Title:The Image of the United States in the Poetry of Ren Depestre and Ernesto Cardenal Author(s): Henry Cohen

Publication Details: Revista Review Interamericana 11.2 (Summer 1981): p220-230. Source:Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol. 161. Detroit: Gale, 2003. From Literature Resource Center. Document Type:Critical essay

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning Full Text: [(essay date summer 1981) In the following essay, Cohen compares representations of the United States in the poetry of Cardenal and of the Haitian poet Ren Depestre.] It is especially important at this particular time for students of interamerican affairs to know how the Haitian Ren Depestre and the Nicaraguan Ernesto Cardenal have portrayed the United States in their poetry of the past quarter century. First of all, by virtue of their extraordinary political status they are opinion leaders, respectively, in Cuba and El Salvador, those nations geographically closest to the U.S. whose present governments are also the most inimical to Washington. Secondly, since they are authors of world stature who write in French and Spanish, they have broadcast a view of the U.S. to a wide readership of students and intellectuals not only in Latin America, but also in Europe and Africa. Despite their widely divergent backgrounds, especially as regards their exposure to North American culture, these poets' characterizations of U.S. society and culture fall into the very same categories and resemble one another to a striking extent, even in what they omit. Without doing violence to the two poetic corpuses, we can group them into five common themes: (1) the mechanisms of imperialism, (2) the psychology of domination, (3) the colonization of internal racial and cultural minorities, (4) the resistance to the ruling groups by some Americans versus the acquiescence of others, and (5) the utopian resolution of global social conflict. After publishing his earliest verse in Haiti in 1945-46, Depestre was forced into exile by Franois Duvalier because of his political opposition to that dictator. He lived in Paris in the 1950's and in Cuba from after the revolution until recently, when he began to work for UNESCO in Paris and New York. All his poetry about the U.S. predates his residence there, however, so he does not write from first-hand experience. In his poetry, Depestre focuses on the manifestations of North American life most publicized in the Soviet and Cuban press which have touched him most deeply as a leftist, a Caribbean and a black, namely racism, capitalism, imperialism and militarism. By contrast, Cardenal has studied certain aspects of U.S. history extensively, primarily North American economic penetration into Central America and the relations between Washington and native Americans during the white settlers' westward push. Twice he has lived in the States, first in the late 1940's, when he studied literature at Columbia University, and again for a few years beginning in 1957, when he entered the Trappist monastery in Gethsemani, Kentucky. He returned to New York in 1972 to raise money for relief of victims of the Nicaraguan earthquake of that same year. Cardenal's poetry reflects his quest for an understanding of the spiritual underpinnings of Indian culture and social organization, his

feeling threatened by U.S. economic expansionism, and his need to find elements of decency in a country in which he matured at two crucial moments of his life. For both Depestre and Cardenal, whose political radicalization stems from the direct experience of imperialism, the United States is first and foremost the base par excellence of international corporate capitalism and its servants, the State Department, the military and foreign puppet rulers. In "Hora O," Cardenal recounts in detail how the tentacular U.S. fruit, railroad, lumber, steamship and investment companies first reached into Central America, expropriating peasants' land and products through a combination of cleverness and cruelty. In his historically exact yet highly poetic treatment of the case of Honduras, for example, he chronicles the mechanism of economic domination involving the granting of commercial concessions, the manipulation of import and export taxes, the revision of earlier agreements, the securing of economic grants for new plantations, the violation of contracts and of constitutional law, the dictating of indemnifications in case of land reform, the pricemanipulating control of plantation growth, the wangling of tax-free land leases, the breaking of promises and the bribery of public officials to retain privileges. The supporting role played by the U.S. State Department in commercial imperialism is demonstrated by American support of the elder Somoza in the 1930's: Como le dijo a Sumner Wells el sonofabitch de Roosevelt: "Somoza is a sonofabitch but he's ours." Esclavo de los extranjeros y tirano de su pueblo impuesto por la intervencin y mantenido por la no intervencin: SOMOZA FOREVER.1 Via telegraph from Boston, faceless, anonymous corporate directors manipulate events in a remote area by dint of their governmental agents, who camouflage their machinations by cynically twisting the meanings of words, by hypocritical political justifications and by simple cover-up. Although Depestre situates international capitalists vaguely "en occident," certain specifics of "Litanies des hommes-cyclones" strongly imply their U.S. origins. Through a world-wide information network, they extend their influence via a seemingly infinite number of agents. We are left with an image of the totalization of control of the many by an insidious unnamed minority which sterilizes the enormous cultural, religious, affective and natural richness of the globe. An analysis of the poem's verbs reveals the extent, mechanism and type of power exercised by these "hommes-cyclones": acheter (repeated 19 times) stresses money as their chief weapon of an absolutism which is expressed by rgner and pouvoir (four incidences). Tlguider underlines the long-range nature of their control. Rompre, sparer, scher, changer and creuser render their destructive and transforming power. The targets of the imperialists are those things which the humane individual holds most dear: joy, hope, tenderness, truth, human beauty, sensitivity, love and brotherhood. Not only do capitalists purchase natural resources, geographical areas, human relationships and institutions, but even feelings, such as hope itself: Ils achtent des alouettes Qui dans les rues du monde

