Category: Xavier Carbonell

Boti clings so much to the dog’s affection, that he sees in her, if distantly, a copy of the love he had for his mother. Accustomed to seeing ghosts, the trust which the dog shows him seems to him more pure and dignified than any human behaviour. In any case, Moya – who we see for the last time naked, euphoric and gripping a rifle as he heads into the mountains – and also the soldier, both have something bestial, wild about them, and for this reason it’s easier to show them the door.

One views both the house and the naval base – as if they were living creatures – with rancour, in a country that would, if it were able, abolish the existence of both: Boti’s shack because, with its junk and hundred-year-old furniture, it reminds us that the past was better; the military buildings because they are the thorn that Fidel Castro could never remove from his heel.

Daniel Ross’s camera captures the harshness of Guantánamo, the suffocation in Boti’s mind which, in many ways he reproduces in the house itself. The director has shown that it’s more and more difficult to produce a film on the island, and that the cinema of today is just a survivor that’s moving closer to the abyss. Nontheless, the young creator overcomes the technical obstacles impeccably.

If anything should be particularly pointed out about the film, it’s rather the quality of the story, whose rhythm is more tiring than it should be and it quickly abandons some very powerful symbols and motifs. To resort excessively to fixed planes, to focus over and over on objects and landscapes, and to work less on actual dialogue, threatens the economy of the narrative. Nor was it a good idea to insist on including the final sex scenes, which end up clouding the symbolism of the absent wife – otherwise plotted subtly by means of the clothes, the dog, the glass of water and the poems.

Despite these neglected areas – and those of the performances, which, perhaps because they are course end up being endearing – ‘The Wait’ will go on to have success at international festivals and it promises to be just the start of a career in film for Daniel Ross.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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The silent protagonist of the story – which brings together 50 testimonies – is Antonio Camiñas, a priest, born in Remedios in the old province of Las Villas and expelled by Castro to Spain. For María Pérez, it is “a moving story” that has been ignored for decades by Cubans.

Camiñas arranged for the welcoming of the island’s children from the church of San Francisco el Grande in Madrid – which became his general headquarters; the minors had been on the point of being recruited into Castro’s armed forces.

“The main reason for getting the children out  was the Military Service Act which required young men aged 15-27 to remain in Cuba”, Pérez explained. “However, the immediate danger were the UMAP [internment work camps for ‘undesirables’]– the military units that give support to manufacturing, because the boys were nearly all religious and from anti-establishment families, that had expressed their desire to leave the country”.

“Everyone remembers Camiñas as a kind of angel but one with his feet firmly on the ground”, he says. “He was very Cuban. They said he smoked a lot. He gave all the boys affectionate nicknames. He was also a very practical man”.

Food, clothing, medication, transport: Camiñas was an administrative genius who shared his skills with other priests and Cuban families in Spain. The children will never forget the black Cadillac owned by Isabel de Falla – a millionaire from the old Cuban nobility – which picked them up from Barajas airport. “It was like an ocean liner cruising through the streets of Madrid”, they record in their testimonies.

Camiñas, Pérez says, never wanted to publicise his work, not only out of discretion but because he considered it his mission as a religious human being. The children are grown up now but that doesn’t prevent them from “going back in time” through the retelling of the tale – to the El Escorial hostel, the Casa de Campo and Navacerrada, where Camiñas gave them shelter.

It’s the voices which are important in ‘When I left Cuba’ – a book of testimony, not a history book. It will fall to more studious writers, says Pérez, to explain some of the deeper questions surrounding Operation Madrid, such as: how did Camiñas manage to avoid Castro interfering in his plans? Was there some secret agreement between the regime and Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator who died not many years later in 1975? Why did Cuban propagandists decide to hide the childrens’ story instead of using it to discredit those who chose exile, as it did with Operation Peter Pan, in 1960?

“The objective of the book is to open up a window to such questions”, admits Pérez. Not even the families involved are sure where the plan came from. In Cuba in 1966 they began to talk about that “route” for getting the children to Spain. You had to go to the embassy, obtain the documents and pay for the passage.

“It cost me a lot to think that the Cuban government wasn’t in agreement with the Spanish one. Nearly 4,000 children couldn’t leave a country without the regime knowing”, he reflects. Spain and Cuba, he adds, never broke off relations and Castro had a certain kind of friendship with Franco, of whom he said that “he never treated his government badly”.

