Xavier Carbonell – Translating Cuba

The Cartoonists From ‘Mazzantini’ Save August From Editorial Lethargy

The online magazine has had a lot of work since Nicolás Maduro refused to leave Miraflores on July 28 / Alen Lauzán / Mazzantini

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 31 August 2024 — In Cuba there is no more money, even for Martí. It is true that the cult of the man Cubans call ’the Apostle’ in his land always had something of alms, and there was no tribute – from the Civic Square to Martí Notebooks – that did not require passing the hat to the battered popular pocket. But Castroism, or this limbo without a label that came later, always has had its own imprint on misery.

No one forgets the famous 28 volumes of Complete Works with a prologue by Juan Marinello that, in some Cuban houses of worship, still accumulate dust. It was even said that there was a volume 29, the prophetic volume, censored for talking about Fidel, communism, computer science, reorganization and other futuristic subjects. Less memorable – for how little it lasted in bookstores – are the critical editions that, if we pay attention to what the professional martyrologist Marlene Vázquez says, will remain eternally incomplete.

With prose in the style of Martí, the imitation of Martí is always an apostolic parody – Vázquez says that “at the moment, the directors of the Center for Studies on Martí is looking for sources of financing for the printing of volumes 30, 31 and 32, now finished.” And he promises that, “as usual, those who contribute will be recognized on the credits page of the corresponding volume.”

It was even said that there was a volume 29, the prophetic volume, censored for talking about Fidel, communism, computer science, reorganization and other futuristic subjects

Vázquez does not say if he expects dollars, euros or the humble pesos with the face of the Apostle. He limits himself to reminding the Government of the propaganda service they could offer: “In the present, in the midst of the loss of values that we are experiencing, and willing to win it by ideas, that great work is very useful.” This sample of the art of seduction appeared in Cubadebate, but any Cuban knows that it won’t come to anything, much less so in dollars.

In the antipodes of the mendicant Center for Martí Studies is the Havana Historian’s Office. This is demonstrated by the resurrection, after years of lethargy, of Ediciones Boloña, one of the projects that the current deputy director, Perla Rosales, most quickly dismantled, after the death of Historian Eusebio Leal. Reinvented and with money, Bologna publishes in an expensive volume the classic, “La Habana. Apuntes históricos (Historical Notes),” by Emilio Roig.

The presentation was attended by Rosales and the entire general staff – the military metaphor is not exaggerated – of the Office. The “Notes” of Roig, the old republican historian whom Castroism did everything possible to forget, had not been published since the 1960s.

On the decline, the publication of Cuban books in exile also seems to be on a lethargic holiday – it happened in January, with almost no titles and very few that were outstanding. The bad streak broke with a book of drawings and notes, “Cartografía Personal (Personal Cartography),” by Jorge Pantoja. The artist, born in Havana, composes the book that every Cuban should be making: an anthology of his school notebooks, correspondence with his mother and doodles.

The publication of Cuban books in exile also seems to be on a lethargic holiday

Personal cartography is a return to Pantoja’s childhood brought to light, the chronicle of the birth of his imagination. It raises the tension between feeling and doctrine, the precocious and the unknown, the rigid and the adventurous. In the end, the trajectory described is the foundation of his own experience as a creator, which is found in those remote notes.

The return to mythology – one of his favorite themes – defines Roberto Méndez’s new book of poems, “Descenso de Alcestes” (The Descent of Alcistis), (Casa Vacía). With a whole arsenal of books in tow, Méndez now summons Hercules and Orpheus, who traveled to hell and returned, and Mozart, who faced death but did not return.

The ones who do not rest – the real cartoonist never does – are the cartoonists of Mazzantini.* The “magazine of bulls, goats and horns, genetic or hybridized” has had a lot of work since Nicolás Maduro refused to leave Miraflores on July 28. The cover of number 52 shows the dictator’s floating head in a dystopian museum of old tyrants. Puzzled, Maduro is Castro’s neighbor, who looks at him crosseyed.

The metamorphosis of the Grand Master Mason Mario Urquía Carreño into a major of the Ministry of the Interior, the stampede of leaders, the blunders of Cuban Television and the pranks of State Security complete the edition. And at the end, a quote from Manuel Marrero that could well be the government’s response to Marlene Vázquez’s request for money: “We never promise our people,” says the chubby prime minister, “what we know we won’t be able to give.”

*Translator’s note: Mazzantini was a bullfighter, considered “muy guapo,” which means he was very courageous, like the subversive cartoonists of the magazine.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Pacharán Through My Life

Reynerio Lebroc was many things: he was a priest, a professor, a patriot, a conspirator and a chaplain of the invading troops in the Bay of Pigs.

Lebroc, center and wearing a gabardine coat, next to the current vicar of Santa Clara (on his left) and a group of priests in Rome / Gaspar El Lugarareño

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 25 August 2024 — It is depressing that the same political dog bites you twice. The situation in Venezuela, a country crushed by my country – I say all the time that we have almost always been villains – has made me think of the Cubans who, fleeing from Fidel, sought refuge in Caracas and were surprised decades later by that moronic nephew of Castroism, Chavismo. I think especially of a couple I met in Madrid. They had left Cuba in the 60s and Caracas in the 90s. I think he was a doctor or a businessman; she offered me a rich pacharán from Navarre and could not resist making fun of Buesa: pacharán through my life without knowing that you pachaste*.

That day we talked about Carlos Alberto Montaner, who was already very ill and few knew that he had come to Spain to die. With Montaner we were losing the dream of a first president in democracy, a dream that Venezuelans are now living and that we – from afar, with envy – admire. He also spoke of the fate that awaits the library of an exile. “My children are not interested in my books,” he confessed to me. I suggested that he send them little by little to the Cuban bishops, who would find a way to nourish their libraries. Libraries are dynamite for the regime, I said, and if I didn’t say it, I thought it.

That day there was talk about Carlos Alberto Montaner, who was already very ill and few knew that he had come to Spain to die.

If it had not been for a library made of banned books I would not have been able to read Cabrera Infante, Arenas, Sarduy, Montaner, Rojas, the people of Encuentro and many others. Dazed by the pacharán and the drowsiness, I asked them if they had never come across Reynerio Lebroc in Caracas. I owe so much of my sentimental education to that bombastic name that I feel he is like an old relative. Every book in his vast library – he managed to send it from his exile to Santa Clara – ended up passing through my hands. continue reading

Lebroc was many things. He was a priest, an expert in colonial history, a professor, a conspirator, a bit of a spy and a bit of an adventurer. There is a photo in which, being less than 30 years old, he is seen descending the stairs of an Iberia plane. He is skinny and balding: he has just been released from prison. Castro put him in prison in 1961 along with three priests. They were to be the chaplains of the invading troops in the Bay of Pigs.