Arrtent chaque passant pour lui dire: "Tu seras heureux I'an prochain au paradis!"2 Cardenal's case studies in imperialism stem from a double motive: Central American nationalism, and a desire to emulate his model Ezra Pound in making of poetry an encyclopedic synthesis of the outer world. Central to their purpose is the intent to provide historical justification for the national liberation struggle. Depestre's poetry appears rather to have been placed squarely in the service of the Soviet bloc in an East-West ideological contest. It is therefore more oriented toward casting blame on the Western ruling circles in a global context. Depestre's familiarity with Cardenal's writings is illustrated by a striking pair of poems that evoke the life and death of film star Marilyn Monroe as a measure of North American business's inhumanity. In "Oracin por Marilyn Monroe." Cardenal indicts the Hollywood movie industry's exploitation of human beings for profit, charging it with the murder of the suicidal star. U.S. society is described as a false cinematographic set, based on outward spectacle instead of inner authenticity, a "Colosal Super-Produccin" fueled by tranquilizers and psychoanalysis rather than love. In a daring metaphor, Cardenal brings together the exploited body of the sex goddess and Jesus' expulsion of the money-lenders from the temple, linking these historically and associatively remote phenomena both visually and conceptually (the body, the temple of the soul, is to be kept pure): Pero el templo no son los estudios de la 20th Century-Fox. El templo--de mrmol y oro--es el templo de su cuerpo en el que est el Hijo del Hombre con un ltigo en la mano expulsando a los mercaderes de la 20th Century-Fox que hicieron de Tu casa de oracin una cueva de ladrones.3 Monroe's white skin and golden hair are sanctified by dint of their depreciation by evil exploiters, in a double process of negative reference and reversal of values. The poem's second memorable image is the final one, in which the star is found dead with a telephone in her hand. The narrative voice wonders whether she has not been trying to call God at the last minute: "Alguien cuyo nmero no est en el Directorio de Los Angeles." Dedicated to the Nicaraguan poet, Depestre's "Christ rpond Marilyn Monroe" is his amplificatio on the two central images of the earlier poem. In this imaginary dialogue between the star and Christ, Jesus tells in scathing satirical tones how Christianity has been commercialized by twentieth-century capitalists, who have co-opted it in their design to dominate and extract value from all the world's resources, including workers. He reveals that he too has unwittingly become the star of a super-production, just as Monroe has been falsified and turned to the profit of 20th Century-Fox. Both have suffered the same fate: their true selves have been suppressed and their false images have helped covetous companies secure large gains. He confesses feeling as helpless as she, whereupon she does not answer but presumably kills herself. Depestre takes Cardenal's rapprochement of deity and actress one step farther, making of Monroe a Christ-figure, humanizing the son of God, and equating the corporate world to a Judas who is willing to sell the life of both for 30 pieces of silver. The idea of Jesus' persecution of the money-lenders is the kernel out of which grows Depestre's notion that missionary evangelism is imperialism's cover for Third World economic conquest. In a startling example of ironic reprise, the whip, a symbol of divine

