November 7, 2003

'Tongue Ties: Logo-Eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Literature'

By NINA C. AYOUB

As a Cuban writer, Calvert Casey had problems with his name. "Mi nombrecito repugnante," he would lament, his English "little name" anathema. Born in Baltimore to a Cuban mother and an American father in 1924, he moved in his youth to Cuba. Later, as an author, he worked almost entirely in Spanish, with rare but telling exceptions.

It was late 1967, a year and a half before Casey's suicide. Disillusioned by the Cuban revolution, the writer lived in exile in Rome and began an