Castro put him in jail in 1961 together with three priests. They were to be the chaplains of the invading troops in the Bay of Pigs

The copy of the book “Religion and Revolution in Cuba” by Manuel Fernandez that I read was Lebroc’s. He underlined a sentence with a hard line: “The release of four priests arrested in 1961: the Spaniards Francisco Lopez Blazquez, Jose Luis Rojo, both diocesan, and Jose Ramon Fidalgo, dominican, and the Cuban Reynerio Lebroc.” I remember some angry phrase in the margin, perhaps a bad word, but I no longer have the book handy.

I can say that I know how the reader-machine that was Lebroc worked. From him, I took a liking for making small analytical indexes at the end of each book. He had a system of signals – one or two curls next to the line, underlining the minimum, annotating in the margin – which I adopted, with few variations. He liked to correct and make fun of the author’s blunders. He marked each book with an Ex Libris: an R and an L, capped by a star. He had collected the thousands of volumes of his library from Madrid, Rome, Paris, Bruges, Berlin, San Juan de Puerto Rico, Bogota, Mexico, Miami and Caracas. He had the most portentous collection of chroniclers of the Indies that I have ever seen, including reproductions of documents photocopied by him in the Archive of the Indies in Seville.

To annoy Castro – but I don’t think he took notice – the Cuban bishops gave John Paul II in 1998 a copy of the biography Lebroc wrote about Antonio María Claret. The Pope greeted Castro with one hand and with the other he held the book by Lebroc, the chaplain of the Bay of Pigs!

The Pope greeted Castro with one hand and with the other he held the book by Lebroc, the chaplain of the Bay of Pigs

Lebroc’s library did not travel to Santa Clara by chance. The vicar of the diocese, Arnaldo Fernandez, was his best friend since school – Arnaldo was a lively mulatto with slanted eyes; Lebroc, a scatterbrained guajiro from Ciego de Avila – in Rome. They used to see each other at least twice a year in Venezuela and that’s how the books arrived on the island. I remember that the vicar would get rejuvenated when talking about Lebroc and I, who was not able to meet him although he died in 2018 in Caracas, would get closer through the conversation to my secret benefactor, the man whose library had saved me.

Lebroc lived in Madrid and Rome for some years. He became a Doctor of history and wrote biographies of the first Cuban bishops, published by Juan Manuel Salvat in Miami. He left several unpublished manuscripts, which I was also able to read. He started a new life in Caracas, where a good part of the Cuban exile – including Bishop Eduardo Boza Masvidal, his friend, who died in Los Teques in 2003 – had settled down. He was the parish priest of La California Norte for 40 years and founded the Centro De Estudios Cecilio Acosta. Almost all the young bishops of Venezuela were his pupils.

Lebroc was remembered by his friends wrapped in his gabardine coat, chatting with the bouquinistes [antique book sellers] of the Seine or rummaging through bookstores in Seville. The fact that he chose Caracas for exile means that there, as nowhere else, the Cubans found a kindred country (Carpentier wrote there, as it happens, Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps) and El siglo de las luces (The Century of Lights). I cannot imagine what the rise of Chavez and that grotesque creature Maduro meant to Lebroc. To see the adopted country torn apart by the same people who ruined his native country must be devastating. Lebroc, the pacharán marriage, so many friends, how did they survive that? We owe too much to the Venezuelans. We stake our freedom on their freedom.

*Translator’s note: This is a pun on words using the word “pacharán” (a sloe-flavoured liqueur commonly drunk in Navarre) and Buesa’s poem “Pasarás por mi vida sin saber que pasaste…” where both words sound similar. The translation in English would be something like ” You will pass through my life without knowing that you did…”

Translated by LAR

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Titivillus In culpa Est (It Was All Titivilo’s Fault!)

Most people who dedicate themselves to being an editor do it to earn a living and not as a vocation, but how could paranoia be a vocation anyway?

The devil with an ice cream cone, in Salamanca cathedral – an anachronistic figure added during the 1991 restauration / Xavier Carbonell

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 30 June 2024 – Burgos, the city where El Cid and Miguelón are buried, is two and a half hours by train from Salamanca. It’s a cold place. To enjoy it well you should eat some hot beans in one of the taverns on Calle San Lorenzo, but not before devouring at top speed a couple of cojonudas – bread, sausage, peppers and quail’s eggs. Then, all prepared and wearing a scarf, one should head for the Museum of Human Evolution, where there are human remains more than 400,000 years old. It can change your life seeing the sharpened stone axe which they’ve named ’Excalibur’, or the ’pelvis Elvis’ (bones), both thousands of years old.

Having completed this part of the journey, one follows the course of the river Arlanzón as far as Las Huelgas monastery. There have been nuns living there since the eleventh century. Very powerful nuns actually, who used to own a large part of the land surrounding the convent. The king had to travel to one of their chapels, where a strange automaton that represented the apostle Saint James brandished a sword and declared him a knight.

To earn some income the nuns opened up part of the monastery to visitors. The floor is solid oak, the tombs are white and in one room hangs an enormous Muslim banner – supposedly used by the Arabs in the battle of the Tolosa flatlands in 1212. And in one of the galleries, under very dim light, hangs the picture of … the character I’m looking for. continue reading

You have to imagine Titivilo as a cat which prowls around the scriptorium, wets his paws in ink and climbs up onto the desk where the monks are working

Black and furry paws, tight pants, hunched, shirtless, a bundle of books on his back, he doesn’t have wings but he does still have his horns. He’s a bignose, he smiles – or grimaces. This is Titivilo, the patron demon of editors, writers, librarians and others whose business is in paper. Next to him is a devil with miniature wings attached to his arms, which gives him the airs of a reveller. Both are trying to torment the nuns and the royal family, protected by the Virgin’s cloak. It’s one of the few times that Titivilo, invisible lowlife bastard, has let himself be caught.

You have to imagine Titivilo as a cat which prowls around the scriptorium, wets his paws in ink and climbs up onto the desk where the monks are working. Today, the same mischievous animal trips over ballpoint pens and two-tone pencils – crucifixes against errors – and passes his tail over the keyboard, introducing malware into the autocorrect of the computer. ’Titivillus in culpa est!’ pleaded the monk when his manuscript contained errors. And the excuse has passed from generation to generation, right down to today’s editors.

One will never have enough indulgence in that profession. An editor is payed – almost always badly – to develop textual paranoia to pathological limits. Victims of professional deformation, they look for ’erratas’ in the TV’s scrolling-news summary, in the adverts, in the words of politicians – those producers of verbal inanity – and they can’t bear to be around when a child is speaking.

The Academy defines ’errata’ as ’material equivocation in the final print or in the manuscript’. Nothing more than that. An ’errata’, for the obsessive editor, is a mental sin whose echo goes on multiplying in the walls of the brain. ’Errata’ is the title of George Steiner’s wonderful autobiography, and also the name of an odd Spanish publisher. There are ’erratas’ that are notorious milestones among the editors of our language [Spanish] – ’el coño fruncido’ (the furrowed pussy – ’coño’ instead of ’ceño’, ie ’brow’), ’the fire behind’, ’the multiplication of penises and fish’ – traumatic erratas, erratas of ETA, bitch erratas, of burials, of thieves.

