Category: Xavier Carbonell

under his desk in the Grand Palace in Addis Ababa. A talisman, a memento mori with a touch of witchcraft.

Neither Putin nor Xi are jellyfish or tardigrades, they do not want to be robots, they aspire to something more modest and therefore terrifying: to live longer, a little longer, as long as they can.

The interview with Maye Musk appeared a few days after a microphone recorded part of a conversation between Xi and Putin about living to 150 years. The headline was that both dictators were seeking immortality, like kings of the Holy Grail, but this is a technical error. Neither Putin nor Xi are jellyfish or tardigrades; they don’t want to be robots; they aspire to something more modest and therefore terrifying: to live longer, a little longer, as long as they can.

It appears (we don’t know Russian or Chinese, the message comes in distorted by translators), that Xi praises human longevity thanks to science: “Now at 70, you are still a child.” Putin provides the sci-fi plot: “Biotechnology is making impressive advances,” he says, “there will be continuous transplantation of human organs, and perhaps people will become younger as they age, even to the point of achieving immortality.”

Xi bursts out laughing—dangerously interjected by Kim—and answers measuredly: “It may be that in this century humans will live to be 150 years old.” This fairytale conversation took place in a fairytale setting: the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing. Díaz-Canel was also there, so it is possible that a little immortality might be splashed on him.

The international media didn’t give much importance to the anecdote. As with Maye Musk, it is assumed that neither Putin nor Xi will leave office until they die. Phrases about real life expectancy were repeated, conspiracy theories were floated, and the conversation was played down.

One remembers with nostalgia that joke from 2016, just as Fidel was about to die, when we Cubans said: “No evil lasts 100 years, but 90, yes.”

One nostalgically recalls that joke from 2016, just as Fidel was about to die, when we Cubans said: “No evil lasts 100 years, but 90, yes.” How wrong we were. There is a way to achieve immortality—Putin, Xi, and especially Trump know this well—and it isn’t symbolic. The mantra “I am Fidel” summed it up well. The entire country became Fidel; we continue to live Fidel’s destructive project; his historical insanity never died; his administrative clumsiness has more than just heirs; it has its own identity.

That’s immortality, and to achieve it, these crazy old men—how could we not invoke Porno para Ricardo?—want to work until the very end. They also want us to work, of course, but not as swimsuit models or as attendees at diplomatic receptions. Many will have to die so that others can become Fidel, or Trump, or Putin, or Xi.

An article on immortality can become a homily or a harangue. If it is—what else can I do?—I’d rather end with an exhortation: cultivate laziness; defend the waste of time as sacred; meditate on the Gate of Heavenly Peace (but not like Putin and Xi); live happily, don’t be too annoying, and die peacefully. In short, don’t be Fidel.

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announces it will support Cuba with its rockets.” He had previously written that the country lived in perpetual “pressure, difficulties, conflicts.”

To twist a phrase of Piglia’s, that was an extraordinary discount in the supermarket of history: the romantic idea of ​​a revolution

The Cuban historical drama will continue to be the subject of various marginal notes. The writers invited by Castro to Havana return to Argentina with a message: “They are not communists, they’re humanists.” Piglia himself will assess the phenomenon with skepticism: “If it is true that they are humanists, they will last three months,” he whispers to a girlfriend. Upon hearing the news of the executions of former Batista supporters, he has another enigmatic reaction: “Justice equals power,” he says in a group of friends.

But Cuba offered them too strong a temptation. To twist Piglia’s phrase, this was an extraordinary discount in the supermarket of history: the romantic idea of ​​a revolution.

In 1961, Guevara appeared in Uruguay, and all the students were dazzled by his speech at the OAS. They were impressed by “his sparse beard and the five-pointed star on his beret, which seemed to be a third eye on his very Argentine face.” In a famous essay, years later, Piglia would speak of Guevara as the reader who resolved the contradiction between life and literature, because he is the guerrilla-who-reads, or as Michel H. Miranda writes, the killer reader.

The news of Guevara’s death in Bolivia—just as the seven typewritten copies of Jaulario are on their way to the Havana competition—is Piglia’s first major doubt about Fidel Castro. “If it’s true that Che Guevara was killed in Bolivia, something has changed forever in the lives of my friends, and in mine as well. A turbulent week, with confusing news,” he writes on a Friday the 13th.

For Piglia, Guevara is a decent writer and Fidel an effective speaker; one takes books to the bush to read in silence, the other is an imposing talker.