retribution in the Biblical episode, is turned upon the innocent. Christ's rage incorporates that of all capitalism's victims, since they cannot speak for themselves. The den of thieves motif from Cardenal's poem is also woven into Depestre's: Je suis par le sperme qui court: CHRIST AND CO! Je suis un gros actionnaire de compagnies. J'ai des mines, des banques, des plantations et des centrales sucrires, Et depuis longtemps le fameux fouet Qui chassait les marchands du temple S'est tourn avec rage vers le dos nu Des paysans et des ouvriers de tous les pays! Je veille aujourd'hui sur le caverne des voleurs. Je suis I'un de ceux qui vous ont vole.4 Their use of Christian ethics and symbolism as a basis for an attack on capitalism reflects the fact that the fundamental moral and religious formation of both the poets and their readership is Christian. Cardenal is an ordained priest even though he serves as the Minister of Culture in the revolutionary Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Depestre was raised in Haiti, where the Catholic Church holds sway in the religious realm together with vaudou, which is itself pervaded by Christian elements. Much of the appeal of Latin American revolution is its claim to be closer to the spirit of Christianity than are the great imperialist nations of the West that claim to be guided by the Judeo-Christian ethic. In seeking to comprehend the psychology of domination that lies behind capitalists' drive for power, the poets uncover three phenomena: alienation from what is natural in the environment and in other people, the perversion of normal human feelings, and a deep-seated guilt complex. In "La danza del espritu," Cardenal imagines that Jesus returns to the United States in the nineteenth century only to be slain by whites in their westward expansion. Resurrected, he goes to live among the Indians, who welcome him as their brother. The turning of a people's religious ideal against itself is a particularly effective satirical tool. "Grabaciones de la pipa sagrada" recounts the journey of the Indian Black Elk to the large cities of the East, as a member of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, in order to learn the white man's secrets. To his disgust, he finds only that they steal from one another and are ignorant of the fact that the earth is their mother. The will to dominate and disrespect for the environment are seen as generalized in white society, all of whose members appear to have internalized the values of their wealthy rulers. Using as his central image the title of Vance Packard's famous book on the advertising industry, Cardenal evokes Madison Avenue in frightening terms: el hondo can, el profundo desfiladero de edificios donde se esconden detrs de sus vidrios the hidden persuaders venden automviles de Felicidad, Consuelo en lata. (a 30 cts)5 Symbolic of the insidious domination of the citizenry through psychological domination, advertising is demonic because, while remaining hidden in dark, recessed places, the

persuaders have a one-way window into everyone else's mind. Their anonymity demonstrates that control, and not fame or adulation, is their aim. Depestre identifies in the U.S. another variety of perversion, a collective sterility and alienation from the rest of humankind. In "Pome hurler sous les fentres de la Maison Blanche," he probes North Americans' profound and neurotic desire for cleanliness, and discovers a need to cover corruption and callousness: O civilisation qui se lave dix fois par jour Et qui pisse du sang chaque soir dans son lit Civilisation qui boit son urine Civilisation qui mange ses excrments Civilisation qui met du coton dans ses oreilles Pour ne pas entendre les cris fous de l'esprit.6 This black Haitian, writing in a Cuba sharply divided between the races in its prerevolutionary period, attributes white North America's moral insensitivity and hygienic compulsivity to guilt stemming from its role in the slave trade. The psychological portrayal elaborated by Depestre shows white America trapped in a syndrome of the denial of historical reality--"La traite des Noirs n'a pas eu lieu. C'est l'invention d'un historien dment."7--and in a desperate attempt to suppress its detractors who tell the painful truth--"Et six balles aussitt se jettent sur sa vie (...) / Il tait Malcolm X un negrerayon qui / Hassait les larmes, les chanes et la haine."8 Depestre's picture of the U.S. as monolithically racist seems to constitute an appeal to francophone Third-Worlders to mark that nation as a whole--not just a particular group or set of policies--as their inherent enemy, and as irremediably so. It has none of Cardenal's subtlety, no sense of part of white America's being victimized by another segment of white America in the context of racism. That Depestre's racially-based historical analysis flies in the face of Marxist theories of social science seems not to deter his pursuing that propagandistic course. The U.S. ruling circles are perceived by the poets as subjugators of racial minorities within their own borders. Cardenal's Homenaje a los indios americanos is replete with allusions to the Indian Wars, to broken or unfair treaties and to the expropriation of useful land in exchange for unfruitful reservations. The case of the Black Hills of the South Dakota Sioux stands as the most striking of many examples of the bad faith of the wasichus, or whites: Hubo un gran consejo con los wasichus (...) Palabras y palabras y palabras: como un viento. El Gran Padre de Washington quera los cerros Negros. (...) Nos pusieron en islas a vivir como wasichus.9 Much like the Nicaraguan's moving evocation of what U.S. settlers used to term "Manifest Destiny" is Depestre's depiction of the unfeeling domination of the Indian--shown as a kindred spirit to the Caribbean black--the taking of whose possessions is rendered all the more pathetic for their paucity: Il avait des chevaux et des tentes. Il avait un puits et un seul fils Et des femmes (...) Un jour arriva I'homme blane qui jeta