How does one learn to edit? There isn’t a school for it, although someone did charge for teaching the craft in my university faculty

How does one learn to edit? There isn’t a school for it, although someone did charge for teaching the craft in my university faculty. The classes turned into a delicious war against time, because there was no way to fill up the term time exhausting variations on one single theme: make sure the other guy writes well, be your brother’s guardian or they’ll punish you. The other, second patron demon of editors, after Titivilo, is the author himself.

There are so few authors who deliver their manuscript with even the minimum of honesty, that, for the reader, there will always remain some suspicion about who is the real, true person responsible for the book. Herralde or Bolaño? Divinski or Quino? De Maura or Kundera? ’Paradiso’ is famous for its linguistic bloopers (it actually starts with “Paradiso 1″ instead of “Chapter 1”!) and, in his copy, Cortázar noted: “Why so many errors, Lezama?” Critical editions usually print photographs of the original manuscript, in which the reader comes to realise with horror that the majority of novelists know nothing about punctuation, ignore accents (on letters), confuse meanings and mess up the rhythm. Not to mention bad handwriting or the celebrated joke made by García Márquez, who said “ditch the proper-spelling thing”.

There have been many chasers-down of bloopers among Cubans – from José Zacarías Tallet to Fernando Carr Parúas. Books about language, such as
’The Dart in the Word’ by Fernando Lázaro Carreter, or the most recent ’Measure The Words’ by the lovely Pedro Álvarez de Miranda, were the best preventative exorcism against Titivilo. Among the current members of the Cuban Language Academy there are few who have the capacity to write text at the level of their predecessors. I’ve just looked at the list and was only impressed by Margarita Mateo.

My ideas for a personal catalogue are so chaotic that they will never find any finance, unless I provide it myself.

Editing is a thankless business. The majority of those who do it, do so only to earn money and don’t do it as a vocation. But how could paranoia be a vocation anyway? Another thing – and this really is a profession that is becoming more and more rare – is ’editor as cultural thinker’, such as one who selects catalogues, or is advisor to an author and a craftsperson of books, whose presentation, obviously, he will have to look after, without this being the core of his work. I’ve known very few editors who were like that – four or five? – and I don’t even dare to say how many of them were Cubans.

For my part, I’m not an editor, although I do edit almost every day. My ideas for a personal catalogue are so chaotic that they will never find any finance, unless I provide it myself. I detest looking for funding, I prefer to produce it myself.

I’ve come to experience true depression when someone else’s text is badly written. It hurts to read a book rotting away with errors, but it hurts more if I’m the one who has to correct them. Life is cruel, we live under the implacable fire of Titivilo and we don’t always have some of those cojonudas to lift our spirits. As enemies of the literary devil, we are also poor devils ourselves.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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The ‘Friends of the Cigar’ and the Cuban Regime Make Millions of Dollars With the Cigar Business

Five distributors, chosen by Fidel Castro himself, monopolize the world market. They organize auctions with the promise of sending the money to the dilapidated Public Health system of the Island.

In the center of the photo are Jemma Freeman, manager of Hunters & Frankau, and Luis Sánchez-Harguindey, co-president of Habanos S.A.

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 4 August 2024 — Escorted by two British red coats and surrounded by millionaires from all over the world, the managers of the Hunters & Frankau house had some news: last month during the cigar auction to promote the Trinidad Cabildos, whose organization had been invited by the Havana regime, 5,150,000 euros were collected in a single night. The president of the cigar company, Jemma Freeman, promised to send the money – most would be missing – to the dilapidated “Cuban Public Health system.”

Hunters & Frankau, the exclusive distributor of the Cuban monopoly Habanos S.A. in the United Kingdom, thus closed the first face-to-face edition of World Cigar Days. Similar – but much more luxurious – at the Cigar Festival of Cuba, the event was hosted by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Between Rafael’s Renaissance canvases and a humidor signed by Fidel Castro in 2002 – which was not for sale – the aficionados bid on limited editions and numbered boxes of Trinidad, a brand that turns 55 and is “loaded with symbolism” for being the favorite of the Cuban dictator.

It is enough to explore the official website of Habanos S.A. to verify that premium cigars continue to give great benefits to the regime. The news section attests to the luxurious network of Cuban cigars internationally and its distribution partners. From Russia to Beirut, from Madrid to Geneva, from Havana to Qatar, the “friends of the cigar” network has been consolidating its power with millionaire sales for decades. A Cuban tobacco planter would need a lot of mental effort to process that a single cigar made by his hands is auctioned for thousands of dollars in the great capitals of the world.

Luis Sánchez-Harguindey, co-president of Habanos S.A. and head of the Cuban cigar empire / Cigar Aficionado

Habanos S.A. would be nothing without Spain. The ethnologist Fernando Ortiz wrote that whoever rules in Cuba rules over the cigar. That phrase is illustrated like no one else by Luis Sánchez-Harguindey, co-president of the monopoly since 2012, although on his social networks he describes himself simply as a president and an expert in “international business management.”

Premium cigars continue to give great benefits to the regime

It is Sánchez-Harguindey who calls the shots for Habanos S.A. and who presents his results annually during the Cuban Cigar Festival. His counterpart in Spain is Fernando Domínguez, president of Tabacalera S.A., which distributes Cuban cigars to every tobacconist in Spain. Sánchez-Harguindey and Domínguez’s dream was to take the American market by storm, but Cuban cigars were banished. In 2015, in the midst of the thaw in diplomatic relations between Havana and Washington, both businessmen salivated over a commercial opportunity that never came.

Heinrich Villiger, director of 5th Avenue Products Trading, exclusive distributor of Habanos S.A. in Germany, Austria and Poland / Cigar Aficionado]

Habanos S.A. soon recovered from its disappointment and strengthened its sales in Europe. The key man of that expansion was Heinrich Villiger, director of 5th Avenue Products Trading, who is in charge of the distribution of Cuban cigars in Germany, Austria and Poland.

At the age of 94, Villiger, a member of one of the most prominent families in Switzerland – his brother Kaspar was president of the country – opened factories in Nicaragua and Brazil this year. He boasts of directing his “empire” – he employs 1,700 people – based on letters that come out of his typewriter. As a young man, Villiger traveled to the United States and then to Cuba, Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico to gain experience. When the Cuban cigar business collapsed in the United States after the Missile Crisis – before which, supposedly, President J.F. Kennedy bought all the cigars available – Villiger took the opportunity and approached Castro.

One of the least known sales niches of Habanos S.A. in Europe is Andorra. One company – Maori Tabacs – takes advantage of the tax exemptions offered by that country, advertises as a paradise for “luxury hunters.” José María Cases and his son Ricardo, who preside over Maori, know it well. Cases is famous for initiating the practice of wrapping cigars in cellophane so that, in the absence of tropical humidity, they survive the European climate.