The “confusing news” can be summed up in one question: “Why didn’t the Cubans rescue him from the field?” The key lies—Piglia puts it in police terms—in Castro. “Fidel Castro confirmed the death of Che Guevara. The question now is why Guevara left Cuba and why he went to the Congo and then, without support, embarked on a guerrilla war in Bolivia.” The explanation offered among Guevara’s Argentine admirers was that “his criticism of the Soviets and, therefore, of certain lines of the Cuban revolution” had caused disagreements with the regime.

In El último lector [The Last Reader] , the dichotomy between Guevara and Castro is presented with a vengeful tone. For Piglia, Guevara is a decent writer and Fidel a showy orator; one takes books into the bush to read in silence, the other is an overbearing talker; one is hairy like hippies and Beat Generation writers, the other pursues Elvis-like behavior. Of course, this idealistic tension could only be posed by an Argentine, who sees double where a Cuban would see the same thing.

However, the contrast between Castro and Guevara is important to understand Piglia’s relationship with Cuba, the almost total silence about his trip to the island in his famous diaries, and his distrust of Cuban institutions that begins with spite (“my book was first until the end but then they awarded the Cuban Benítez”) and ends with his resounding “Me caí de la mata” [The penny dropped**], just before the Padilla Case.

Translator’s notes:

*Online searches as of this date show the book selling for close to $500.

**Literally “I fell out of the bush”

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his youth.” That should be enough to achieve the “dramatic story, the masterful novel” promised by Tusquets on the back cover.

The best-selling Cuban novelist suffers, though always vicariously. Life is elsewhere, not in the socialist Matrix, and he’s the first to admit it.

“In Cuba, we have no choice but to incorporate misery into life and remain silent,” Padura explains to the El País journalist under his solar-paneled rooftop. The best-selling Cuban novelist suffers, though always vicariously. Life is elsewhere, not in the socialist Matrix, and he is the first to admit it: “I finish the book, press a key, and in two seconds it’s in Barcelona.”

2. Dos exiliados [Two Exiles]. The Yucca Fool and Other Old Stories (Verbum) is the testimony of a double exile, Miguel Sales, who escaped not only from a country but from an entire era, the one before 1959. According to journalist William Navarrete, these stories conclude “the taste of other times” in the mouths of their protagonists. These four pieces address, among other topics, “the journey of the Archangel Raphael to America, the Castro utopia, the presence of the Chinese on the island, and the Fitzgerald mansion.”

With a prologue by Iván de la Nuez, American Playgrounds (Rialta) by Juan-Sí González is the latest installment in the Fluxus series, coordinated by Carlos A. Aguilera. Born in Santiago de Cuba in 1959, González offers an exile’s view of the United States. His collection of photographs of the North American country is, according to the publisher, an “interpellation of the present” that captures a kind of open-air museum.

3. Quijote remediano. Several books of poetry were published in August. Among them, “Del polvo no he venir” [The dust hasn’t come] stands out, which Betania publishing house offers free to readers. Its author, Omar Rodríguez García, who died in 2009, was born in Remedios and remained outside the institutions. He left behind several unpublished books and a series of semi-legendary anecdotes.

4. El desierto de la revolución. [The Desert of the Revolution]. Utopia Poisoned (4Métrica) brings together some of the most lucid voices on the Cuban issue to reflect on the regime’s alliances with many complicit states. The book examines the mechanisms of ideological export and political control that have characterized Havana in recent decades. Its conclusion, endorsed by authors such as Hilda Landrove and Eloy Viera: “The emancipatory paradigms of the 21st century need to overcome the desert of the ‘Cuban Revolution.'”

“Poisoned Utopia” brings together some of the most insightful voices on the Cuban issue to reflect on the regime’s alliances with many complicit states.

5. Un recordador [A Reminder]. Luis Felipe Rojas aspires for El ruido de los libros [The Noise of Books], recently published in Miami (Media Mix), to become his personal time machine. Its theme—”how the diverse voices of the people shaped the reader, the writer that this book shows you today”—recalls Fernando Savater’s Recovered Childhood: “The books and the voices of the people make a fuss so that the words spin in a cyclonic wind toward me and so that I don’t miss the stories that were invented to be heard.”

6. Posdata [P.S.]. Those who enjoyed Princesa Miami, the “political and population atlas” by Legna Rodríguez Iglesias (Incubadora, 2024 Franz Kafka Essay/Testimony Prize winner), can listen to the soundtrack of the book prepared by Walfrido Dorta here. It’s a minefield: from Ozuna to The Beatles, from Shakira to Roxette, and vice versa. Consider yourself warned.

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What is truly disconcerting is that Prat acquired most of these objects within Cuba.