At first it was a bit disorganised, says the co-author of ‘When I left Cuba’ – for example, the case of the boy who arrived at Barajas but there was no one there to pick him up. “A police officer spoke to him and took him to an office where, by chance, they knew about Camiñas’s work. One of the officials took him home and he stayed there until he was taken to the priest a day or two after”, he says.

In another case a boy of 11 was taken in a bus directly to the church of San Francisco el Grande. “Because of these situations Camiñas began to organise daily visits to the airport to see whether there had been any children who arrived unaccompanied. There were many people who helped him”, he explains.

At the Escorial and the other hostels the children lived out their adolescence as fully as circumstances allowed. They collected pesetas to travel into Madrid for walks, went on tourist trails, were well liked by everyone and talked nonstop. “They cried during the night; in the morning they got up to play ball”, says Pérez. “Of the ones that I know, none blamed their parents for the decision that they made”. 

Eventually the time came to tell the whole story. Remberto came home and said to his sister: “Oskar Schindler saved hundreds of Jews from the Holocaust and the whole world knows about it. But father Camiñas saved nearly 4,000 Cuban children and today no one remembers who he was”. 

María’s first idea was to approach the writer Enrique del Risco, who couldn’t take on the project but recommended Ricardo Quiza as a collaborator. The process took two years, during which dozens of “children” were interviewed. “It’s all recorded”, Pérez assures us, thinking about a possible audiovisual future for the project. 

After seeing the results and the reception of ‘When I left Cuba’, both Pérez siblings are convinced that it will get harder and harder for the regime to hide the story of Operation Madrid. “My parents were sure of one thing: they wanted to save their children. I believe that they did”, says María, whose memory “beats and goes on beating” for the island – as it goes in the song by Luis Aguilé which gave its title to the book.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso
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When Roberto Méndez began as director of the Academy on 18 February 2022, the Communist Party’s newspaper welcomed his being chosen for the post and said that everything remained “in good hands”. However, the official press has kept silent since his resignation and didn’t announce that Jorge Fornet had taken over the role in January. 

After months in limbo, the Academy attempted to return to its normal functioning. Fornet, who worked for years as right hand man to the cultural coordinator Roberto Fernández Retamar, was finally presented as leader of the Academy at the ninth International Congress of the Spanish Language in Cádiz, Spain, in March.

“There are some leaders that are awarded their role like it were a prize, but there are other cases in which it looks more like they’ve been bought. That is the case with Fornet”, thinks the Academy member interviewed by this journal. 

Despite his loyalty at Casa de las Americas, Fornet’s trajectory has not been irreproachable in the eyes of the regime. Author of numerous essays about the cultural politics of the Revolution, and son of the similarly “problematic” writer Ambrosio Fornet, the essayist is remembered for a volume that was never sold in Cuban bookshops: The 71: Anatomy of a Crisis, a formidable analysis written in the year in which the poet Heberto Padilla was arrested by the State Security. 

“The appointment of Fornet is an attempt to “cleanse” him once and for all, of all of his lacking in orthodoxy. The government wants to set him on the right road, that’s why he was offered the job. And it looks like it’s getting results”, says the Academy source. 

The “voluntary” defenestration of Roberto Méndez and the ascent of Fornet had, besides, a higher objective: to gain a definitive control over the ACuL, an institution which defended to the hilt its autonomy throughout the Republic and which Fidel Castro, from 1959 onwards, tried in vain to dismantle.

“As the Revolution failed to eliminate the Academy, it decided to infiltrate it” – just like it did with the masons and many other institutions – explains the interviewee. The ACuL’s resistance to Castro, with with Dulce María Loynaz as leader, is legendary.

Méndez himself related, in a published article, how when he was a young man and recently arrived in Havana, the corporation [Academy] seemed to him like an anachronism compared with the institutions created by the Revolution. It was a “strange mixture of retired professors and ruined nobles”, all brought together in Loynaz’s large house, in Calles 19 and E in El Vedado, which functioned as one of the bases of the institution.

With the passage of time, and in the face of the extreme age of the writer [Loynaz], the Academy was regulated by intellectuals affiliated to the government and agents of counterintelligence, who infiltrated the corporation little by little: Lisandro Otero, Salvador Bueno, Roberto Fernández Retamar and Nancy Morejón. In 2012, after decades of suffocation by the regime, the ACuL was absorbed into the Historians’ Office, at that time led by Eusebio Leal. Under Leal’s patronage, the corporation began its definitive relocation to the San Gerónimo school building in Old Havana.