Mohamed Zeidan, president of Phoenicia Trading and partner of Habanos S.A. for distribution in the Middle East, Africa and part of Europe / Beirut Duty Free

Using that “trick,” José L. Piedra began to import cigars and developed his business. In 1975 he opened an office in Cuba and, after the fall of the Soviet Union, he began to help Castro by sending him products that the country requested, not necessarily linked to the world of cigars. He befriended Villiger and Nicholas Freeman – father of the current manager of Hunters & Frankau – who were already close to the dictator.

Millionaire and decadent, Cases has a collection of 400 humidors and imports more than 200 cigar bands from the Island. In addition, he is a cigar cop: Maori Tabacs’ monopoly prevents counterfeit cigars from entering Andorra and France, where he is also in charge of the market.

On the American continent, Max Gutmann has been selling Cuban cigars in Mexico for almost 40 years

Castro met the Lebanese Mohamed Zeidan, president of Phoenicia Trading and partner of Habanos S.A., in the Middle East, Africa and part of Europe, in 1999 during a Havana Festival. Castro “became fond of him” after the auction of a signed humidor for which he gave $230,000. Zeidan, whom he nicknamed “the Phoenician,” re-auctioned the humidor on the spot to win over the dictator even more: the money was used to pay the lawyers who represented Havana in the dispute over the custody of Elián González.

On the American continent, Max Gutmann, president of Importer and Exporter of Cigars and Tobacco, has been selling Cuban cigars in Mexico for almost 40 years. Of Austrian origin, Gutmann bought the first humidor signed by Castro and opened the first Casa del Habano in Cancún in 1990.

When a group of businessmen with no connection to Cuba opened a store of the same name in Paris, Gutmann received a call from the president of Cubatabaco – the name of the Cuban state monopoly at the time. They asked him to give the Cuban regime the “Casa del Habano” brand completely free of charge. In return, they would give him the exclusive rights to distribute cigars in Mexico.

Max Gutmann, in the center, with two of his partners at the Casa del Habano de México / Cigar Aficionado

Gutmann accepted. Castro admitted him into his circle, and he managed to be one of the 200 guests at the first cigar gala dinner – there were still no festivals – in 1995. He returned to his country with a humidor signed by the caudillo and the writer Gabriel García Márquez for which he paid $5,000. Gutmann believes that his company also captures the U.S. market, which cannot negotiate with Habanos S.A. That Americans and Canadians travel to Mexico to buy Cuban cigars, he says, was the idea of Castro, who allied with Gutmann “knowing that they would surely end up there,” he said in an interview.

Domínguez, Villiger, Freeman, Cases and Gutmann, considered the pentarchy of the Cuban cigar worldwide, were summoned by Fidel Castro during the Special Period to stir up their clientele before the first Cigar Festival.

Called to the international cigar event par excellence, the millionaires who meet in Havana once a year – and also personalities such as Jeremy Irons, Paris Hilton and Tom Jones – also travel to the “twin” events that the five houses hold around the world, and which have been joined by other potential tycoons from Russia, the United Arab Emirates and – the client of the future – China.

Each dinner is more exclusive than the last, and more and more expensive and extravagant cigars are being sold. As an afterthought that, for any Cuban, is more than ironic, the millions collected are promised to Cuban Health. Without the slightest modesty, Habanos S.A. publishes the photos of each event.

At the end of the night, the “friends of the Cuban cigar” are photographed with the humble Cuban farmers, and they give a toast – cigar in hand and dressed in a tuxedo – for the dictator who made their businesses prosper.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Intimacy With the Devils

Knowing how the hierarchs of the regime live, what they eat, who they sleep with, the watches they wear, what jokes they tell, produces a poisonous effect: that is the true merit of Norberto Fuentes

A group of ’sweet Cuban warrior’ with Tony de la Guardia on the far left and Arnaldo Ochoa in the center/ CC

Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, July 28, 2024 — Arnaldo Ochoa was shot 35 years ago. Will anyone have remembered him on July 13, or Tony de la Guardia, or the others who shared lead, sweat and fear with him? I would also not have noticed the date if I hadn’t finally found, after two and a half years of searching, a copy of Dulces guerreros cubanos [Sweet Cuban Warriors]. I could never get the book in Cuba, with the photo of the executioner on the cover shooting his AK-47, a man making his way through history by fire and death. The exterminating angel.

Roberto Bolaño didn’t like that book. Bolaño, who probably only read the first pages – the condemnation of the reviewer out of necessity – dedicates to him the hardest words that have been said about Norberto Fuentes: “It is as if Raúl Castro today went into exile in Miami and wrote a book lamenting the injustices committed by his brother in forty years of dictatorship.” To Fuentes, the survivor par excellence of Cuban literature, there is no way to approach him without having an opinion. Few have read his work, but all of us – including me – read it with rage against Fuentes; we read to refute or get pissed off with Fuentes.

“It’s as if Raúl Castro went into exile in Miami today and wrote a book lamenting the injustices committed by his brother”

Bolaño fell into that trap. He criticized the ‘syncopated style’ of the book, its chronic imitation of Hemingway, the revolutionary double standard – two Rolexes, two houses, two women, two pistols, two passports – and the fate of someone whom the writer does not consider, a soul in pain. Going, not without disgust, through the 459 pages of that book does not transform the reader. There is no apology or excuse anywhere – that also displeased the Chilean – and the author doesn’t like it any better. Nor the man. continue reading

However, Fuentes delivers an outsider’s guide to the Cuban Revolution that is at the level of – and perhaps surpasses, because it is written by an old agent – other horror chronicles, such as the Mapa dibujado por un espía (Map Drawn by a Spy) by Cabrera Infante or the now worn out Antes que anochezca (Before Night Falls) by Reinaldo Arenas. As a writer, one regrets that Fuentes — obsessed with the center of power, with killing his Personal Jesus, ‘Fifo’ [a nickname for Fidel] — and enthroning the heroes, does not explore the margin any more. From that hive of minor agents, informers without salary, lovers with ration books, crazy scientists and useful idiots one wants to know more, because they still exist.

Ochoa’s phrase about the type of business that others do – ‘little boys’ things,’ little money – directs the focus to the right place, but Fuentes resists. He wants epic. He wants, with good reason, literature. ’There was death and regret for this book,” he cries.

It is a book about the toxin, the non-enjoyment, the dialogues that would annoy anyone. A new language for a new generation

Witnessing the intimacy of those bastards, knowing how they live, what they eat, who they sleep with, what kind of watches they wear and what they do to relax described to paroxysm produces a poisoning so effective that it is the true merit of Fuentes. A book about the toxin, the non-enjoyment, the dialogues that would annoy anyone. A new language for a new generation: “Viking. Buffaloes. Prophets. Ranger. Crossbow. Everest. Moccasin. Stuka.” Two images summarize that environment: Raúl Castro’s aluminum flask, which he continues to use to get drunk, and the breakfast scene of Fidel and Dalia Soto del Valle, the teaspoon of honey, the buffalo milk, the dictator’s slippers.