What is truly disconcerting is that Prat acquired most of these objects inside Cuba. One has to imagine what the country was like in the 1940s and 1950s, the wheeling and dealing of smugglers and millionaires, the era of the Count of Lagunillas—owner of the Greco-Roman art collection at the National Museum—Bacardi, and Julio Lobo. Prat himself had a Jew named Schneider appear at his house during the middle of World War II to sell him a Roman ritual vase.

Prat traded one piece for another, offering his services in exchange for a funerary stele or an imperial coin. He had started as an archaeologist in Barcelona and then in France, when he had to flee Franco and cross the border in 1939, to be interned in the Agde concentration camp. From there, he took some prehistoric figures, first to New York, then to Miami, and finally to Havana.

In the Cuban capital, he encountered an atmosphere of xenophobia and academic exclusion. The university didn’t hire permanent foreign professors. José Gaos and María Zambrano, to name two notables, passed through the island, but eventually left. If the Republican exiles had found a less hostile environment (it was also the era of Franco’s fanatics and the founders of the Cuban Nazi Party), perhaps Cuba could have been Mexico. Perhaps, who knows, learning from them—learning to think—might have freed us from Fidel Castro.

When Santiago founded his university in 1947, he began hiring foreigners in open opposition to the Havana prohibition (“just as the East rose up against political colonialism, it is now doing so against cultural colonialism,” declared the faculty). Prat found a rental in El Caney and never left the neighborhood.

From the beginning, Prat conceived the idea of ​​a Living Museum—what is now known as an immersive museum—an exhibition as representative as possible of all human art, accompanied by contextual explanations and learning exercises. He partially realized his dream while he was a professor, but was never able to find funding for the idea. The collection became “living,” but only because its owner constantly moved it from the classroom to his home, and from his home to temporary exhibitions.

In his possession was a 4,000-year-old Sumerian tablet, bearing a cuneiform inscription: “Six fat-tailed sheep, offerings to the god Enki, from Aba-Enlilgen.”

In his possession was a 4,000-year-old Sumerian tablet bearing a cuneiform inscription: “Six fat-tailed sheep, offerings to the god Enki, from Aba-Enlilgen.” He also possessed several Egyptian figurines known as ushabtis, metaphysical slaves who accompanied the deceased on their journey to the afterlife. One of them was instructed to speak in the name of “Osiris Padineith, righteous of voice, born of the lady of the house of Nekhbet,” and offered to “act” and say “here I am” when invoked.

Prat also had Greek pottery, vessels called olpes, lekythos, and hydrias, with black and red paintings of wild beasts and athletes. As for Roman art, he had found fragments of friezes with lions and a bust of the ill-fated Emperor Commodus.

At the end of his life, Prat had to protect his pieces from the bandits who swarmed Santiago during Cuba’s ‘Special Period’. He decided to donate his collection to the state. No one can explain why it hadn’t been confiscated sooner, as happened to so many collectors in the Soviet world (see Bruce Chatwin’s novel Utz, a small masterpiece about an obsessive collector of Meissen porcelain in Prague).

By then, he had already classified the entire collection—often inaccurately and bizarrely—on meticulous cards that he typed into his Remington typewriter.

Photos from the 1990s no longer show Prat, shovel in hand, a pose he loved, but rather as an old doctor with glasses, a cane, and the appearance of a venerable druid, a true Panoramix*. Spain paid several tributes to the Catalan, but it was too late. Francesc Prat i Puig had become Paco Prat and was Cuban. He died in Santiago on May 28, 1997.

*Getafix, in English. An Asterix character.

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by the smoke. In Santa Clara, the bar was a café and the café was a bar, depending on the time of day. Lycanthropic, a café dimmed the lights and became a nightclub. In the morning, hungover waiters served us, and served themselves, a strong cup of coffee.

The famous Mejunje was never a café, but rather a well-crafted platform for intersex hustlerism with the Party’s blessing. If there was coffee, it was reheated grounds, and it was preferable to drop into other establishments if you weren’t seeking the company of unwelcome characters of all stripes and passports.

The Europa—Steiner would be horrified—was and perhaps still is the battleground where Italian settlers negotiate with their jineteras [hookers] for child support. I often saw a troubled Giuseppe or a sad Alessio suffer the consequences of a tropical night with those mulaticas, rarely mulatonas.

Not to be missed is the priceless Revolución, filled with communist memorabilia and located next to the Tren Blindado [Armored Train]. A Che Guevara fan could stop there, be overcome with emotion by a photo of Fidel with Hemingway, and spend a few dollars before making the pilgrimage to the mausoleum where the Argentine’s unlikely bones lie.

