, the literary adventures of Amadis of Gaul may be marvellous but
70

the real life adventures of the conquistadors as narrated by Bernal Diaz del Castillo in his
Historia verdadera de la conquista de Nueva Espana which describes the meeting of
Spaniards and Indians are marvellous in a truer sense, and constitute "lo real maravilloso".
Henri Christophe's building of the Citadel La Ferrihe to resist Napoleon or the revolt of
Mackandal who persuaded his followers of his lycanthropic powers are other such
instances. Later Carpentier preferred to use the term "baroque" to describe the unique
character of New World history and culture because "every symbiosis, every cross breed-
ing engenders a form of the baroque" (La novela latinoamericana, p. 126).
But how exactly, it can be asked, did Carpentier convert a theory of cultural des-
cription which is what the notion of the baroque or "lo real maravilloso" really is, into
novelistic material? The answer lay in Carpentier's view that one key to the modern novel
was to invest a plot with an epic character, by relating that plot to "a great and public
action ... an uprising, a strike, a revolution, a conflict involving groups of men against
other groups of men" (La novela latinoamericana, p. 153). And as is now well known, the
Carpentier novels were based on a scrupulous researching of texts, and indeed were often
very literally a rewriting of texts. For example, Noel Salmon has shown how closely
Carpenti(lr used certain French historians in developing scenes for El siglo de las luces. 16
Returning to the notion of epic events we are able to see that Carpentier set his novels in
relation to the Haitian war of Independence, the French Revolution, the Seco~d World
War, the Spanish Civil War and the Bay of Pigs fiasco, or even the performance of the first
opera in Europe which featured the Aztec emperor Montezuma. And always, there is the
Carpenterian conviction that the Euro-Mediterranean past is immanent in the American
present, that The New World rather than going through the stages of Man according to
Positivism and Auguste Comte, was living out the Western process as a simultaneity. Large
sections of Latin America, he has maintained "belong culturally to the era of medieval
Europe" (La novela latinoamericana, p. 155), the figure of Shango in the voodoo pan-
theon echoes an ancient Cretan myth figure, and St Barbara has a curious functional
resemblance to the Mexican rain god, Tlaloc, even as Don Quixote in a pastoral speech
evoked scenes from Hesiod. Medieval or ancient Grecian typologies lurk in Carpentier's
novels where one might least expect, not only explicitly as in the scene in The Lost Steps
where the narrator likens the travelling prostitutes of the Venezuelan hinterland to equi-
valent medieval types, but in less spelt-out situations. For example, the whole sequence,
later in the same novel in which Nicasio, the leper and outcast from the community of
Santa Monica de los Venados, attempts to assault the young Indian virgin sexually, has a
straight correspondence with medieval literature on lepers and the belief that they could
be cured by a virgin. A related belief about sexual contact with a virgin is also still held in
regard to the cure of venereal diseases.
It is this vision of layers of history cohabiting in a modern time-space continuum
which Carpentier fashioned his elaborate style to capture, based on the view that the New
World artist must convey to the reader " the colour, density, weight, size, texture and
appearance of the object". He believed, with Balzac's narrator of La Recherche de
L'absolu that "human life in all its aspects, wide and narrow, is so intimately connected
with architecture, that with a certain amount of observation, we can usually reconstt:uct
a bygone society from the remains of its public monuments"! 7 except that the New
World narrator's archaeology through revelation of a hidden present and the architecture
to be explored must refer not only to human constructs but to American Nature whose
 71

profusion of forms was as yet untamed or domesticated by man's technology or imagina-