Ochoa, the mulatto philosopher, the Greek – although Raúl insists on calling him the Negro – plays with the essential powers, “the Party and the Mafia”; that is, the proverbial monkey* without his harmless chain. Ochoa is the man who laughs, the joker, who clashes with the Jesuit severity of the Castros. “The officer of the Armed Forces to whom I have drawn attention most times, whether sitting in front of him at a desk, at a family meal, in a corridor, is named Arnaldo Ochoa Sánchez,” Raúl lectures in the famous recording. “And the first thing I started to criticize is that he is always talking, he is always joking, you never know when he is serious.”

The “tormented brain,” the “absent dream,” the installation in reality – “I went to brush my teeth in the bathroom behind my office”; the pathos – “I saw tears running down my cheeks”; the epic sprinkled with kitsch, rosy death: those are the qualities of the true revolutionary. “As you can assume, I was first outraged with myself. I immediately recovered and understood in the act that I was crying for Ochoa’s children,” he exclaims.

Bolaño failed to understand Dulces guerreros cubanos (Sweet Cuban Warriors) as the great epitaph of Tony de la Guardia, the Cuban Achilles

But Ochoa is the least in that book. Bolaño failed to understand ’Sweet Cuban Warriors’ as the great epitaph of Tony de la Guardia, the Cuban Achilles and, like Achilles, reserved for death. It is possible that Fuentes’ portrait is exaggerated, as all memories are exaggerated, but there is no doubt that it is moving. The lack of understanding of the panorama, the lack of warning in the face of disaster – they were the great strategists of the Army! – the assurance that death awaited them and was going to take them away, that those people were lost. The family portrait is so touching that one almost forgets that they were elite murderers.

A few years ago, when Patricio de la Guardia – Tony’s twin – left the dungeon where he had been locked up since 1989, Fuentes celebrated him. Patricio was already an old man, as weak as Raúl Castro or Ramiro Valdés, although he was born in 1939 and had the mantra of his clan tattooed on his forearm: Never say die (“Nunca digas morir”). With those three words, worn out on his transparent skin; with Raúl’s aluminum flask; with hundreds of dirty uniforms, broken pistols, frayed epaulettes, whose memory is not sweet; with all that dust and that shit, one hopes that the Cuban Revolution will finally end.

*Translator’s note: From a common expression in Cuba – referencing ordinary people’s relationship to power – “You can play with the chain but not the monkey.”

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Juan Gualberto Gómez’s Legacy Is ‘Democratic and Subversive’ for Cuba, Says His Great-Granddaughter

Facade of the Juan Gualberto Gómez House Museum, at number 359 of Empedrado Street, in Havana / 14ymedio

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 12 July 2024 — A large part of Juan Gualberto Gómez’s library was kept in the house that the patriot and his wife had built in Santos Suárez. When the family decided to leave Cuba, after Fidel Castro’s coming to power, they didn’t have time to take everything out. Angelina Edreira, his daughter, who was relocated, still lived there. The Government sealed the house and handed it over, shortly thereafter, to a large family, who threw what was left of the archive into the street. A friend informed Clara Caballero Caraballo, Juan Gualberto’s great-granddaughter, that the family’s books – including his own – were scattered on the sidewalk. She went to look for them. She managed to get a photo of her great-grandfather and a book dedicated to Emilio Roig, whose title, in the light of present circumstances, was still ironic: For a Free Cuba.

This Friday marks the 170th anniversary of the birth of Juan Gualberto, and his great-granddaughter has organized a tribute in Madrid, where she has been living in exile for decades. Architect and researcher about the Cuban “sacarocracia”*, Caballero talks with 14ymedio about the oblivion and recovery of the memory of the hero, whose thought has been relegated to the dustbin by the Revolution because it continues to be – she maintains – “democratic and dangerous.”

Mortuary mask by Juan Gualberto Gómez, in a reproduction of the original of 1933 / 14ymedio

Born in 1854, Juan Gualberto Gómez appears in Cuban history books as “Martí’s friend,” always in the background, and his work is very rarely studied. Caballero says that her great-grandfather “died poor and did not have a square meter of land to be buried in so a tomb was built for him.” During the ceremonies for Martí’s centenary in 1953, her grandmother Angelina approached the governor of Havana and told him: “The Republic is celebrating, and the remains of Juan Gualberto Gómez are welcomed by a religious archconfraternity.”

The following year – when Caballero had just been born – the patriot could count on a worthy tomb, paid with a government credit. “It was a racist society and his name did not appear in any history book,” Caballero says, to illustrate how relegated his memory was. Caballero’s aunt, Nancy Loyola Edreira, had to fight a lot for Havana Historian Eusebio Leal to include the house on 359 Empedrado Street – where Juan Gualberto lived and worked – in Havana’s restoration plan. Today it is a museum.

“In the family it was conveyed that Juan Gualberto was very loving and sincere. My father’s generation and my aunts opted for pedagogy – in particular history and geography – and French culture. My grandmother studied at the French Alliance in Havana and traveled a lot to Europe before the Revolution. And, of course, she knew how to dance chotis**,” jokes Caballero. continue reading

Objects belonging to Manuela Benítez, wife of Juan Gualberto Gómez / 14ymedio

Angelina left Cuba in 1968. Other members of the family went into exile in New York or Chicago, whose university has a study center named after Angelina Pedroso, granddaughter of Juan Gualberto and a benefactor of Hispanic students. Everyone also venerated José Martí. During the Republic, the family bought a house in Zaragoza – where the Cuban national hero studied – to which they went on vacation. “At the end of the meals when there were visitors, there was always talk of history in the house, around a table with documents, books and papers,” Caballero recalls.

Juan Gualberto also lived for some time as an exile in Europe. Caballero comments that the official files of the time allude to her great-grandfather’s tendency to “filibuster” and admit that he was under close surveillance by Spanish intelligence. “I have more information about his life in Madrid, Ceuta and Paris, which his initial biographers did not have, and street or school names that should be corrected, but without a revisionist spirit. I have found addresses where he lived, and there is a building in very good condition that remains standing,” she explains.

For Caballero, the legacy of Juan Gualberto Gómez is summed up in finding the balance among the old values of freedom, equality and fraternity. Achieving it in the future Cuba will not be easy, because “generations of Cubans have been humiliated in a thousand and one ways, in which fear has been transmitted above all.”

“Juan Gualberto was a convinced democrat. Since his Parisian youth he had fought with his pen during colonial domination, and in the time of the Republic he would not enter the ranks of any reactionary party, so he resigned, abandoned, founded and merged parties. And for each party he founded a newspaper expressing its ideology. He never looked back, but forward. That is his legacy, it is an example for politicians and journalists of all time,” she says.