In the Obrador — with its white walls and tables — the few real Marxists in Santa Clara, always utopian and poor, met. They were more closely watched than the dissidents. I frequented their chess boards and always caught someone I knew who was off base.

We must not leave out the priceless Revolución, full of communist memorabilia and next to the Tren Blindado.

“I’m in a café,” Lezama says in at least a couple of texts, like a profession of faith. It’s not hard to imagine him sipping a daiquiri, his ears listening for voices and epiphanies, à la Joyce, like the resounding “Chinese Bride, Good Luck” from La cantidad hechizada*.

Cafés and bookstores always went hand in hand, and not far away was the little shop where I sometimes—on payday—bought cigars or cigarillos. How long did I spend going from café to café? When I went to Havana or Camagüey or Cienfuegos, I always looked for a place that served good drinks and had a cigar shop nearby. The one in Cienfuegos, where an ancestor of mine worked for decades, was staffed by a Mason whose golden ring—with the compass and set square—reverberated as he arranged the cigars in a glass pyramid

Old times and old things, like Steiner’s cafés. From another planet. A different life and faces, of whose whereabouts I have no idea. It all comes back when I go to the Novelty, and although Mario looks at me solemnly from the cover of Letras Libres, he knows better than anyone what the poor, happy life of a young writer is like.

*The Spellbound Quantity — A book of essays by José Lezama Lima

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Who can forget their toys, or the things that served as toys?

Who can forget their toys, or the things that served as toys? A cigar box from which I cut out an entire paper city, which I assembled and disassembled in my living room. Some plastic soldiers from World War II—they appeared under my bed one Three Kings’ Day, a tradition that communism failed to eradicate—with binoculars and flags, rampant or rolling in the trench, belonging to imaginary states.

A pair of astronauts, with their spacecraft, armed with detectors for lunar dust, who I now remember as the forerunners of Daft Punk. (Much later, on the beaches of Valencia, I saw dozens of searchers moving their instruments on the sand, like those little figures in spacesuits.) I also had a crossbow, a bow that shot arrows, coloring books—one of them only had the frustrating silhouette of Lassie, the collie—light swords made from radio antennas, magic wands.

There were toys left behind in Cuba that I should have brought. Toys that were so old they were considered relics. An American wooden box with ten miniature bowling pins, which one could knock down with a ball hanging from a pole. The Lone Ranger, whose hat eventually became toasted in the tropical heat, harder than the Western one. To keep it covered, I put a bottle cap on it: it looked like a horseman with his charro or an Arab with his fez.

George Washington, in a blue jacket and tricorn hat—that one survived—was his unlikely expedition companion, both on horseback. There was also a clarinet, made of fine black plastic, with a small notebook of melodies. Almost everything else was lost.

At least once a year, my entire town allowed itself to indulge in toys and imaginary life.

At least once a year, my entire town indulged in toys and imaginary life. It was the month of revelry, March, although in some years it was held in August. I hated and still hate that atmosphere. At seven in the morning, the hammering and welding began. The sparks from the tips of the rods crackled on the iron frames. When everyone left, I went out to play in that rusty fortress, on top of which the carriage was built.

In none of my novels have I recreated that world, which has brought so much money to the cheap folklorists who proliferate like midges in that place. Everything frightened me. The crush of people, the glitter, the makeup, the immobility of the characters in the wings.

There were always half-naked girls – often classmates, the only incentive to go and see the float – and a voice- over narrating some corny legend: Troy: Blood and Fire, The Sun of Austerlitz, Sissi Empress, Prayer in the Desert, The King and I, Beyond the Sea , A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a thousand silly things, all financed by the exiles.

I didn’t like going out but staying in my room, knowing that all the houses in the town were going to be empty at that moment.

I didn’t like going out, but rather staying in my room, knowing that every house in town would be empty at that moment. What a wonderful feeling. I’d take out my toys, my books, whatever, and start inventing that phrase whose wickedness only a Cuban can accurately gauge. Then the firecrackers would explode, rise into the night sky, and descend like kamikazes onto the rooftops. Scared to death. My cats would protest. The neighbors’ dogs would howl.

Five in the morning. Total drunkenness, trash, urine. Toy enthusiasts—and sometimes me too—scaled and looted the float. They stole cranes, cobras, monkeys, tea and smoking tables, marvelous lamps, thrones, and dragons. Everything stuffed with Styrofoam, an entire world of Styrofoam. Everything designed to shine once and die, like naked girls, like flying cars, like the child one once was.

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Cubans, were defamed.