“The key to understanding how the Academy functions today is to observe the essayist Graziella Pogolotti, a figure who has received very little attention but who is the person that dictates the government instructions to the corporation”, says our interviewee. “The decisions that Graziella implements, with help from Professor Luisa Campuzano, are those which the Ministry of Culture have taken.

It was Pogolotti (she who also had links to the State Security) who, according to our source, arranged the dismissal of Rogelio Rodríguez Coronel, director of the ACuL up until 2022, and his substitution by a “malleable” candidate like Roberto Méndez.

“Bearing in mind the Academy’s team, Méndez was announced as the ideal director” said the source. “No one was going to choose a novelist like Leonardo Padura, who joined the corporation in 2019. Nor a writer like Mirta Yáñez, who has never meddled in problems. The same goes for less ‘noisy’ academics like the linguist Sergio Valdés Bernal or the historian Eduardo Torres Cuevas. The ‘old camajanes‘ [rough translation: lazy old parasites] of Cuban literature, like Antón Arrufat or Reynaldo González, would never have accepted the role”.

Méndez didn’t have any qualms in accepting Graziella Pogliotti’s idea, says the source. “Everyone else said no”, he insists.

It is very revealing that the condemnation of Daniel Ortega, aside from its limited repercussions, didn’t lead to the expulsion of Méndez from the ACuL, the academic observes. “The regime itself also has an image of cordiality to maintain in front of the Association of Spanish Language Academies (Asale) and the RAE”. Havana won’t dare to repeat Managua’s [Nicaragua] action.

Regarding Jorge Fornet, he remains under surveillance and is “still disposed to be bought”, he concludes. Meanwhile, the essayist continues to lead the Academy and continues to try and establish a working rhythm there, amongst all the crises and divisions.

The small turnout of the Academy’s members on 21 April at the traditional tribute to Miguel de Cervantes on the Day of Languages, in San Juan de Dios Park, was very telling. Watched closely by Perla Rosales, the implacable deputy director of the Historians’ Office – and their supreme leader in practice – the Academy knew how to disguise their definitive hijacking by the regime, with smiles and bouquets of flowers.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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Miraculously, Dulce María’s words are not distorted by the other person’s voice. She speaks about Cervantes and his “immortal book”, and allows herself, before the Spanish royals, an anecdote about the War of Independence: In 1895, her father, Enrique Loynaz del Castillo, took part in an expedition to Ciénaga de Zapata. Breaking into the jungle, he comes across someone asleep: it’s a Spanish soldier who’s somehow been left behind, and who’s head is resting on a copy of Don Quixote.

In a lovely episode from Soldados de Salamina [Soldiers from Salamina], the man manages to escape, but he leaves behind the book and a leather case, “rich with jewels”. Loynaz eventually returns the booty but keeps the book, which he’s started to read underneath a tree, in order to avoid the bother of having to cross the swamp. After a while the other soldiers hear his guffaws. “Carry on laughing”, his companions tell him, and they beg him to read the book out loud to them — because he’d discovered “a way of escaping from hell”.

“It isn’t hard to cry on your own. However, it’s almost impossible to laugh on your own”, the elderly woman finishes by saying, through the man’s voice. The nervous faces in the hall wait, sure in the knowledge that there’ll be some words of criticism for Castro’s regime, a final, rousing fighting speech. However, instead Dulce María talks about writing as a salvation for the “pursued and the misplaced”, like Cervantes, like captain Loynaz, like herself. Did she need to add anything else?

Dulce María returns for a final time to Havana. She tells someone that she’s come to think about Havana in the same way that she thinks about animals — dogs and birds. Her father never agreed to keeping the latter in cages, because in her house, she says, there was always a great passion for freedom. And what a house it was to live in. Carpentier tells us that the the Loynaz siblings had turned the working day on its head. They woke up at five in the afternoon and, as if emerging from coffins, they lived by night. It’s well known that all of them were poets and all had a great sense of memory.

The house was Dulce María’s other ‘avatar’. In her lament for the mansion’s “final days” — written, as a prophecy, in 1958 — she misses “that effervescent life”. In one of her last interviews, her voice trembles: “It made me suffer a lot in my life seeing the sorry state that the house got into over the last few years. But I couldn’t do anything to save it. So the only thing I hope and wish for is that it ends up by just collapsing”.

A woman’s best quality is her mystery. Dulce María always respected that. One can re-read her with much pleasure, but nothing impresses one more than her ethics. Around her — today as much as yesterday — swarm the political writers, the satirists, militants, spies, sectarians, the effete, the dissidents, the exiled, the indifferent, the mediocre, the brilliant, the vulgar and the opportunists. Any old snitch or informer can provoke her with a question but she doesn’t bat an eyelid. “The Havana of today? Better not to talk about it. Excuse me”. And she gets up to go and look at her collection of fans. 