His writings and his biography insist on the need for tolerance. In Spain, Caballero explains, he interacted with people diametrically opposed to separatism but who greatly respected him. “He promoted, like Martí, love among Cubans from the Island, peninsular Spaniards and emigrants. He managed to legalize peaceful separatist propaganda after his writing “Why we are Separatists,” for which he was sentenced to two years, eleven months and eleven days in prison,” she adds.

Commemorative plaque of Juan Gualberto Gómez on the facade of Empedrado 359 / 14ymedio

“In Cuba, unfortunately, there have now been decades of betrayal and harassment of those who think differently. Even within the family, as reflected in Eliseo Alberto’s book, ’Report against Myself.’ That doesn’t agree with Juan Gualberto’s thought.” This Friday, Caballero will try – in her words – to “show an image of him to an audience in Madrid.” Doing it in the Athenaeum, a “very symbolic” place for what it represented for Juan Gualberto, is a profession of faith in free thought.

“To compose the table I have summoned people who are familiar with the socio-political transformations that Juan Gualberto suffered in colonial and Republican Cuba. They have valuable and different visions,” she says, alluding to her guests: the editor and poet Pío E. Serrano, and historians Luis Miguel García Mora and Christina Civantos.

“There will also be talk of the problems between the autonomists and the liberals of colonial Cuba. In addition to the research on his life in Ceuta, which I love because it argues Juan Gualberto’s position regarding the reality of white and black Cubans, it defends the construction of a national identity and also covers the Abakuá or ñañiguismo religion, which is not usually dealt with when talking about political patriotic issues. I will also display old photos and books that I forgot to put in the program.”

Her objective is to “open other perspectives on Juan Gualberto,” for which she is in a privileged position, since “there are no other descendants interested in the subject.” However, she acknowledges that she sees in other members of his family – such as his daughter, Ángel, and his aunt Angelina – not only the traits of her great-grandfather but also his “political, moral and ethical honesty.”

Another significant point is to pay tribute to Juan Gualberto Gómez in Madrid, a city where hundreds of Cuban exiles now reside. Organizing the tribute has also been for Caballero an exercise of reflection on family and personal history. She arrived in Spain in the 70s with her parents; she made a career as an architect, and now she wants to “honor her ancestors.” The Island, so close in sentimentality, is still far away geographically. “I have learned to live without the sea,” she says.

* The business of sugar production, controlled by a few families during the time of Spanish rule.
** Traditional dance of Madrid.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Two Books Point Out That the ’11J’ Protests Put an End to the Idyllic Vision of the Cuban Revolution Abroad

For the Regime, “nothing happened” that day, not even in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, said Francis Matéo, sarcastically

People protesting on July 11, 2021 in Havana / 14ymedio

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 10 July 2024 — Three years after the massive protests of 11 July 2021 (’11J’), many Cuban readers wait to read two books: a historical study that defines the caliber and meaning of the demonstrations and an anthology of the chronicles, reports and photographs that – regardless of ideological position – were published during those days. Now, on the eve of its third anniversary, bookstores have received valuable personal testimonies and many studies about the event that changed the citizen landscape of the Island.

One is the Spanish edition of Cuba… Homeland and Life! (Ecúmene Ediciones), by the French reporter Francis Matéo, whom 14ymedio interviewed about his “chronicle of a revolt.” A year after that conversation, Mateó explains to this newspaper the need to “not forget what happened” on 11J.

“It has been weeks, months and years (we should add: days and hours) of suffering and agony for the victims of the repression that followed these demonstrations. Thousands of families were mistreated, violated and destroyed by the harassment inflicted on their loved ones. Innocent victims were imprisoned or condemned to exile, if not to the despair that continues to worsen on the Island,” he says.

“Innocent victims were imprisoned or condemned to exile, if not to the despair that continues to worsen on the Island”

The situation, he says, “has only become worse.” Many of those who were arrested in those days “continue to languish in prison” and “almost 600,000 Cubans have emigrated since the summer of 2021.” continue reading

In his book, the journalist undertakes a study of the root causes of the crisis that led to the eruption, including the erosion of the methods of control of the Cuban regime, the indebtedness of the leadership and the collapse of the economy.

According to the press release that accompanies the launch, the book recounts a series of events for which citizens “paid dearly. For the first time in more than sixty years, the Castro dictatorship is openly condemned in the streets of the entire Island, and the fear imposed by the repression of any form of protest yields to the courage of the peaceful but determined demonstrators,” he summarizes.

Matéo traveled to Cuba after the coronavirus pandemic and collected the testimonies of dozens of demonstrators, including several from the Havana neighborhood of La Güinera, one of the main focuses of the protest and where Diubis Laurencio Tejeda was shot dead at the hands of the police. He also came into contact with journalist Iliana Hernández, who at that time lived in the capital under strict police surveillance.

Matéo’s book represents a critical trend within European journalism that, according to the author himself, seeks to counteract the idyllic vision that many have of the Island. Annihilating the “romanticism about the Revolution” is the declared objective of Cuba… Homeland and Life!, which takes its title from the song that became the soundtrack of the protests.

Matéo traveled to Cuba after the coronavirus pandemic and collected the testimonies of dozens of demonstrators, including several from the Havana neighborhood of La Güinera

In 2022, a few months before his death, the Uruguayan journalist Carlos Liscano wrote about the idealization of the Island, which crumbled for many foreigners on 11J, and the silence over Cuba’s reality. In his book, Cuba: Better Not to Talk About It (Fin de Siglo), he settled accounts with a Revolution to which he himself dedicated much enthusiasm; he was a Tupamaro guerrilla in his country and a political prisoner, in addition to covering the invasion of Playa Girón [Bay of Pigs]. He defined the complicity of Latin American intellectuals about the Island in one sentence: “We didn’t know because we didn’t want to know.”

The demonstrations of 11J broke the silence for many “ideological tourists,” a term with which Liscano defines those who travel to a Havana that is decorative and prepared by the regime, diametrically opposed to the real life of the Cubans who protested. Cutting the internet, arresting journalists, beating citizens and imprisoning thousands of people are among the methods that made the difference – according to the Uruguayan – between silence and denunciation.

An attempt at an academic approach to 11J was made by Alexander Hall, compiler of Cuba 11J: Counter-hegemonic perspectives of the protests (Marx21.net). The volume brings together a group of voices, mostly left-wing or with some degree of commitment to officialdom, who in recent years have radicalized their positions on the Regime. This is the case of the historian Alina Bárbara López or the economist Miguel Alejandro Hayes. The volume also includes essays by intellectuals of such disparate approaches as Julio César Guanche, Mauricio de Miranda, Zuleica Romay, José Antonio Fernández Estrada, Dmitri Prieto and Leonardo Romero Negrín.

The book, which aimed to point out the birth – or at least the awakening – of a “critical left” on the Island, lamented the country’s poverty but subscribed to some of the causes that the regime attributes to it, such as the US blockade.* It was right, however, to define the economic triggers of the protest – the package of measures imposed in January 2021, accelerated inflation and the financial defenselessness of citizens in the face of the pandemic – and to diagnose the moral bankruptcy of the Regime.