The second one who died was Harold Cepero and I will never forget the devastation his death caused in the circles in which I moved

The second death was Harold Cepero, and I’ll never forget the devastation his death caused in the circles I moved in. Harold had studied to be a priest, a term that carries with it an ethical and cultural background. He had dropped out of the seminary, found a girlfriend, and I think he raised pigs—a detail that touched me, I don’t know why—and all his friends remembered him as a lovely man.

Payá and Harold, Harold and Payá. How many times have I heard their names without having seen their faces, which the news was careful not to publish. Religious magazines, on the other hand, published photos and testimonies from Harold’s former seminary classmates, heart-wrenching testimonies, and I am still friends with those who offered them.

With one of those friends, a close friend of mine, I got in a car headed for Remedios. I’ve always had an irrational fear of any means of transportation other than the train. Later that year, and with the rumor that the political police had “cut the wires” of Payá’s Hyundai, the tension escalated to its peak. My destination was the Remedios Parish Church.

That is where the Franciscans lived, who, in some ways, shaped part of my sentimental upbringing. They were Mexican, but completely overwhelmed. My friend and I would meet one of them for lunch. In fact, my entire circle began holding these “chance” Masonic meetings, of the third kind, to talk about Payá. No one would have trusted a landline—those in churches are tapped: the ABC of caution—so we had to travel and whisper.

It was a conspiracy, and I was involved in it. I knew it, I accepted it, I savored it. Thanks to the priests and nuns, when I was 14, I heard Dagoberto Valdés and witnessed a human rights protest in Placetas. I’ll never forget the priest, steadfast and in his white cassock. I wondered which policeman would have the courage to remove him from the scene to search for those who had taken refuge in the church.

During the after-dinner conversation in Remedios, over coffee, my friend and the friar began to talk in code

Over coffee at the Remedios table, my friend and the friar began to talk in code. At 17 and coming from where I came from, I was above suspicion, but even I had to learn to speak that way. And I did.

“What did you think of that man?” the priest said. “Terrifying,” my friend said. “Did you turn on the television last night?” “Yes, for a while,” the other replied, “no one believes those little cartoons.” “It seems they’re scared.” “Yes, scared, very, very scared.” “And with the sick old man, even more so.” “And that wasn’t all,” the friar theorized, “an order in extremis from you know who?” “I couldn’t believe it,” my friend replied.

But it didn’t end there, in that easy-to-decipher dialogue. Payá’s death, at the heights of politics, had consequences at every level. What’s above, so it is below. “And our friend?” my friend asked with a small smile. “He hasn’t reacted,” the priest replied, “he knows how to pretend very well, he’s intelligent.” Our friend was one of the agents that Security had infiltrated into the Franciscan ranks. They’ve done the same with the Jesuits and the Dominicans and every religious order that has passed through that country.

What was expected of our friend—I learned from that conversation—was a flash of conscience, a turmoil that would make him confess, feel guilty, and die of shame for Payá and Harold, whom he surely knew. The human improvement, no less, of the unbeatable New Man!

The human improvement, no less, of the unbeatable New Man!

But the epiphany never came, it never would, and that was the second lesson I learned in Remedios, after the coded language. As Creole wisdom warns, the snitch is the most vile animal of the tropical fauna; and as Dr. House emphasizes, people don’t change.

I think of Payá and my humble beginnings as a conspirator, in that time that seemed so full of possibilities, to console myself for the mediocrity in which we live. When everything falls apart, who will I vote for? When there are political parties, what will the options be? When there is freedom, what quality will conversation have? What privileges will those who struggle today, those in exile, those in prison, demand? What country is this, that the closer it gets, the more frightening it becomes?

I think that with that blue Hyundai, raising a cloud of yellowish dust in the East, many answers were lost.

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Patron saint of hippies and other outcasts under the Castro regime, Haydée was the tsarina of Casa de las Américas until her death

Patron saint of hippies and other outcasts under the Castro regime, Haydée was the tsarina of Casa de las Américas until her death. Her responsibility was the “revolutionary education” of young Latin American writers. She claimed to have made that generation famous, something she admitted in numerous documents, but never with greater elation than in a letter she sent to Mario Vargas Llosa on May 14, 1971.

The document is famous, having been cited by the likes of Jorge Fornet and Rafael Rojas. I myself discovered it between pages 66 and 67 in a 1971 issue of the journal “Casa.” The whole magazine is one long artillery barrage. It starts off with a speech by Fidel. The main course follows, with instructions on cultural “parameterization.”* And for dessert, the self-incrimination of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla.