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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The poet and critic Roberto Méndez revives, through his biography Felipe Castro and the Catholic University Association (Universal), the story of the Galician Jesuit who founded one of the island’s most active youth institutions during the Republican era, which Fidel Castro set about closing down after 1959. The association, still active in Miami, played an essential role in supporting the Cuban exiles who organised the expedition against the dictatorship in the Bay of Pigs in 1961. 

Un día como hoy [One Day Like Today] (Bahía), by Alcides Herrera, presented in New York this month as part of a tribute to its author, was described as a “neo-historicist exercise in parody” by Elvia Rosa Castro. In his pages, she added, Herrera subverts the “institutionalised history drowned in its own tedium and in its own lessons and regulations” and turns it into a story. 

A new edition of El negrero [The Slave Trader] has been added to the Verbum catalogue: the unorthodox biography which Lino Novás Calvo wrote about the colonial slaver Pedro Blanco Fernández de Trava. The Spanish writer José Manuel Caballero Bonald, who died in 2021, described Calvo thus: “He may be included in the list of great creators of marine adventure novels — writers like Conrad, Stevenson, London and Melville”. 

The literary magazine Bifronte, coordinated between 2005 and 2006 by writers Luis Felipe Rojas and Michael Hernández – with the support of the bishop of Holguín — was digitised and made available to readers by Rialta. In its editions there appeared texts by writers who were polemical and “difficult” (for the regime) and who eventually had to abandon the country — people such as Antonio José Ponte, Rafael Vilches, Carlos Esquivel and Ernesto Santana.

“Bifronte was born for dialogue, for conveying ideas and for putting together a new vehicle that would steer ahead, towards tomorrow. One particular conviction? Never just one, but similar ones to this one were prized: that culture never survives a false unanimity” — a belief held by its editors since its first launch. The magazine published stories, poetry, articles, reviews and interviews, with its focus on contemporary Cuban literature. 

The death of storyteller and promoter Eduardo Heras Leon motivated a polemic about his role in the cultural politics of the Revolution. Since the announcement of his passing on 13 April, many of his students from the Onelio Jorge Cardoso Centre for Literary Training (founded with the foresight of Fidel Castro) as well as many Cuban writers on and outside of the island, remembered distinct episodes from Heras’s life and offered up judgements on his complicity with the regime. 

Also recently deceased — in the U.S. — is the writer and teacher Lourdes Gil. The Cuban Cultural Centre in New York, an institution with which she collaborated closely, remembered her as “a complete Martí specialist and dear friend”. Gil directed the literary magazines Romanica and Lyra, and had a recognised academic career in the United States, a country she arrived in as a young girl in 1961 as part of Operation Peter Pan. 

With the awarding of the Cervantes Prize to the Venezuelan poet Tafael Cadenas on 24 April, the relationship between literature and democracy gained a new prominence in Latin America. During the prize ceremony, the author of Derrota [Defeat] declared the urgency with which the world must defend freedoms in countries like Venezuela – which, along with Cuba and Nicaragua represents the most retrograde and therefore toxic form of leftist politics in the region — and asked that literature “recreate”, through education, democratic thought. 

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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I soon learnt that not only had the volumes existed since 1768 but that several of them had arrived on the island in the forties and fifties, bought by enthusiasts of the English language. The Britannica, declared the reviews and even Borges himself, understands the universe and puts it within our own arm’s reach. Thousands of engravings, maps, diagrams and fold-outs illustrated its articles and turned any one of its volumes into a cabinet of wonders, an optimum and immeasurable inventory. No reader’s lifetime would be long enough to enable them to digest the immensity of its volumes’ knowledge.

I don’t know how I came across the woman who, without having read Borges, was the owner of the 1929 edition. She had collected in a box some twenty or more copies, all with their gilt lettering and Prussian blue covers. I examined the books: among them there was evidence of moth larvae having drilled tunnels through the paper, through all the words – written passages chewed up with the dispassion of a reader. She asked me whether, despite this, I wanted to take the box. I answered yes, knowing that she was presenting me with a time-bomb, a veritable colony of implacable enemies that, after devouring the Britannica, would continue their expeditions through the rest of my bookcase.