Ces trsors au feu de sa civilisation.10 Depestre recalls the civil rights struggles of the 1950's and 1960's in the U.S. South, centering attention on the opposition to school integration, the fire-bombing of black churches in Mississippi by the Ku Klux Klan, the unleashing of police dogs against non-violent demonstrators, and religiously sanctioned laws against racial mixing. All references to white and governmental involvement in the civil rights movement's victories are omitted. Cardenal focuses most pointedly on the cultural devaluation and denial which informs colonization, the assumption of a cultural void that allows conquerors to justify enslavement on the basis of conferring civilization in a void. The poet, a serious student of Indian religion, describes the horror and sadness the natives felt when they saw Europeans buying and selling land ("nosotros / nunca hemos comerciado / la tierra es parte de mi propio cuerpo / yo nunca vend mi tierra"11), treating natural resources as personal property ("Dios (...) / mand que los pescaderos y tierras fueran de todos / que no se demarcaran ni dividieran / sta es la ley antigua"12), debasing sacred substances ("Antes no se fumaba por placer sino slo por oracin / los blancos ensearon a la gente a profanar el tabaco"13) and construct rectilinear houses ("No hay poder cuadrado / (...) todo lo que hacen los indios es en crculo / y es que el Misterio lo hace todo en crculos"14), all of which constituted violations of holy law. Both poets celebrate the heroic resistance of colonized and exploited peoples who resist by affirming their own cultures in the face of the attempt to impose the dominant culture. In "Tahirassawichi en Washington," for example, Cardenal shows how, when he travels to the capital, an old Indian deprecates the white rulers' cultural assumptions. Thus, the Capitol is unworthy as a locus of legislation since its mainly rectilinear construction renders it unredeemably secular, the grandiose and impersonal Library of Congress "no serva para guardar objetos sagrados / que slo podan guardarse en su choza de barro," and the Washington Monument represents an impious threat to God's monopoly on the construction of high places.15 Cardenal uses native American culture as a foil for the North American value system, which he criticizes for its lack of a sense of the sacredness of life and nature. While it technically lies beyond the geographical boundaries that I have set for this study, le vaudou may be understood analogously as an effective tool of black Antillean resistance to European cultural hegemony. In Un arc-en-ciel pour l'Occident chrtien, Depestre's poetnarrator's successive metamorphoses into deities (loa) that threaten, tease and berate a Southern white racist family, symbolize all the Afro-Americans' built-in cultural shields against the ravages of slavery, exploitation and neo-colonialism. Above all, the loa have kept these descendants of Africans in close touch with the natural world: "Ne riez pas de mes dieux agraires / Parce qu'ils n'ont pas rompu les ponts / Avee le premier sel de la terre: l'homme!"16 In addition to cultural resistance, we find in the poetry of both authors praise for specific North American radicals. Cardenal's visit to New York in 1972 placed him in contact with two groups that have born witness to the continuous presence in U.S. society of a small yet vital anti-capitalist and anti-militarist political movement. In "Viaje a Nueva York," we meet some of the protagonists of the pacifist opposition to the Vietnam War: the Berrigan brothers, Daniel and Philip, and friends of theirs who served prison terms, destroyed conscription records and threw blood on the Nixon White House. Cardenal also signs of the Catholic Worker movement, born in the Great Depression and engaged for forty years in