The letter to Vargas Llosa shows up on a little slip of paper, folded like the message in a fortune cookie, to aid the reader’s digestion. As the note itself explains, it is presented this way because of the urgent need to respond the Peruvian writer’s resignation from the magazine’s editorial board. Fortunately, I was able to steal that issue of “Casa” from a dusty bookshelf at Central University before the termites could get to it. I now have it in front of me along with the letter.

By the time Haydée adds her signature to the letter’s four long pages, she was addressing a man who had already written some of the Spanish language’s most acclaimed novels: The City and the Dogs, The Green House and Conversation in the Cathedral. She freely reveals the author’s address –Via Augusta 211, Ático 2.o, Barcelona. Like Beethoven, she knows how to create a big bang.

Haydée lurches between totalitarian coldness and revolutionary coarseness, the two rhetorical styles of Cuban strongmen

She addresses him as “sir,” not “comrade,” as Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén liked to do, because Vargas Llosa is no longer her colleague. First, the formalities. He cannot resign from the board because the board no longer exists. It was abolished “because having a divergence of opinions among committee members was unacceptable.” Surgical castration to treat the cancer of free expression. “We thought this action was preferable to simply excluding people like you from the board,” she explains. Haydée lurches between totalitarian coldness and revolutionary coarseness, the two rhetorical styles of Cuban strongmen.

What a shame, the midwife mentions in an aside. “A young man like you,” someone who could have done so much for Fidel, like García Márquez, who would go on to enjoy a personal friendship with the Cuban leader, something Haydée denies to Vargas Llosa. He is exiled from the communist firmament, dragging dozens of intellectuals with him. The Peruvian writer had to add his voice — “a voice that we helped get heard” — to the unanimous chorus.

The talent of the Revolution’s old aristocrats to turn a statement into a judicial weapon is also employed here. She mentions Padilla, a writer “who has acknowledged his counterrevolutionary activities” and has never been tortured. “It is clear that you have never faced terror,” Haydée says. It is clear that the ghost of her brother still haunts her. If the regime does not defend itself, it would really be like “letting Abel die.”

The trial continues. Vargas Llosa acceptance of Venezuela’s Rómulo Gallegos prize in 1967, which the Chavez government later rescinded, was an insult. He should have given the money to Che Guevara and his guerrilla fighters, as Havana suggested. “Buying a house was more important to him than showing solidarity with Che’s military efforts at a decisive moment.” Thus, Vargas Llosa is responsible for Guevara’s death later that same year.

At the end, Haydée asks that her death be viewed as a sacrifice – like Che, like the Vietnamese, like Abel – and that is what she will get, but not from Vargas Llosa

The tone of the letter becomes more strident. His opinions on Fidel’s position regarding the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia are “ridiculous.” Appearing at an American university is a sin. Not going to Havana when he is invited is also a sin. Vargas Llosa can only “regret” being “the living image of the colonized writer, contemptuous of our people, vain, confident that writing well not only makes one forgive bad actions but also allows one to pass judgement on a great movement like the Cuban Revolution.”

At the end, Haydée asks that her death be viewed as a sacrifice – like Che, like the Vietnamese, like Abel – and that is what she will get, but not from Vargas Llosa. After a lifetime “of fuses and cannon fire all around”, she kills herself in a conventional way, by a self-inflicted gunshot wound, like Eduardo Chibás and Osvaldo Dorticós before her. Abel and Celia, her children with Armando Hart, will also die prematurely, in an accident that occurred in 2008. Fidel Castro will outlive them all. As will Vargas Llosa.

*Translator’s note: a process of establishing “parameters” and categorizing anyone who falls outside of them as misfits.

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In Rey Obsecado [Headstrong King], a small drawing from 1959, a strange figure raises his fists as if on a platform. You don’t have to think long to guess who it is. A Compañero Has Died #1 , from 1962, represents the shadow of a hanged militant. In #2, the deceased is on the ground, and from his chest—or rather, from his entrails—emerges a stain that could be his soul, the soul of a communist terrified by his immortality. And finally… the negation of the negation : the supreme tongue-twister of Marxism completes the theorem.

The artist showed that he wasn’t going to be faithful to any canon. Abstract Expressionism, yes, but in his own way.

Consuegra, of course, is much more complex than his ideology. A member of the “controversial group”—once again, the museum’s political correctness takes over—of Los Once [The Eleven], the artist demonstrated that he wasn’t going to be faithful to any canon. Abstract Expressionism, yes, but in his own way. His autobiography, Elapso tempore [Time Lapse], published by Ediciones Universal in Miami and which Fernández confesses to having read almost secretly, is already quite difficult to obtain.