The moths lived off the encyclopaedia until, years later, a kind of imperial decree forced me to get it out of the house. Deciding to save at least a fragment of that kingdom, I went through hundreds of thousands of pages, one at a time, cutting out articles I couldn’t lose, along with all their relevant maps and prints. Having to mutilate a book is the worst kind of torture that a reader can be subjected to. I tore a whole encyclopaedia to bits.

As I write this — too long after that day — I am looking again at those pages that I rescued. I carried them with me from the island and they form part of my collection of lucky charms. I have, with one beautiful Egyptian engraving, the word Rosetta. I have a little album in which pictures of archways and columns adorn the definitions of words like abbey, or romanesque. Unusual words like microtomy — the art of carefully cutting up plants and animals in order to study them — and the Quixotic bascinet and the biography of a German called Knipperdollink. There are also gentlemen, all kinds of trees, monsters, explorers, little devils and uncommon alphabets.

(My encyclopaedia wasn’t a dream, and the loose pages that I still keep do reassure me in that respect. I found out later that H.G. Wells, like Borges, had given the books an additional use: as an aficionado of toy soldiers, he used the volumes in his collection as the mountains and trenches of his battlefields).

Anyone who isn’t acquainted with these books, who hasn’t held one of these blue tomes in their hands — made up of “an infinite number of infinitely slender sheets” — cannot imagine the significance of the Encyclopedia Britannica for those who, at one time or another, like young people eternally aged, were their owners. As the blind man said, in that anthology which I stole 15 years ago: “Somebody else, on some other hazy afternoon, got to own all the books, and the shade.”

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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A general sense of fear is preventing the uprising that many hope for.  Reyes says that across the island there are private protests and discussion, as well as small demonstrations against the regime but a protest like that of 11J is very difficult to bring about. “Also, there’s a lack of opposition leadership”, he notes, “Who will coordinate a demonstration? Who will channel the people’s energy? Who will speak out? I don’t rule out the possibility of an uprising, in fact I think it’s quite a strong probability but there are many factors working against it”. 

Regarding those already in exile, the priest is pleased that there are many of them who are working seriously towards Cuba’s future. Nevertheless, he says, “change needs to come from within”. “An exile can support, can assist, but it’s not that easy. You do what you can, with integrity”, he adds.

The island’s Catholic Church, on the other hand, has its own limits. The recent visit by Cardinal Beniamino Stella, who asked for “an amnesty or some other form of clemency” for the island’s political prisoners doesn’t seem to have had any impact on the regime, which has continued to demand severe sentences for those who participated in 11J. The island’s Episcopal Conference continues, it would seem, with the same strategy of non-confrontation.

However, Reyes is unequivocal: despite its social impact and works of charity, “the church isn’t a philanthropic organisation nor a political party”. It’s mission is essentially religious although it has not neglected for one minute to accompany the families of political prisoners or the creation of social initiatives to alleviate the people’s misery. The other side, he laments – the prayers and the being close to the people – “isn’t often in the news”.

“Regarding the political and social arena, we try, from where we are, to accompany people in their desperate times. We also try to shine light on people’s consciences and help people to think. If a priest writes an article or an invitation to reflect, I’m happy about that and I share it”, he says. Reyes, just like other priests and clerics on the island, like Castor José Álvarez and Nadieska Almeida, have denounced the regime’s abuses in recent years.

As there’s little sign of the country opening up to a new era, the most urgent problem is the exodus of young people. “I understand that”, he says. “They want to leave, live, make the most of the only life they have. When they can, they go. What’s the result? We have the most aged population in the region”.

Meanwhile, Díaz-Canel’s government, which ratified almost all of its cabinet members’ posts, moves closer every day towards countries like Russia — whose invasion of Ukraine it has witnessed with its own eyes — and local allies like Mexico or Nicaragua. In Reyes’ view, people don’t care much about the regime’s diplomacy. “There are more important things that they have to attend to, like getting daily bread to eat”. 

Nonetheless, the arrival of ambassadors and foreign politicians in Havana to greet Diaz-Canel as architect of the continuity of the Castro regimes never ceases to be disheartening: “If they keep on shoring up the system with economic assistance it will last a thousand years and this brings us to the same conclusion that everyone has: the most sensible thing is to escape”.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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In 2016, a delegation of Valencian business owners, headed by the president of the autonomous community, Ximo Puig, travelled to Havana. The political atmosphere was tense but very promising. Fidel Castro, in terminal decline, would die one month after this visit. His brother Raúl appeared to be open to an economic opportunity and had begun a process of thawing diplomatic tensions between Cuba and the United States. And Eusebio Leal, the frenzied Havana Historiographer – and quick-witted manager – had brought relations with Spain to their most positive level.