service to the poorest of the poor, in the denunciation of capitalism and in supporting left social activism. In contrast to the positive dedication and energetic resistance of U.S. Catholic radicals--with whom he, as a leftist priest, was led philosophically to associate--Cardenal portrays the anomie, hedonism and commercial sedation of other sectors of the U.S. population. Instead of the stars that usually twinkle in the night sky, flashing neon signs with the names of consumer goods illuminate the urban blackness. The patently unnatural character of the light, the artificiality of the brand names and their association with ingestion, speed, power and deodorization represent a cutting commentary on U.S. civilization in "En la noche iluminada de palabras." "Coplas a la muerte de Merton" more extensively satirizes middle-class Americans' aspirations than any other poem: la cindad bajada del cielo no es Atlantic City-Y el Ms All no es un American Way of Life (...) La muerte es una puerta abierta al universo.17 If death is access to the universe, then the American way of life is a limitation, a dead end. The City of God is not an American vacation paradise, but a locus of true virtue and justice. Mocking the advertising industry's appeal to the illusory goal of eternal youth, Cardenal claims hedonism to be a sort of living death. Depestre's role, as apparently limited by his blackness and his communism as Cardenal's is by his catholicism, is to sing the praises of black American radicals who have been persecuted. In an apologia reminiscent of the virulent ancient Greek and Roman satirists', Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver is made to object to his being characterized by the U.S. press as violent and destructive; he affirms that his society is more so than he and that his hyperbolic style is required by the injustice that he attacks and the indignation that he feels when confronted by the "Civilisation-tigre civilisation fin-du-monde! / Ton grand coeur lgendaire est une chambre gaz / (...) le Grand Ulcre du sicle!"18 Communist Party member Angela Davis, attacked for her political views when a professor at the University of California, is lauded and defended by Depestre, who claims that she is perceived as violent only by the U.S. ruling classes, whom she threatens by her teaching of Marxism to blacks. (He apparently is unaware that she has taught people of all races with less regard to the issue of race itself in her overall approach to U.S. society than Depestre might suspect.) As he did in the case of Marilyn Monroe, the Haitian draws a parallel between Christ and Malcolm X, "l'agneau de Harlem,"19 whom he portrays as a conciliator between blacks and whites after the conquest of his own racial hatred. It is noteworthy that Cleaver, Davis and Malcolm X all asserted that racism can end in the U.S., and that Depestre chooses to celebrate individuals who worked toward that goal. Although a self-proclaimed Marxist, the Antillean tends to conceive of social conflict more in terms of race than of class. This simplistic and decidedly non-Marxist way of understanding political conflict is a tendency that we find even in his most recent writing. Critic Jean Mtellus takes Depestre to task for ignoring class interest in favor of a racial interpretation of contemporary Haitian history in the novel Le mt de cocagne (1979).20 The Martinican playwright Aim Csaire was found guilty of the same error in his drama about the Haitian Revolution, La Tragdie du Roi Christophe.21 It may well be that the nearly absolute association of class and race that existed in Haiti in the nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries--first the native bourgeoisie's being composed of those racially mixed persons whose features were most Caucasian, and subsequently the black ruling group's gaining ascendancy at the expense of liberal and radical lighter-skinned Haitians whom they exiled or repressed--has imprinted so indelibly on Depestre's consciousness that he conceives of keen human conflict only in racial terms. Both he and Cardenal, despite their insistence on the scope and the violence of colonialism, have composed long poems in which large-scale social and political conflict is resolved, not through armed struggle as one might expect, but rather via miraculous or quasi-miraculous means. "Marchas pawnees" infers that U.S. whites might be able to undergo a psychological and behavioral transformation if they assimilate the philosophy contained in Pawnee songs as recorded by frontier ethnographer Alice Fletcher.22 If the white man heeds the soft yet powerful songs of peace, contends Cardenal, just as the Plains Indians attended to the song of the sparrow--whose notes are happier and sharper than those of larger, more powerful birds-then he too may attain wisdom and happiness. And if atomic war signals, in Apocalipsis," the end of civilization as we now know it, it will also ironically usher in a new social order of perfect harmony in which all conflict will be resolved. Cardenal's visionary speaker describes a nuclear holocaust in which all people disintegrate, evaporate and are genetically transformed by H-bomb and chemical-wielding angels of death. Then comes the incredibly optimistic metamorphosis of a world thought doomed to extinction into a classless society! Las clases ya no existan ms y vi una especie nueva que haba producido la Evolucin (...) era un solo organismo compuesto de hombres en vez de clulas.23 If this poet stands in his social philosophy for an amalgam of Marxism and Christianity, as he has often stated he does, then it is certainly the prophetic idealism of the latter rather than the materialism of the former that dominates his historical vision. At the end of Un arc-en-ciel pour l'Occident chrtien, having just spent 133 pages castigating a U.S. family for its unpardonable racism and the U.S. for its demonic militarism that threatens to destroy the world, Depestre unexpectedly envisions a similarly marvelous resolution, which is to be accomplished through wisdom and love. The first of these is represented by Notre-Dame des Cendres, to whom the poet prays: Reviens fille proaigue du savoir Rgner sur nos phares les plus familiers (...) Reviens lever avec nos plus tendres mares Un nouvel ge du coeur humain!24 The good will of the speaker, the spokesman for all the world's downtrodden, bridges the gap between oppressed and oppressor, since the U.S. rulers seem incapable of such generosity: "J'avance porteur d'une foi / (...) Occident chrtien mon frre terrible / Mon signe de croix le voici: / An nom de la rvolte / Et de la justice / Et de la tendresse."25 The revolutionary socialist gains the upper hand morally, since the "underdeveloped" has become the repository of the ultimate Christian values abandoned by the West.