A native of Havana, trained as an architect and pianist, and recipient of dozens of awards, Consuegra’s works can be found in such unconventional venues as the orthodox Casa de las Américas and the headquarters of the Organization of American States in Washington DC. The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes had quite a few of his pieces in storage, but hadn’t given them prominence—how dare they?—until now, at the initiative of curator Yahima Rodríguez.

“Too many creators have been turned, at best, into non-people on the Island.”

One of the scholars, Armando Álvarez Bravo, summarized the Revolution’s war against Consuegra in an anthology paragraph: “Too many creators have been converted, at best, into non-persons on the Island; they have been erased from official records and, if exiled, have had to suffer, in addition to their expulsion into outer darkness, the antagonistic weight of the complicit academic, cultural, political, and media machinery sympathetic to Castroism or in its service. A machinery that, in addition to denying true values, has exalted too many mediocre people.”

Go see Hugo Consuegra now that you can. I’m not talking to the happy ghosts who, like me, are no longer there, but to those who can afford to pay 30 pesos—a Judas figure!—to see the umpteenth exhumation of a dead comrade take place in Cuba .

’El ahorcado’ is back in town. / Xavier Carbonell

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off,” which only the unbridled sexuality of the 60s and 70s could complement, never replace.

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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What is his duty against this insignificant dictatorship, completely ignored by 13 administrations, from Eisenhower to Biden?

To see a Cuban rave about him, celebrate his victory, throw a pathetic little party, a pathetic little cake with blue, white and red meringue, is to re-enact that orgasmic militancy that he once felt for Fidel Castro. Another “The Man”? Another “The Horse”? Another “My Commander”? Again “This is your house, Fidel”? No, thank you, whoever it is. A politician is an administrator, not a messiah.

I arrived in Europe without knowing what I was going to eat for the next month. I was assigned a number. I know what it is like to be a number or an illegible card, and I am not remotely alone. This country welcomed me, life made its way through mountains of bureaucracy, regulations, paperwork and uncertainty. What kind of human being would I be if I approved – or worse, if I voted! – for a policy that gives the green light to the hunt for migrants, hundreds of them my fellow citizens.

No, Biden’s immigration policies have not solved anything, but that does not justify thousands, perhaps millions of people living in total uncertainty since January 20. Not uncertainty, but fear. That is not the America we believed in. That is not freedom.

But Cubans are never afraid. Cubans, who do not live in a country but in a bubble of exceptionality, do not take it personally. Trump, my friend, the people are with you. One of the lowest hours of Cuban exile was traveling to Washington, to the doors of the White House, and asking for absolutely everything – some already saw themselves in a B-1 Lancer dropping bombs on Point Zero, with the Ride of the Valkyries in the background – except clemency for migrants from Venezuela, Nicaragua and Haiti, three countries as screwed as we are, perhaps more so. And the Afghans? And the Ukrainians? And the others?

Many pro-Trump friends, who are now beginning to moderate their enthusiasm, have told me: “I never imagined it would turn out like this.” I reply that there was nothing to imagine, because Trump may be a cruel, authoritarian guy and a compulsive liar in almost everything, but that when it came to migrants he was more transparent and sincere than the Virgin Mary. You like Trump, but he doesn’t like you.

I don’t like the fact that any Cuban who expresses the slightest displeasure with Trump – which ultimately is not just hating that ugly, orange-haired old man, but the values ​​he proposes – is met by a school of patriotic piranhas on social media. One leaves Cuba to speak, think and defend whatever one wants. Be a Trumpist, I respect that right. But cancelling and censoring, putting all the nuances in the same bag, simplifying, insulting, defaming, those are Villa Marista tactics that we have assimilated by dint of suffering them.

Trump will not help us build a country. No one is going to fix it for us or gift it to us.

Trump will not help us build a country. Nobody is going to fix it for us or gift it to us. For Trump, there is only one country, and I am not even sure it is the United States. The politicians who accompany him, whom the press calls Cuban-Americans, are Americans even if they have Latin surnames. They are concerned about a nation, their own, not that of their parents, and with good reason. Cuba – Kiuba – is a word that must sound very exotic in Washington.

I cannot speak about the end of aid to the independent Cuban press, because I have run out of space. To understand the impact of this news, one only has to take a look at the happiness that is felt in Cubadebate, Granma, the Party and the Foreign Ministry.

Well, Donnie, we’re done (I’ll leave Musk for another day). These are my dislikes, with zero likes because I don’t have Facebook or X. Brain and stomach and an arsenal of patience for the future. I feel free, freer than ever, as every Cuban migrant should feel, and the rest is literature. “Let Trump cook,” one wrote recently. Let him cook, the Kingdom is his. But with what ingredients, with whose sweat, at the cost of what values, with what allies, the Cubans? Like in Woody Allen’s joke, I no longer dare to belong to any club where there are people from my country.