tion, as was the case with European landscapes.
Again Carpentier felt that one could read the New World landscape in terms of nee-
Mediterranean typologies and his approach can interestingly be compared to the Guate-
malan novelist Miguel Angel Asturias for whom a nativist archaeology revealed a land-
scape and history immanent with Mayan mythology. What unites them is the fact that
Asturias often gave the "Mayan" perspective novelistic coherence by reference to similar
myth figures from Babylonian and Mediteranean mythology. This is the mark of the
creole writer in the Caribbean whose reference is to multiple traditions, and who must
forge his individual talent at one and the same time from native sources and a mature,
seductive and domineering Western tradition so pervasive in its forms and modalities
that the "native" writer can confuse homegrown content with innovation in form, and
even mere technique with the elaboration of a style.
What Surrealism taught both Asturias and Carpentier as writers of prose fiction was
very simply to re-examine the relation between realism, a Western literary phenomenon
with specific assumptions about the nature of reality, a style which taught one to pro-
duce a certain description of social reality, and their own alternative reading of Latin-
American reality itself. Of the two Carpentier was much more rationalist and stayed
closer to realism while also pursuing a rationality which could include the belief struc-
tures of that world once scorned by Cartesian philosophy and Hegelian history. Carpen-
tier risked his talent on the belief that the Caribbean Basin formed part of a nee-Medi-
terranean diaspora and the achievement as well as the limitations of his novelistic output
derives from this perspective.

A reading of the essay on El siglo de las luces by Edmundo Desnoes, a younger

Cuban novelist, shows something of the ambivalence with which Carpentier's views and
indeed his novels have been received in Cuba and Spanish America. Carpentier, according
to Desnoes, wished to mythify reality and emphasize the scenography, to focus on primi-
tive landscapes while the task "of the young novelists is to demystify reality" .18 Desnoes'
remarks help to draw attention to a fact we have not so far indicated, which is that in his
essays Carpentier tended to direct attention away from the novelist's critical function.
It is indeed as if, at a certain level of consciousness, he could not bring himself to discuss
the contradictory reading of New World history which he actually produced in his novels.
It was Carpentier's destiny as a writer always to need to depict the New World under
creolized Western eyes but it was also his peculiar gift to understand at some level of
consciousness that the Western model could only produce degraded emblems and a
crypto-history. A writer must of course resolve his artistic problems at the level of style.
And Carpentier produced a universe of discourse which in his view expressed both his
populist obsessions and the forms of a sophisticated art which he resolved by wedding high
culture to picaresque traditions. On this basis he constructed his baroque vision of the
Caribbean Basin.
72

NOTES

1. Lionel Trilling Sincerity and Authenticity, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1972, p.
138.
2. Hegel Philosophy of History, New York: Dover Books, 1956, p. 87.
3. Roberto Gonzalez Echevarcla, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at home Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press, 1977, p. 56.
4. c.f. Alfonso Reyes, Obras Completas, Vll
5. Josf! Vasconcelos, La raza cosmica, Mexico: Escasa Calpe, 1966.
6. Alejo Carpentier, Letra y solfa, Caracas Smtesis Dosmil, 1975, p. 302.
7. Alejo Carpentier, Literatura y conciencia politica en America Latina, Madrid: S.A.E.G.E.,
1969, p. 112.
8. Jorge Manach, Homenaje a Ia nacion cubana, Rio Piedras: Editorial San Juan, 1972
9. Alejo Carpentier, Cronicas, V .2, La Habana: Instituto Cubano del Libro, 1976, p. 107.
10. Alejo Carpentier, Cronicas V.I. La Habana: Instituto Cubano del Libro, 1976, p. 136.
11. Alejo, Carpentier, serie valoracion multiple, La Havana: Casa de las Americas, 1975, p. 63.
12. c.f. Sylvia Wynter, "Creole criticism- a critique" New World Quarterly v. 5, n. 4. 1972, p.19.
13. Joseph Halpern, "Sartre's Enclosed Space" Yale French Studies, n. 57, pp. 61-62.
14. Paul Zweig, The Adventurer, New York: Basic Books, 1974, p. 237.
15. Alejo Carpentier, La novela latinoamericana en v1speras de un nuevo siglo, Mexico: siglo XXI
editores, 1981, p. 128.
16. Noel Salmon, "El siglo de las luces", historia e imaginacion in Reoopilachln de textos sobre
Alejo Carpentier, La Habana, 1977.
17. Honor~ de Balzac The novels of Balzac, V.22, Philadelphia, 1898, p. 2. (Trans. by Ellen Mar-
riage)
18. Homenaje a Alejo Carpentier (ed. Helmy F. Giacoman) New York: Las Americas Publishing
Co. 1970, p. 306.