That of the forbidden novels in Latin America is an old story and dates back to the days of colonialism, when the[inquisizione](https://www.treccani.it/encyclopedia/inquisizione_(Enc encyclopaedia-Italiana) had the habit of putting on the index, in his black lists, “novels narrating vain or profane stories, such as those of Amadigi and others of such invoice , because it is a harmful exercise for the Indians and it is not good for them to deal with it or read. ”
The lies of the fictionalized lives, the exaggerations and the deceptions were harmful to the faith and the right conduct of the subjects of the kingdom. And, in the ports, the hand of the customs officers was quick to collect the books full of deceptions, a fate that shared the Don chisciotte and the Lazarillo de Tormes.
However, banning reading has always been the best way to stimulate curiosity, turning it into an act of defiance and, consequently, of freedom. The books banned by the censors mocked the controls hidden inside wine barrels and crates of bacon or masked with fake covers. They also circulated in hand-copied volumes. And not only the novels with their pernicious fantasies, but also the subversive books written by Enlightenment thinkers as the fires of the liberation movements were kindled throughout America. Now the Don chisciotte had been supplanted by the New Eloisa by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
This bureaucratic anxiety to prohibit books became part of the control policies implemented by the tyrannies that began to follow one another in imitation of the republican governments, whose sworn enemy number one was represented by the printing presses that had machines judged to be hell, capable of making incendiary books. against public order, morality, good manners or anything that deviated from official thought. Not circulating ideas in one country was a way to freeze time.
Unusual request
But with the twentieth century not all dictatorships were so sensitive to books, starting with those that O. Henry, exiled to Trujillo, Honduras, where he wrote his novel [Cabbages and kings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabbages_and_Kings_(novel), he called “banana republics”. The Guatemalan general Jorge Ubico, the Honduran Tiburcio Carías and Somoza cared much more about the newspapers than the books, which always had limited circulation and were published by the same authors. Old Somoza did not prohibit books in Nicaragua, a country with almost no bookstores, but he sent his militant fanatics – the blue shirts who venerated him as a Mussolini of the Tropics – bludgeoning the presses of enemy newspapers and scattering the loose type of printing boxes on the street.
His son Anastasio was no exception. In the last months of his dictatorship, when he was already in despair, he blew up the headquarters of the Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa. Instead, his list of forbidden books was limited to those that spread Marxism. However, his customs agents were not very circumspect, as they let books such as The holy family by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, because they believed it was of a religious nature, or the Capital, which I imagined to be a praise to the system and harmless as it was too bulky.
When, in 1970, the Central American University Editorial (educa) published in Costa Rica Sandino by Neill Macaulay, a search based on the Annapolis Navy archives, a shipment with five thousand copies was sent to Managua and stopped at customs. Gregorio Selser’s classic, The guerrilla warfare against the marines. Sandino, general of free men (Feltrinelli 1972), circulated illegally in the country.
Macaulay’s book was brought to Somoza by the customs director to decide what to do with it. The man gave it a quick glance and gave it back. “This is not about me”, she told him “but my father”. The five thousand copies sold in less than a week, a record for a country with so few readers and scarce readings.
All this to tell you the story of Tongolele did not know how to dance, my banned novel in Nicaragua. The Alfaguara publishing house sent a first air cargo from Mexico while others arrived by land. Suddenly, the process of unpacking the boxes slowed down, with the excuse that some travel document data was missing. Then the customs director asked for a summary of the contents to be presented.
An unusual request, from which it was understood that the cargo would be kept forever in the warehouses, and that we would never obtain any authorization. It was the first banned book in Nicaragua’s contemporary history. I don’t know if, just as happened with Somoza, some obsequious official brought the book to the couple now in power for evaluation or if one of them read it. This will remain in the halo of mystery that always envelops the books that cannot and must not be read.
But in Nicaragua thousands have read the electronic version of my forbidden novel, which passes from screen to screen, just as it did in the past with barrels of wine and crates of bacon for the smuggling of ideas and inventions, and with copies mimeographs of the past.
In Malmö, Sweden, a library of censored books has been opened, the Dawit Isaak, named after the writer declared a traitor and detained for many years and without trial in Eritrea. Contains dai Satanic verses by Salman Rushdie, persecuted by the theocratic regime of Iran, to the books of the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Aleksievič, Nobel Prize for literature. In Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, there is also the museum of forbidden books, created to “preserve books that have been banned, censored or burned and to tell the public their story”.
Then two long journeys await Inspector Morales and the parade of characters from Tongolele did not know how to dance, journeys in search of their well-deserved place on the shelves of those libraries that represent the spirit of freedom.
(Translation by Sara Cavarero)
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