Puig returned  to the Iberian Peninsular in a state of ease. As well as achieving his commercial agenda, his Havana business counterparts had – amongst all the cigar gift-boxes and meetings dressed in light guayabera shirt-jackets – esteemed it perfectly fine to hand over some thirty Sorolla paintings, along with other works by Valencian artists such as Mariano Benlliure and Julio Vila Prades. Once the loan of the works was secured, Spain would agree to clean and restore them, as well as bear the cost of their transport from the Island. 

The plan was to surpass even the 1985 exhibition, to which Fidel Castro, as secure then in power as ever, had given consent: The Havana Sorollas, which had been held over one month in Madrid and another month in Valencia. 

In 2019, it was Carmen Amoraga who went to the Cuban capital. It was the city’s 500th anniversary. Eusebio Leal, very ill, was in his last days, and Miguel Díaz-Canel was now the visible pompous-jerk president, appointed from the invisible powers above him – a dependent of the Castro dynasty clan. Inside of only three years, the rules of the game had changed. After a review of the condition of the paintings, Amoraga didn’t manage to seal an agreement with the Cuban government, but everything did appear to indicate that the works would be making their way to Spain in 2023, in time for the anniversary.

However, now there wouldn’t be thirty paintings, but only ten. Some of the others, she explained, were subject to dispute and couldn’t leave Cuba. On top of that, all those works by other Valencian masters had been kept out of the discussion.

The whole business was made worse by the 2020 pandemic. And following that, the Havana regime was overtaken by profound crisis – underlined by the huge protests of 11 July 2021 and then the emerging international disgrace of its alliance with the Kremlin and its support for Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine. But the most suffocating dimension of the country’s problems was that of the multi-million dollar outstanding payments accumulated by Castro after several decades of subterfuge in trying to evade the creditors.

At the High Courts of Justice in London in February, the investment firm CRF I claimed a debt of 72 million Euros from the National Bank of Cuba. Faced with a possible ruling against it – which did then come to pass on 4 April when the British court partially ruled in favour of the creditor – Havana decided not to go ahead with the loan of the Sorollas: most of them illegally confiscated after 1959 by Castro. This, then, is the “international situation” that, according to Amoraga, ruined the Valencian government’s celebrations.

It’s thought that Cuba holds the third most important collection of Sorollas in the world, after those of Spain and New York. Collectors, millionaires and cultural institutions were acquiring his works from 1923 onwards, sometimes directly from the artist himself. At the Universal Art building of the Cuban museum – an impressive manor house located on Paseo del Prado in Havana – one can admire Pescadores Valencianos (Valencian Fishermen, 1908), Haciendose a la mar (Going to the Seaside, 1908), or Verano (Summer, 1904) – this latter one perhaps the most valuable of Sorolla’s works on the Island, and, doubtlessly, the one most ingrained in the visual memory of Cubans.

Around 1950, almost all of the Sorollas in Cuba were owned by sugar magnates – the Lobo, the Cintas and the Fanjul Gómez-Mena families, whose names don’t appear in the Havana catalogues. Nor is there any talk of their theft – dressed up as a transfer to the socialist state – which the Ministry for the Recuperation of Embezzled Goods brought to a head after the triumph of the Revolution. 

The Fanjuls, connected via marriage to the Gómez-Menas – who went into exile in the United States and rebuilt their fortune there – had hidden a number of paintings behind a wall, constructed expressly for the purpose in their mansion in El Vedado. The revolutionary government converted the building into the Museum of Decorative Arts and seized all its master works, including those that were hidden. Many were auctioned at prestigious auction houses, such as the British Sotheby’s, or ended up in the hands of officials and associates of Castro. 

When, at the end of the nineties, the impresario José Fanjul discovered that Puerto de Málaga (The Port of Málaga, 1910) – one of his family’s Sorollas – had been sold in London, he put together a team to find out who the buyer was. Sotheby’s washed their hands of it and tried to exit gracefully from the investigation but the alarm was raised in Havana. The Fanjuls, worried that Castro would sell all the works confiscated from the family in order to help him get out of the economic tight spot which the fall of the Soviet Union had put him in, set about making international demands for stopping the trafficking of art organised from the Island. The Cintas’ foundation had done the same thing in 1995 when they found out that two of the Cuban magnate Óscar Cintas’s Sorollas were on sale at Sotheby’s.

