Cuba is a tiny island in the middle of the Caribbean and so it’s really striking to think that it has produced a culture that rivals those produced in very large, very rich and important countries like Mexico, Argentina or Peru. Cuba’s about 1,400 kilometres long and about 200 kilometres wide. It’s very small, but it has an outsized presence in the cultural landscape. It has produced some of the most important writers in Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries; names like José Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy, Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Reinaldo Arenas.

One of my favourite writers is José Lezama Lima, who wrote a great novel called Paradiso, which was translated into English by Gregory Rabassa, the translator who notably put into English One Hundred Years of Solitude and other novels by Gabriel García Márquez. Part of the project of Lezama Lima was writing a novel that describes life in Cuba in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s – so, life in the world that he lived in – but to do so, he chose a very erudite, baroque, literary language of the 17th century. So, there’s a little bit of a clash between the register of the language and the world that he’s describing – a world of peasants, students and people running around the streets of Havana. But the language is all of these words taken from this incredibly beautiful and obscure baroque poetry.

There’s a good anecdote. The first edition of Paradiso was made in Cuba in 1966, and it was apparently full of errors. Two writers who immediately realised what an important novel this was decided to work with Lezama Lima to fix it. One of those writers was Julio Cortázar, and the other was Carlos Monsiváis, a very young Mexican writer.

There was one thing that they couldn’t figure out, which was that all the commas, all the punctuation, seemed to be in the wrong place. It was really like a puzzle that they couldn’t crack, so they went to see Lezama Lima in Havana. By that time, Lezama Lima was older, and very large. He had asthma and had trouble breathing. The writers said, ‘José, we can’t figure out the punctuation. It makes no sense. Could you tell us what’s happening here?’ And Lezama Lima came out with a remarkable answer. He said, ‘Well, I’m asthmatic, so I just write commas when I run out of breath. This is the way I would speak if I were to read the novel.’

So, the novel has this asthmatic rhythm. The writers decided they couldn’t touch the commas. Those commas were sacred; they were asthmatic commas.

Paradiso is a bildungsroman. It’s the story of a boy called José Cemí, who is born into a middle-class family near Havana. Cemí goes through all the experiences of a young boy and then a young man in Cuba. He goes to school, he meets his friends, he has a sexual awakening.

The novel talks about homosexuality in a very interesting way, again using this baroque language to describe the boy’s first experiences with other boys. To give you an example, there’s a moment in the novel where the boy sees the penis of another boy in school and it’s described in Spanish as el aparato germinativo tan tronitonante. Tronitonante is a word that exists in French: tronituante. It comes from ‘thunder’ and the noise that thunder makes. So, he talks about the reproductive apparatus as being thunderous.

Cuba, like other countries in the Caribbean, has a distinct relationship to the body and to sexuality. In Latin America, this is quite striking, because most Latin American countries, from Mexico to Argentina, come from a very heavy-handed Catholic tradition. The whole relationship to the body and sexuality was oppressed for a very long time by the Catholic dogma.

One of the writers who has captured this in the most realistic way is Pedro Juan Gutiérrez. His Dirty Havana Trilogy is set in a very dark period in Cuban history – the 1990s – which the Cubans called the Special Period. From the mid-1960s to 1989, the Soviet Union was the patron of Cuba. Cuba was living off Soviet subsidies, which stopped abruptly in 1989, when the Soviet Union collapsed.

After the Cuban Revolution, many of the youngest and most promising writers left Cuba. Severo Sarduy went to live in Paris, Cabrera Infante went to live in London, and Reinaldo Arenas left first for Miami and then to New York City. On the one hand, it was very sad: Havana lost a critical mass of great writers, people with a great imagination who had given Latin American literature some of its masterpieces of the 20th century. But on the other hand, exile has been a constant in Cuban culture since at least the 19th century.

For instance, José Martí, an important poet of the 19th century, who is considered the father of Cuban independence, died in 1895 fighting the Spaniards during one of the independence wars. José Martí lived in exile. Cuban culture has always been a counterpoint between those inside the island and those outside the island.

Severo Sarduy came from Camagüey, the second largest Cuban city, from a humble family. He arrived in Paris and ended up living with François Wahl, who became his lover and life partner. Wahl was the editor at Éditions du Seuil – the editor of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva and many other very important intellectuals.

So, suddenly, you imagine this young Cuban boy who arrives in Paris and the coalition of worlds – the Cuban culture, which is full of the body, the baroque and this very witty sense of humour; and, in France, Lacan, structuralism, psychoanalysis and the magazine Tel Quel. The beauty of Sarduy is that, in exile, he managed to put these two worlds together. Sarduy is the writer in exile, and that’s how that generation managed to take roots in a different culture and to blend that with what he brought from Cuba.

Cabrera Infante didn’t really take very much from London. He liked English literature, but his literature remained all Cuban. However, Sarduy actually put Cuba together with French structuralism from the 1970s.