Mick Hartley

An interesting look at Margaret Atwood and Cuba, from Yvon Grenier at Quillette. The Canadian novelist – best-known for her dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale – is a frequent visitor, but manages to keep quiet about the politics. 

As a Cuba scholar, a student of literature and politics, and an enthusiastic reader of Margaret Atwood’s work, I have collected articles and media clips over the years related to the Grande Dame of CanLit’s many private and official visits to Cuba. Frankly, the file is thin. Generally, scholars engage with her important body of work (more than 60 books, fiction and non-fiction), without mentioning this topic. It is an interesting footnote, no more. Why interesting? Because it illustrates, in her case and as a pattern, how an inquiring mind sincerely committed to human rights and democratic values can turn off its critical antennae. Atwood allowed herself to become a compliant guest in a country that checks almost all the boxes of totalitarianism, minus extensive terror: a single-party state, no rule of law, arbitrary arrests (2,000 of them during the first eight months of last year), stultifying media (even Raúl Castro says so), and a regime of censorship that allows no freedom of speech, association, and only limited freedom of movement; a country with half-empty bookstores selling the same few official writers and hagiographies of the dear leaders.

I am not saying she ever became an enthusiastic apologist, as many Western writers and intellectuals did during the 1960s until the 1971 Padilla show trial. This is not like, say, a Sartre returning from Russia and announcing that cows produce more milk under socialism. Atwood has hardly said anything publicly about Cuba, as far as I know. Rather, Atwood in Cuba is more like a Sartre under the occupation, blissfully unconcerned about what is going on around her…

Of course The Handmaid's Tale is unavailable in Cuba. Then again it's about a future US, where the patriarchy take over, so what's that got to do with communist Cuba, where gender equality is (supposed to be) official policy? But there does seem to be a feeling that, like many progressive writers and intellectuals, she's quick to spot totalitarian threats from the right, but can't quite spot them on the left.

On her way to Cuba in 2017, Atwood said she was curious to know what Cubans thought about Donald Trump. After his improbable electoral college victory, The Handmaid’s Tale soared up Amazon’s bestsellers lists, as did Orwell’s 1984. As she put it, there are elements in the novel that are “increasingly resembling the ideas of some US lawmakers.” She and her hosts no doubt found much common ground on how Trump might turn the US into a dictatorship. But Trump is no longer in the White House. He flouted democratic norms, but the rule of law, most of the media, and the country’s system of checks and balances reined him in. Trump is out because of something that has not happened in Cuba since 1948: a free and fair election. Fidel and Raúl retired at a time of their own choosing, after decades of total power. 

As it happens Atwood, unlike her silence on the subject of Cuba, has made public her views on the trans debate, as a co-signatory to a letter offering support to the trans and non-binary communities of the US and Canada in the wake of the JK Rowling affair. From an interview with the Times last November:

On the subject of trans rights she is very precise indeed. After our conversation she emails me a video attacking JK Rowling’s view of the issue. Rowling defends the ultimate biological reality of sexual differences as a feminist cause: “If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased.” Atwood also emails a Scientific American article stating the opposite case: “Why the new science of sex and gender matters for everyone.”

“The most bothersome thing about me,” she explains, “is that I’m a strict agnostic. By which I mean there’s a difference between belief and fact. And you should not confuse the two. You can believe all you like that trans people aren’t people, but it happens not to be a fact. It is not true that there are only two [gender] boxes. So the two questions to ask about anything are: is it true? And is it fair ? So if it’s not true that there are only two gender boxes and that gender is fixed and immutable, is it fair to treat trans people as if they’re not who they say they are?”

Who on earth believes trans people aren't people? But she's nailed her colours to the "progressive" mast, and that's what matters.