‘50 Stories of Cuba in Exile’ and an Essay on Sugar Among the January Books

Last month, Azúcar, an essay that compares the history of sugar with that of civilization, arrived in bookstores.

The Ácana mill, in Matanzas, drawn in 1857 by Eduardo Laplante as part of his “collection of views” of colonial sugar mills / Project Gutenberg

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 2 February 2025 – “Azúcar!” It was for decades the battle cry of Celia Cruz, sung in vibrant and honeyed syllables. “Without sugar there is no country” was the mantra of the Republican landowners, which in the light of the current sugarcane debacle sounds like a spiteful prophecy against Fidel Castro. In fact, Cuba owes its opulent nineteenth century – railways, cities, mills – and also its sickly attachment to slavery, abolished late, to sugar.

Manuel Moreno Fraginals, in the prologue to his controversial study on the sugarcane industry on the Island, described like no other the ferocity with which sugar shaped the history of Cuba. The author of El ingenio [The Sugar Mill]- who ended up disgusted and going into exile in Miami, where he died in 2001 – traced “the footprints that start in sugar and manifest themselves in the establishment of a university chair, or in a decree on tithes, or in the characteristic form of the Cuban architectural complex, or in the terrible effects of the razing of forests and the erosion on the soils.”

Azúcar [Sugar] (publisher Ariel) arrived in bookstores this January, an essay of almost 500 pages signed by the Dutch researcher Ulbe Bosma, which equates the history of sugar with that of civilization. For the text, where it is not difficult to find the imprint of Moreno Fraginals, “the rise of sugar speaks to us of progress, but also of a much darker history of human exploitation, racism, obesity and environmental destruction.”

In an interview, Bosma illustrated the political and economic importance of the so-called Creole saccharocracy

In an interview offered in Barcelona to the newspaper La Vanguardia, Bosma illustrated the political and economic importance of the so-called Creole saccharocracy during the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. If today it is the technology tycoons Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos who pull the strings of world politics, he said, at that time the influence of the big sugar surnames – Fanjul, for example – was decisive in the United States and Europe.

For Bosma, social networks are just as addictive as sugar, and the key to dealing with both is moderation. He says that he adds sugar to his coffee, but only “a teaspoon.” “Despite everything I’ve found out,” he says, “I’ve gotten used to its flavor and don’t want to lose it.”

Independent Cuban publishers have had a modest production during the first month of the year. One highlight is Como el ave fénix [Like the Phoenix] (Rialta Magazine), 50 interviews published by Cuban journalist William Navarrete in recent months on CubaNet. They are, for its author, “stories of Cuba in exile.” They narrate, according to the life experiences of those involved, the last 100 years of the Cuban nation.

“For years, William Navarrete has had the sense of smell and sagacity to locate many of the protagonists of the politics and culture of the Island of the twentieth century and get them talking about the lost city, the political prison, the purges, the labor camps, the exile or the great names and events of their life stories,” say its editors, who qualify the book as “one of the most powerful collective testimonies” after 1959.

Rialta also publishes, in its ’Files’ section, a recount of Antonio José Ponte’s career in ’La Gaceta de Cuba’

Rialta also publishes, in its Expedientes [Files] section, an account of the career of Antonio José Ponte in La Gaceta de Cuba. What was published by the poet and essayist in one of the most disgusting magazines of official culture gives the measure of how his critical caliber was gestating. This dossier is also a sample of the work of Ponte in Cuba, the attempts at “civic extermination” to which the regime subjected him and his emergence as one of the indisputable voices of his generation.

Ediciones Memoria, a small publishing house in Camagüey dedicated to the rescue of Cuban civic thought, publishes Las conferencias de Shoreham, by Manuel Márquez Sterling. “His prose is a long and subtle examination of both his own and the national conscience. There is no lack of irony, even mockery, but above all, in the sometimes light ease of speech, there is always the seriousness of the duty to be,” explains his editor, Alenmichel Aguiló.

The anthology of poems by the Russian Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky, who died in 1996, translated by Ernesto Hernández Busto for the Siruela publishing house, is already in bookstores. Devoted to the writer exiled from the Soviet Union, the Cuban has written: “With Joseph Brodsky I am always tempted to make different versions, perhaps because in his poetry there is also an effort to communicate a certain universality, a certain transcendence.”

Translated by Regina Anavy

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