Anger and tenderness are the themes of this book; the rest is literature
14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 22 March 2025 — José Lezama Lima’s epitaph was supposed to be a phrase by Flaubert— “All lost, nothing lost” — which he ended up replacing with his own verses. When a Cuban reads Juan Abreu’s Debajo de la mesa [Under the Table] (Ladera Norte), the optimism of the Buddha of Trocadero vanishes: everything is completely lost, even nothingness, even the tomb where the epitaph was to be placed.
No one has written with as much freedom as Abreu. What else can they take away from him? His words come from a face scrunched up in rage, a rage he himself offers to readers as a guarantee of the truth. He speaks because he’s pissed off, and he’s pissed off because he’s free, and freedom sometimes comes from the gut and the pain. If you don’t like it, close the book.
Prose so insolent could only be born of tenderness. Anger and tenderness move Abreu and are the theme of this book. The rest is literature. From a young age, Abreu was obsessed with the idea of the work—narrated, painted, sung, lived—and the total sacrifice it demands of a creator. If there were a religion for him, this would be it. If there were a god, it would be Reinaldo Arenas, who makes his entrance as the omnipotent and ubiquitous divinity of books.
Arenas, the extreme tension, a temple for thousands of couples—regardless of sex, color, or Kama Sutra position—a mythological creature in the forests of Lenin Park, wrote a book of which Under the Table is a counterpart. If Before Night Falls is about the childhood and youth of a Cuban from the countryside, what Abreu tells is what life was like at the foot of a hectic city like Havana.
According to Abreu, both worlds—the countryside and the capital—were and will be in perpetual conflict. Fidel Castro, a puritan allergic to Havana’s chaos, took over the city to destroy it from within. To destroy the simple joy of families, the Christmas dinners, the cars along the bay, the dwarf skyscrapers, the lust of white women, black women, mulatto women, Chinese women, Chinese mulatto women, women “tall and superb, with hairy pussies, smoky skin, and massive but elegant bodies… where have those goddesses gone?”
All lost. From under the table, they emerge to play what all Cuban children—even after the Great Loss—have played: pellets, lizard-catching, kite-flying, hole-peeking, and what, as a teenager, constituted for Abreu an amulet against all kinds of devils (and she-devils): “the hobby of jerking continue reading
If the first part of the book is about childhood, parents and first loves, in the second it is no longer possible not to talk about Castro’s world.
If the first part of the book is about his childhood, parents, and first loves, in the second, it’s impossible not to talk about Castro’s world. Dystopia, suffocation, repression—unfortunately, none of this belongs to Cuba’s past. Although the cyberpunk Comandante didn’t manage—as far as we know—to freeze himself in a cryogenic sarcophagus, today’s Cuba is the result of what he created.
Against that mass of hatred, complexes, and propaganda sludge we call Castroism, we can and must fight, but not at one’s own expense. What is the purpose of a homeland, Abreu repeatedly asks. What purpose does it serve and what benefits does it bring? The Mariel Boatlift was Cubans’ great gamble on real life. Leaving rather than dying. If you have to choose between homeland or death, neither is better.
In Cuba, there was—and nothing has changed—too much death. The image of Arenas, when he was living as a beggar in Lenin Park and State Security was hunting him, is the best example: “He emerges from the darkness, preceded by two enormous rats frightened by his movements. When I see him, I want to cry. He’s already prepared to sleep. He’s fully clothed and his head is wrapped in various rags.”
“Thank goodness this newspaper is finally useful for something other than its official use as toilet paper.”
From his sleeves crumpled pieces of Granma spill. He uses them to protect himself from the cold. “Thank goodness this newspaper is finally useful for something other than its official use as toilet paper,” says Arenas. He is the persecuted writer par excellence, Abreu observes. He is the homosexual writer par excellence. And the one with the greatest moral stature in all of Cuban literature, in which there are so few excellent writers.
The complicity of Serrat with the Cuban regime—he allowed dissidents to be beaten during a concert; the events at the Peruvian Embassy in 1980; the campaigns against those who wanted to leave via Mariel; the snitching; the frustration of having Fidel within range of an AKM and not being able to fire; the progressive bleeding of Cuba; the exile of Arenas, of Abreu, of the entire family; the exile of an idea of a country.
Since they’re taking everything from us, let them take our homeland too. Our memory—what happens under the table, with a book in hand, while adults chat—can’t be taken away.
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