At the end of this tunnel of tension that is about to become a roller coaster, we are ants trying to live our lives in the age of Trump, extras in an episode of House of Cards or Succession, a poorly drawn drawing in the background of the comic strip. Gray and forgettable people. But tell me, at the end of the day, isn’t that a little comforting?

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From Einstein Waldo Balart learned that time can be a substance, and that as a substance it can be represented

In the oppressive Victorian society where the popular – but not physical – concept of the fourth dimension was born, the idea that there are worlds that our senses cannot grasp was a symbol of freedom. Flatland , a mathematical novel published in 1884 by Edwin Abbott, narrated the adventures of a square who discovers the existence of spheres.

In “flatland” there are only two-dimensional forms, and the appearance of this other being upsets everything. The sphere, on the other hand, does not conceive the possibility of a fourth, a fifth or an nth dimension. The idea was so attractive that it won thousands of followers, such as the bigamist writer Charles Hinton, who invented the tesseract – a hypercube with 24 faces and 32 edges, later painted by Dalí – and the theosophist Claude Bragdon, who aspired to redecorate New York following magical and numerical patterns.

For Waldo Balart, only abstraction – specifically Suprematism and Constructivism – had succeeded, after several failed attempts, in representing these new conceptions of time and space. This required a great deal of inner purification, similar to that of a saint or a hermit.

Pure color, pure form, mathematics and illumination together. A song to freedom that never ceases to have a profound resonance in history.

The Cuban’s affinity with these movements led him to shape his work according to the same search for purity. Pure color, pure form, mathematics and illumination together. A song to freedom that never ceases to have a deep resonance in history – and in his own history – a rebellion against politics and reality that seems to reach its climax in the photo that Rialta published in 2024 of his empty wheelchair. Clean lines, a scarf, paint stains on the floor, the absent body. It is the Heart Sutra of Buddhism: emptiness is form, form is emptiness.

“The needs for freedom and solidarity are born from an internal struggle within the creator,” writes Waldo Balart, “which drives him to become self-absorbed and thus be able to channel his energy from a personal perspective.” This idea is expressed much more clearly in his letter to the poet Gonzalo Rojas, where the painter claims to have succeeded in translating onto canvas the feeling of emptiness of Saint John of the Cross, the great Spanish mystic.

The perfect representation of the dispossesion was a black square like Kubrick’s – “it can’t be a circle, because then it would be a black hole” – because it was at the same time the absence of color and all colors, delimited by a solid form. “I consider it as nothingness, which is the only way to achieve communion with the Universe.”

‘Essays on Art‘ does not contain only essays on art. Waldo Balart foresaw the pressure of the Internet as early as 1987, when he attended an exhibition by the technological giant IBM in the Egyptian temple of Debod, transplanted in Madrid. He was shown the making of a chip and the future of computing. The situation was like walking through a labyrinth with an unlikely tour guide: the Minotaur. The artist saw in all this a danger for those who wish to lead “a marginal existence as the last bastion of personal freedom.” A prophecy fulfilled.

One of the most delicious texts in the anthology is ’Revolution’, the “outline of a history of the Cuban tribe, descendants of the Goths and the Lucumíes”

One of the most delicious texts in the anthology is ’Revolution’, the “outline of a history of the Cuban tribe, descendants of the Goths and the Lucumíes.” This comedy, which begins in 1492 and goes through the wars of independence and the Revolution of 1930 until reaching 1959, is his particular reading of the island’s past.

With Castro – his former-brother-in-law – a Russian flag is placed on the stage and “all the actors get into geometric-military formations, and begin to march like automatons repeating slogans in unison that the judges have ordered them: “blah burun gru puraca achán.” Waldo Balart senses the Cuban apocalypse, and after a season of “fights, killings and hangings” comes the great dispossession of all symbols. Only emptiness and a song by The Beatles remain.

What I like about Waldo Balart is not only his paintings, always with beautiful titles – Structure of Light, Axiomatic Orde, Longitudinal Knot Genesi, Proposition – but also that essential Cubanness that Castroism has always wanted to exterminate. The Island as a synthesis of the universal, as the zero coordinate to search for the rest of the universe. The Island, not as a closed-off state, but as a starting point.

The artist knew himself to be the custodian of this memory, which had “considerable weight” for him. That is why he liked to point out that the Revolution was only an accident – ​​with all the implications of that word – in a larger story. “Everything has been said,” he insisted with Gide, “but since no one listens, it must be repeated.”

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