The value of the book lies in the fact that it collects documents issued by the Regime during those days, which attest to the calls for repression by Miguel Díaz-Canel

The Cuban government itself promoted the drafting of an official history of the protests – Cuba 11J. Protests, responses, challenges (Elag) – in which it totally blamed Washington for the outcry and washed its hands of the debacle by pointing to the person responsible: Donald Trump. The value of the book lies in the fact that it collects the documents issued by the Regime during those days, which attest to the calls for repression by Miguel Díaz-Canel.

In addition, there are the speeches given by the president, “with Raúl Castro by his side,” in the so-called acts of revolutionary reaffirmation after the protest; the messages of several writers and artists in defense of the regime; an interview with Silvio Rodríguez in which he criticizes the demonstrators; and the opinions of citizens close to the leadership.

For July 11, the Government had a slogan from the beginning: “Nothing happened.” Nothing happened in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, says Francis Matéo, sarcastically. “It is true that nothing seems to have changed in Havana, apart from this palpable and increasing sense of despair,” he admits. The reality, however, is different: there is growing “anger and resentment” towards the Government of Díaz-Canel, Patria y Vida has become an alternative national anthem and the country is ready – with the spirit that began on 11J – to achieve its liberation.

*Translator’s note: There is, in fact, no US ‘blockade’ on Cuba, but this continues to be the term the Cuban government prefers to apply to the ongoing US embargo. During the Cuban Missile Crisis the US ordered a Naval blockade (which it called a ‘quarantine’) on Cuba in 1962, between 22 October and 20 November of that year. The blockade was lifted when Russia agreed to remove its nuclear missiles from the Island. The embargo had been imposed earlier in February of the same year, and although modified from time to time, it is still in force.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Gibberish

The history of a family, or even a country, can be told through a few photographs

A blurry photo of the then eight-year-old author holding a Zenit camera / Photo courtesy of the author

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 2 June 2024 — I open the package with the photos and papers that I brought from my country and start organizing them on the coffee table. From the bottom I take out the map of Cuba that Alexander von Humboldt created in 1827 though the brittle sheet of paper on which it is printed dates from 1930.

On top, a photo of a vigilant me when I was eight or nine years old, snapping a photo with a Zenit camera, whose click I can hear across time without effort. I am in my grandmother’s house. I am wearing a jacket that I really liked and a sweater. Except for the bamboo wallhanging behind me, everything is out of focus. I begin to lay out the other cards, like a game of solitaire.

A photo of my grandfather M., sometime in his thirties. Dressed in a jacket and tie. I have his eyebrows and his jaw. His face is a little asymmetrical, like mine. The photo paper has been nibbled by a termite. In the subsequent image he is next to two women, smiling. One is my grandmother C., whose smile is more of a grimace. Judging by the planks and the floor, they are in my old house, which to them, as newlyweds, is very new.

There are other people in the background: a laughing child who is too tall. There is a hand on his head that doesn’t seem to belong to anyone. Some fingers, also without an owner, hold a cigar. Here my grandfather is dressed in a jacket that I tried on once and that is now stored in a remote wardrobe, trying not to become trash. I think everyone is happy, or pretending very continue reading

convincingly to be happy. On the back, a cross and the number three.

My great-grandfather J. is holding my father in his arms. Black and white. They are in the same hallway as the previous photo, almost at the entrance to the parlor, as though that void in the building were the ideal place to take photographs. The old man has strong features that I will inherit. A belt and a white shirt. He is smiling, however. He has glasses. On the back side, the number 68.

A time when Cuba was laughing. The fat cows before they were plunged into “indigence,” a word that hits me like a blow to the head

The entryway of the house. In the background my grandfather M. is holding, I believe, his American bicycle. My grandmother C., with the bitter face of her later years that I can barely remember. Her tied-up face, as they often described it, leans on a railing. An iron screen, blue plastic blinds, the door that was separated from the threshold by a hook. On the back, the number four and a date: August 28, 1987. A time when Cuba was laughing. The fat cows before they were plunged into “indigence.” The word hits me like a blow to the head right before the thieves take everything.

The maternal line begins. My great-great-grandfather, whose name I do not know. Wrinkled, patriarchal, in a white shirt. He looks towards the margins of the photo like he is exhausted. Or maybe I am misinterpreting his posture and he is just playing dominoes. The image is printed on thin paper. On the front side someone has written in pencil, “For M,” his daughter, my great-grandmother. I have no other photos of the old man, no other evidence of his time on earth, and the handwritten inscription moves me.

A note written on 3 June 1944 reads, “Marry and you will know what flowers are!” It is a wedding greeting to my great-grandmother written by her brother, JF. Three days later, thousands of Allied soldiers crossed the English Channel and landed in Normandy. I wonder if Rommel or Montgomery or Churchill were ever topics of conversation at the family dinner table. Or if any of my relatives considered – as many Cubans did – going to Europe to fight against Hitler, as they now do for Putin.

Three days later, thousands of Allied soldiers crossed the English Channel and landed in Normandy

My grandfather P. laughs uncontrollably. He has lifted his foot onto a table and is wearing glasses. He assumes a rock-and-roll pose. The room where he is sitting is not just humble. It is dilapidated. Though the household is poor, he wears a shirt, a sweater, a watch and light socks.

In the next photo there is a drastic change. He was forced into military service, I estimate, around 1965. I know that they took him to Pinar del Río where he befriended Silvio Rodríguez. He is standing in front of the Capitolio in Havana. He looks at the camera, a picture of seriousness, with his hand on his waist and his back rigid.

Now he is shaving a man. My grandfather P. shares his name and profession with his father. Stools and sinks. A curious observer watches, or rather inspects, his work. Maybe the man is his next customer. I do not know why but there is a certain tenderness to this photo. It is taken from a corner, as though the photographer did not want to be seen. Was my great-grandfather the man holding the camera?

My grandfather P. and my grandmother I., recently married. Her dress is clearly homemade. His pants are shabby. The photo is taken in my town. The number 830 is on the back. They appear again in another photo, this one taken in Havana. The same shirt, the same dress, their eyes squinting in the sun. It is the late 1960s and the city already looks rundown. Balconies and rags, a battered car. I dare not call my grandmother to ask her the date.

A big Christmas tree and, beside it, my grandfather. This would be 1951 or 1952. Though there is an atmosphere of festivity and abundance, the house is modest. A haphazardly hung light bulb gives it away. The child’s gaze has a wonderful glow. His face, very similar to my cousin’s.

Forty years later, the expression is still the same but not the face. The hair coming out of the ears, the poorly cut suit, are those of a drunk. There was neither shame nor pride in it back then, when people first realized the magnitude of what was lost. On the back of the photo there is an amber stain that matches the silhouette of my grandfather. It is his double, his ghost.