The former legitimate owners of the pictures brought to light an intricate network of dealers, peddlers, curators, spies and agents of the regime. In 2009 when Havana discretely loaned two Sorollas to the Prado Museum – one of them being Verano – the Fanjuls once again launched a judicial challenge. Protected by the Helms-Burton law, which penalises the traffic of goods expropriated by Castro, they sued the the museum. However, they couldn’t get the pictures back. 

The intransigence of Fidel’s political heirs, the rupture of power in anticipation of the death of Raúl Castro (who will be 92 this June), and the debacle of the national economy, have all put off even further the happy ending which the Valencian authorities had been hoping for since 2016. With these precedents, and the high profile media attention on the ‘Year of Sorolla’, it’s unlikely that the painter will be able to avoid his being hijacked by Havana.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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Persona non grata makes certain progress, via digressions, as a volume built entirely from personal memories. The narration dithers, and forms a hypothesis, falls down through paranoia; it thrills, and it mulls things over. Edwards believes that, in 1970, Castro had drilled down into all the excess opened up by the Revolution and had managed to submerge the country into a destiny of collective obfuscation. His crazy delusions were already evident in his physical appearance — bags under the eyes, unkempt beard, a compulsion for clouds of tobacco smoke — and he aspired to the achievement of perfect surveillance/security, which the Chilean interprets as being one of his “Jesuit disorders” — a hangover from his Belén* schooldays.

As Castro diverted the course of history in Cuba in 1959 — says Edwards — he thought he could twist the country’s destiny time and time again, and also its laws of nature. The image of the Leader as mad scientist à la Victor Frankenstein, who dreams of practising genetic recombination in cows whilst he harpoons sharks in his private paradise at Cayo Piedra — is one of the most grotesque in the book.

A re-reading conjures up new questions about another spectre, Manuel Piñeiro, the ubiquitous Barbarroja [redbeard] whose microphones and spies — chauffeurs and beautiful secretaries from Havana — didn’t miss a single move made by Edwards. Piñeiro’s authority over the secret police, his influence over where even Castro could or couldn’t go, turned him into the leader’s confessor, and, without him realising it — the author notes — his puppet-master. Perhaps this suppressive control, which lasted right into Fidel’s decline, might be the key to explaining Barbarroja’s unusual death — he crashed his car into a tree in 1998.

In the midst of all of the tale’s tremors we find Padilla and his wife, Pablo Armando Fernández, Norberto Fuentes and César López, the first Miguel Barnet and the ghost of Cabrera Infante. The spring in the trap which power held in reserve for them was triggered when the Chilean abandoned the Island for Paris, where his teacher, Neruda, awaited him.

“Fidel Castro’s repression didn’t have the Steppe-like coldness (with simultaneous convent-like coldness) of Josef Stalin’s”, Edwards summed up in a commemorative prologue in Persona non grata. Nevertheless, he knew how to quickly identify the enemy — “the ladybirds, along with the poets, the long-haired, the mystics and the mystic-types, and all variety of social scourges” — who deserved, in his olive-green hell, “a slow death, though, in some cases, a less slow one”. Edwards, traveller to an irreconcilable Havana, understood first and foremost what others derived from Cuba and he anticipated what someone called — with an anesthetic malice – a Grey Five Years.

*Translator’s note:

Belén Jesuit Preparatory School was founded in 1854 in Havana. Fidel Castro attended this school, an institution renowned for its strict Jesuit discipline.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso
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Up until half way through the book the stories are pretty harmless. He goes out in search of the unusual but stops short of crossing the line into risky political areas. This is the natural condition of the independent journalists in Cuba — they are the marginalised, stuck in their tribe. But from this point on, things begin to change in the book, the voices move forward, and the language — earlier, varied and ambiguous — becomes a machete blow. Whereas before he used the word ’government’, now it becomes ’dictatorship’; where before he spoke of anonymous swindlers, later he alludes to the imprisoned artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara or to the dissident Ariel Ruiz Urquiola. He directly questions the president and the generals, describes his “walks” around Villa Marista, the general headquarters of the State Security secret police. Now he has nothing more to lose.

Jiménez Enoa’s works have a strange predilection for the law. With some well calculated pauses between paragraphs he points out which article of the Penal Code his interviewee is violating, and how to use this fact to challenge the police. He has read between the lines of the constitution, of Castro’s speeches, and even of the threats made by the torturers. Everything has a legislative or authoritative value, everything practiced in Cuba is criminal and if there’s a cover-up it is there once again in the language: to resolve, means to steal.