It was never the intent of either of these Third-World poets to hold a mirror up to the United States in order to reflect it faithfully and totally. Depestre and Cardenal body forth in their works a myth of their gigantic neighbor which grows out of the experience of generations prior to and including their own: the tentacular invader poised over them as a constant threat. Upon this background they embroider patterns of militarism, racism and moral degeneration which are some, although by far not all, of the salient features of North American life. What is essential is that we in the United States be aware of the continuance and amplification of this myth by some of the most widely read authors of the Caribbean region. We have too long ignored such images of the U.S., and we are too often uncomprehending when our southern neighbors relate to us in terms of that harsh, unflattering myth so out of tune with the ideology with which we are imbued as citizens.

Notes
1

Cardenal, Nueva antologia potica (Mxico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1978), 49. Depestre, Pote Cuba (Paris: Pierre Jean Oswald, 1976), 130. Cardenal, Nueva, p. 89. Depestre, Pote, p. 119. Cardenal, Nueva, p. 243. Depestre, Pote pp. 123-124. Depestre, Un arc-en-ciel pour l'Occident chrtien (Paris: Prsence Africaine, 1966), 114. Ibid., p. 115. Cardenal, Antologa (Barcelona: Editorial Laia, 1978), 154-155. Depestre, Pote, p. 52.

10

11

Cardenal, Nueva, p. 182. Ibid., pp. 183-184. Ibid., p. 203. Ibid., p. 158. Ibid., p. 202. Depestre, Arc-en-ciel. p. 133.

12

13

14

15

16

17

Cardenal, Nueva, p. 219. Depestre, Pote, p. 124.

18

19

Depestre, Arc-en-ciel, p. 114.

20

"L'anti-mlatrisme militant des personnages proches du gouvernement aurait t vritablement comme un programme du gouvernement. (...) On ne peut pas laisser croire qu'il n'y a eu que des noirs autour du fromage prsidentiel ces deux dernires dcennies. Il y a eu au pouvoir des mlatres et des quarterons et mme des blancs frachement naturaliss." ("la ngritude et le vandon," La Quinzaine Littraire, No. 311 (1979), 12.)
21

"Il nous semble que si le prsentateur nous avait montr Hati sous l'angle de la lutte des classes (...) il aurait t plus facile de comprendre [les vnements historiques de la Rvolution hatienne]." (Herv and Nicole Fuyet and Guy and Mary Levilain, "Dcolonisation et classes sociales dans La Tragdie du Roi Christophe d'Aim Csaire," French Review, Vol. 46, No. 6 (May 1976), 1110.)
22

Alice Cunningham Fletcher, Indian Story and Song from North America (Boston: Small Maynard, 1900).
23

Cardenal, Nueva, pp. 84-85. Depestre, Arc-en-ciel, p. 135. Ibid., pp. 137-138.

24

25

Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition) Cohen, Henry. "The Image of the United States in the Poetry of Ren Depestre and Ernesto Cardenal." Revista Review Interamericana 11.2 (Summer 1981): 220-230. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol. 161. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Web. 26 June 2013. Document URL http://go.galegroup.com.ezproxy.otago.ac.nz/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CH1100043975&v=2.1&u =otago&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w

Gale Document Number: GALE|H1100043975