Factual Fiction.
An Interview with Jose Latour

Last Sunday (March 25th, 2007) was a warm and rainy day in the atmospheric village of Bayfield, Ontario. Amidst a local pub a brunch had been held and as the tables were cleared and only coffee cups littered the table surfaces, an audience was captivated by a man whose life had changed dramatically in the last decade. At 62, no person should have to uproot and leave their homeland, knowing they will never touch that soil again, or smell that sweet air, but a person would do so for the sake of his family and his own safety. Jose Latour roundly annunciates his words as he reads a passage from Outcast, the novel that granted Latour the fundamental right to his freedom of speech. McLelland publishing house has recently released Outcast, and even though it was written in English in 1999 and has already been published in other parts around the world, it is a definitive piece of fiction.

Latour lives in Canada now, but when he was writing Outcast he was living with his family in Cuba, under the military dictatorship of Fidel Castro. Cuba is a dangerous place for someone like Latour, a writer, as Castro and his regime know that the pen is mightier than the sword. As Latour speaks in Bayfield he tells of friends who were writers and are serving from twelve and up to twenty six years in jail for doing so. Like one of his heroic characters, Latour decided to out-think the system. So with pen firmly placed in hand, Latour who was already a very well known Cuban author of crime fiction wrote his next novel, Outcast, in English.

This single act allowed Latour the opportunity to open his writing up to a larger audience and bring his words to a world stage. So when a Spanish publisher requested Latour’s presence for the launch of Outcast, he was willing to accept on one condition: that his wife and grown children join him for the trip and Latour would pay for their expenses. The Cuban government needed a written letter from the publishers requesting Latour and his family for the book launch in Spain. The Cuban government accepted the request and the Latour family took their last steps on Cuban soil in 2001; an outcast.

Now Jose Latour is 67 years old and he amiably asks the crowd of onlookers orchestrated by The Village Bookshop owner, Mary Wolfe, whether they would prefer a question and answer session first or for him to read from Outcast. He’s gracious enough to accept either option, only seven people in the room have read Outcast, so he opens up the discussion, then reads, and then accepts more questions afterwards as well. Latour doesn’t seem like an author stood in front of the crowd, in fact you somewhat forget that he has around a dozen novels attached to his calling card. No, the man in front of the audience seems like an activist storyteller, he seems stoic and yet welcoming at the same time; he is as captivating with an audience as his books are with a single reader. He talks of Cuba, its government, its peoples’ struggle in a way that makes the audience feel part of his stories. Latour seems to have a presence about him that has mesmerized his audience. I glance over to see his strongest supporters, at a table towards the back of the room is sat Latour’s wife and grown children. They are taking pictures of him and enduring the process of waiting as admirers ask him questions, as he signs books and is interviewed later at the Village Bookshop by me.

As the Bayfield sophisticates look on, Latour speaks of the good and bad in Cuba. “I was born in 1940, and communist Cuba came in when I was 18 years old. I don’t believe in a perfect system, it simply doesn’t exist. There are no perfect systems and no perfect countries, but there are better and worse systems. On one hand Cuba has the best health care and educational system for its people than any other third world country, but on the other hand the communist system in Cuba limits freedom of expression and human rights. So essentially what happens is that we become healthy, educated slaves.” That last sentence hangs in the air, heavy with the weight of realization. He continues, with a deliberate appeal, “you people don’t know what you have here. It’s not a perfect society, but it is much better than a communist society.” The room is filled with a thankful round of applause. We all feel slightly more free now, than we did when we entered that room.

On that note, Latour reads a passage from Outcast. It is a journal entry from a Cuban lawyer who has escaped on a raft to America. The journal passage describes the first look at a store from a recent refugee standpoint. Like the rest of the book, the passage is a riveting look at the Cuban experience when they have left their country. I think to myself, as Latour will admit to later: this is fact veiled as fiction. The passage talks about the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. North Americans forget we are the ‘haves’ on the basic premise that we can walk into a store and buy ten packets of hairpins if we so choose. As the audience listens, I can’t figure out what their response is to hearing about such poverty in our warm, well fed, clean environment.

Without the liberty of saying what you want, how do crime novels get published? Jose Latour tells that Cubans love to read, and crime fiction at that. “The covers are crappy, the paper is crappy, and the books are cheap. Crime fiction is big in Cuba because Mr. Castro, when he does one of his many five hour speeches at night on the television, we Cubans tune out. We listen to music, we read books, or we go to bed and have sex.” A round of laughter, and he continues, “Cubans are tremendous readers; there was a huge illiteracy campaign in 1960.”