Money is another obsession in the book. How does one manage to eat or to live in a country where wages are not enough to cover the basics. A gigolo gives him the key: in real life “there are no tariffs, only cushy jobs”. He fights against everyone and against history like those people who built their ramshackle huts on the edge of Che Guevara’s mortuary square in Santa Clara, visited by tourists and government leaders. It’s the tension between the desire to live and the ghost of Castro and his guerillas. But if you can’t escape from the country, there’s always a metaphysical escape: suicide.

Whilst reading The Secret Island, another force becomes apparent, one which doesn’t often show its face and which couldn’t be more decisive: the battalion of spies, confidantes, patrol cars, informers and sympathisers of the regime. One can fight against them up to a certain point but their skill lies in their persistence and in their talent for destroying lives. In a final self-portrait, Jiménez Enoa offers up the creed of an escapologist from time and space: “Escaping from Cuba is not the same thing as escaping from any other country for the first time. To escape from Cuba is to fall into the world, to realize that Cuba is an island that has been hijacked by a political system which ensures that the country remains locked inside the twentieth century”.

I suppose that Jiménez Enoa will ask himself the same question as all of the other artists and intellectuals who have become exiled from Cuba in recent months: After his book-exorcism, his testament-report, his page-frontier, what next? Hopefully not too many years will pass before he’ll be able to dedicate a ’Sonata for a good man’ to those who watched over him, like the one that Dreyman wrote for HGW XX/7.

Exile, as the only way out

As a result of his publication, Jiménez Enoa was arrested, interrogated, tortured, and finally regulado [regulated], a method used by the Castristas by which a citizen is prevented from leaving the country freely. After he did finally escape however, and was living in a place as peaceful as Amsterdam, one of the regime’s agents actually turned up at one of his conferences and aggressively shouted out at him like a maniac that everything he was saying was a lie.

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Publisher’s note: This article was first published by the Spanish daily El Mundo, in their cultural magazine La Lectura.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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Following the contents page and adverts for Coca Cola, Victoria’s Secret and Rolex — yet more names of remote and unachievable things — came the news of celebrities’ love lives. The gossip columns were the perfect polar opposite to the political press, they explained the economic climate better and without numbers and put on record all the drunken women, divorces and rumours that would later be turned into novels, songs and plays.

Once the appetite for gossip had been satisfied then came the diet advice and only after that, the recipes. Cooking tips, new types of blender, the  top ten brands of oven, how to decorate your patio to be a hostess for a ’brunch’ (but what was a ’brunch’?). As diligent as ants, the family set about an impossible project: trying to translate advice from a capitalist world to a ’sackcloth and ashes’ socialist one. A stuffed duck had to be adapted to a chicken as skinny as Cindy Crawford; the house wine passed for a Moët & Chandon; and the rusty wheel of the Singer sewing machine would spin tirelessly to try and achieve the style of a Valentino or a Versace.

When ill-fortune took hold there was no more pressing a remedy than the horoscope or the prophesies of that rather camp Walter Mercado, who appeared to be the product of a union between Elton John and Barbara Streisand. You only had to hear our mothers talking: “I read that this month some expected money would come our way”, “When it’s full moon, don’t get mixed up with other people’s business”, “You will feel vital and full of energy”, “Love will come knocking at your door on Friday, don’t hold back”.

Finally, on a hot Sunday afternoon it was time to open the magazine just before the classified ads, where there were the five, or ten, serialised chapters from the novel by Corín Tellado, the ubiquitous and harmless pornographer, as he was described by Cabrera Infante.

Taurus or Capricorn, alchemy or astrology, pig or rabbit, sunflower or olive oil, bikini or underwear, tracksuit or sarong; life was a constant dilemma of choice between things we had never even seen, and the magazines — the authorised opinion of Queen Elizabeth or of Keanu Reeves — helped us out in our theoretical predicament.

What we didn’t know [as kids] was that this whole microcosm was dependent upon a crude and secretive market. The magazines didn’t arrive home free of charge. They were rented by the day, they were traded for a bunch of bananas or a bottle of tomato pureé, certain titles became collector’s items and they were carefully looked after. Many female friends were ostracised for not returning a copy in time or for having ripped the cover. In an austere and monotonous country, that particular bastard genre of journalism was our only connection with the other world. Any infraction or theft would unleash a war.

Thanks to poor literature, our childhood got to become technicolour — as Nabokov used to say — and not black and white. Because of this, everytime I see the seductive and aggressive magazine covers, calling out like sirens, I wonder whether the termites have yet ground up the copies that I left back at my house.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.