As the plight of Cubans is a heavy burden of thought for Latour, he often returns to the subject, telling of how the average Cuban income is $13.00 a month and pensioners receive around $7.00 a month. He explains why the black market is huge as people can’t afford a shirt, or shoes, when it costs $20.00 and all they make is $13.00 a month. So people steal the shirts and sell them on the black market. “Perhaps you’re not interested in all of this,” Latour asks his audience, to which they unanimously voice the words “yes, yes, carry on.” So he does. “We have ration books for food and you have to decide if you want sugar or flour, because you can’t afford both. Then you have a million Cubans abroad sending wages home every month to their families in Cuba, which is about one billion dollars a year and a great source of income for the Cuban government.” Latour shakes his head, “it is not a people, or even Castro that has failed us, it is the system that doesn’t work. With total certainty, I believe the communism in Cuba will crumble.” Latour seems to have carried the weight of these stories from Cuba and up to Canada.

Ana Maria Thompson, who now lives in London, Ontario, asks Jose Latour a question. She premises the question with a brief description of her life. She was born in Cuba in 1935 and married a Canadian, and moved up north. She had family back in Cuba and the last time she went back was in 1959, just before the dictatorship took power. She asks Latour how the Cubans have such a good sense of humour, and act so light hearted. Latour answers, “A friend of mine was sent to jail for twenty years for using weapons of mass destruction; a pen and a paper. He wrote against the government. So with threats like this all you can do is laugh, dance, have sex (more laughter), so that we do not take a serious life so seriously.”

After the reading and the questions, and the autographs, I join up with Latour in the privacy of The Village Bookshop in Bayfield. My first question to Mr. Latour is about the writer friend in jail. Latour gives a voice to Oscar Espinosa, who is serving a twenty year jail sentence, for writing articles he was secretly sending to the Miami Herald about the Cuban plight. “I don’t write about these things that I talk about in readings, they are too political. In Cuba we have one employer – the state. In Cuba we have one publisher – the state.”

I press on as I believe that Outcast, and his other novels are a deep examination of the politics in Cuba on a human level. “Somewhere between five to six million Canadian tourists have been to Cuba, to the beach resorts only. My books offer them a view of the life of Cubans. Canadians are curious, they see the hardships of Cubans and they want to know why. I try to have my books explain the ‘why’. I lived my first 62 years in Havana, Cuba, and I have a great storage of memories of before and after the revolution.”

Do you lose touch with that life? “No because the first thing I do every morning is get on the internet and read all the world news on Cuba for that day. I try to keep updated and the memories will always be there.”

When researching Latour on the internet I had come across two famous Jose Latours. One is the author in front of me and the other is a musician in the US. The author explains to me, “One day I’m sat in my house in Cuba, and a man calls me and says ‘are you Jose Latour’ and I tell him yes, then he says to me, ‘I am also Jose Latour and my friends have told me I wrote a book and I didn’t’.” They laugh about the matter and the author tells me that they are friends now.

So confusion took over as I weeded out the musical Latour, to the writer Latour on the internet. Then I come across an essay called Post Communist Cuba. I ask Latour if he is the author of this work. He nods, then I ask why he decided to write an essay on post communist Cuba. “I wrote this in Spain immediately after we left Cuba, it was my settlement of accounts to my country. I had a debt to my country and I owed it to say what I knew about Cuba in the twentieth century. I had to self-publish it, but I had to write it as well.”

With so much oppression over the written word, Post Communism Cuba must have been a great release for Latour. When I ask him what the greatest change for him has been, what he is most grateful for when he wakes up every morning living in Canada now, his answer is immediate: “the internet”. This might not have been my first choice, but when Latour explains, it seems like I have a new source of joy towards the thing I moan at for taking too long to download.

Latour says, “In Cuba if I wanted to find out about a Taxi company name from Fort Lauderdale for one of my novels, I would have to write to someone I knew in Fort Lauderdale and ask for a list of taxi companies. Then they would write me a letter back and this could take two months to find out one piece of detail for a novel. All of my research had to be done at the National Library; we had no access to internet. I see how information is so easy to get through the internet now, and every morning I can’t believe that I have such a powerful tool at my command – in my house. This allows me the freedom to write, and I know I will not be jailed for what I write. Now I feel as though I have freedom that I posses.” Conversations are rarely this revealing.

When I query as to the best advice Latour had ever been given, he says that his family had told him in his early twenties to leave Cuba. They would say, “Communism doesn’t work. Get out of Cuba.” For a lifetime of struggle and hardships, Latour has finally discovered his personal freedom, but he has not abandoned those memories, or those left behind in that struggle. Through his books, his speaking engagements and simply how he lives each day, Latour is settling his accounts to his country and they owe him a great debt of gratitude.
Outcast, which is available now, is the first novel about Elliot Steil. The second novel, also available, in the Eliot Steil series is called Comrades In Miami, and the third novel about Elliott Steil, Latour is about 80% completed.

Books that inspire Jose Latour are: The Egyptian by Mika Waltari, Cannery Row by John Steinbeck and The Prince of Foxes by Samuel Shellabarger.