There was neither shame nor pride in it back then, when people first realized the magnitude of what was lost

I have many other photos that have nothing to do with my family, at least not directly, but I carry them with me. It is what I like to call the Alavarez’ saga/escape. I have no idea what connection the Alvarezes had to my family. The father, in a military uniform, with a pencil-tip mustache, boots and a riding crop, was the chief of police in my town.

A baseball team sponsored by José L. Piedra cigars, one of which I smoked on the terrace of Ernest Hemingway’s house in Havana. The park as it looked in 1925, in the direction of my old house, with just a few bushes that are now trees several decades old. The Royal Bank of Canada, awnings, a rural guardsman. The parish, a boulevard.

A very elegant photo of Joaquín Álvarez, the last in the saga, in a suit. I see him boarding a plane, doing acrobatics while riding a horse and saying goodbye from a train – hands behind his back and well-groomed. On the back, a dedication: “To my unforgettable Mariita, a token of love and affection from her J. August 1924.” I have often imagined that unknown girl. A hundred years have passed. I do not know why she never received this photo, which now belongs to me.

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Cuba: The Decade of the Creative Stampede

When Castro died, Havana began forming into a giant anthill that, when it wants to be, is my country / EFE

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 22 May 2024 — Ten years ago, I thought I would always live in Cuba. I knew where the graves of my relatives were. I knew how to speak Cuban, not the standard dialect, not Canarian, nor Iberian, which is what I speak now. I knew that my country was mediocre but Fidel Castro had one shave left — or perhaps several— judging from his beard. Maybe that would change everything. I had begun to study philology and worked in a library in Santa Clara. I had a cat and a lot of books. I had that life.

In effect, Castro died in 2016. (Judging from photos, only a few white hairs remained of his beard.) In Havana a giant anthill began to form that, when it wants to be, is my country. A battalion of insects and larvae and mosquitoes, all grieving, all with tears in their eyes, all there to see the corpse pass by. I knew that his death would disgrace the country, not because Castro had died – that was an epic relief – but because from then on the memory of the dead man would return, not from the future – he was known for being able to leap through time — but from the past, from newspapers and books, from the mouths of the nostalgic and apocalyptic. Fidel the Prophet, the Sacred Heart of Fidel, Fidel the Terminator.

The anthill would arrive in Santa Clara at dawn – nocturnal mourners, a pitiful spectacle – at the university where everyone had to be present. It was going to be unbearably historic, the newspapers warned. When I left the Central University, I made a point of being seen. “Where are you going?” a department head asked me. “I’m going home,” I responded, not knowing that years later the Cuban hip-hop artist Cimafunk would become famous for exhausting variations of that phrase until it became the motto of my generation.

I went home. A difficult task because it involved swimming against the tide of buses, cars and other elements that made up Castro’s funeral procession. From there, I kept going to closed spaces. My spaces, not theirs. Spaces that were becoming abstract. Ideas, novels, books. I went to Ecuador, I went to continue reading

India. Remote places. Countries to which I would not have traveled had they not gotten in my way. And even though everything seemed to indicate that I would not go back, I always went home.

In an essay about the Cuban novelist Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño said that Havana – and by extension all of Cuba – lived in a perpetual coma. He later corrected himself, describing the city as “anemic and feverish.” We can forgive Bolaños this mistake because he made the diagnosis at the start of the millennium. By 2016, the patient was no longer responsive.

Perhaps the most radical difference between the “New Man” — the children of the revolution — and us is that we decided to wake up from the coma. We were reading, and I mean reading a lot, of independent media. When I came back from India in the midst of the pandemic, I did so under false pretenses. I had a clear escape plan. I came back with contacts and resources. I came back restive and aloof, like a cat. A couple of friends had already left. When protests erupted on 11 July 2021, the rest got out. The jailbreak was intense and I was happy to be part of it.

I do not think I have ever felt the sense of guilt that seems to overwhelm some exiles. The latest wave of Cuban emigration is full of courageous mothers, cool Marxists, impromptu Afro-Cuban writers and activists of all stripes. Also journalists of very diverse abilities. I have seen old Castro loyalists waving flags in Madrid, trying to persuade Spain’s prime minister not to resign, which gives me a bad feeling. Before he emigrated, I also saw a well-known poet leave a small blossom at the tomb of Fidel Castro. I have been alive for three decades and, at this point in the game, I do not think anything can surprise me when it comes to Cuba.

After ten years, the idea of homeland has eroded. We never wanted it to be this way but Cuba has become so depraved that many of us will find it difficult to return, if we ever do return, to the place where our life began. That life, which now seems like an April Fool’s joke, came to an end. Late in his life, Kant warned against succumbing to “the panic of darkness.” We have decided to live, not just survive.

For me – for all of us who left — reading this publication is a way of restoring ties with the country of our birth. “Updating oneself” by reading a news article is a nostalgic somersault. We still get to watch, experiencing it through those who lend us eyes and ears to see what we are missing. And so by not being completely disconnected — always with a mother or a friend or an orphaned cat on the other side — we continue to feel Cuban. Nonetheless. . . And yet. . . With the help of this full-color reality, we can see the future and the decisions we will face more clearly.

The first ethical dilemma an exile has to face is whether or not to return to to the source of his pain, to the point of departure

The first ethical dilemma an exile has to face is whether or not to return to the source of his pain, to the point of departure. What is there to build? What is left among the ruins? What will those Cubans who stayed behind be like? Can a post-Castro Cuba and Cuban identity coexist. What about the Cuban mercenaries who fight alongside Putin’s forces in Ukraine and those fleeing Cuba via Nicaragua? Will it ever be possible to write freely in Cuba? The answer depends on the individual. Nobody asked us to stay and no one has the right to tell us when to return.

Escaping from the anomaly of time and space that is Cuba, moving to a quiet city in Spain, opining on what was lost, reading and writing for “14ymedio” is what one has to do now. It does not resemble the life we left behind, or what we anticipated ten years ago, but maybe it is better. True to my old profession and to the books I left behind, I carry two snippets from Greek philosophers in my pocket. One by Iamblichus is for the present and wards off melancholy: “When you leave your homeland, do not turn back because the Furies are following you.” The other by Democritus, for when I am feeling relaxed, helps me not to get my hopes up about going back: “I came to Athens and no one recognized me.”

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Young Cuban Captured in Ukraine: ‘I Haven’t Killed Anyone, I Never Touched a Weapon, I Am Not a Mercenary’

14ymedio interviews a Cuban captured by Ukraine on the war front

The Cuban prisoner interviewed by this newspaper believes that he was detained in Donetsk, a city in eastern Ukraine occupied by Russia / EFE

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 6 April 2024 — When Ukrainian troops captured Frank Darío Jarrosay Manfugás, a 35-year-old musician from Guantánamo, he had neither helmet nor weapons. It was night. He had left a bunker with a Russian soldier with the mission of moving a battery to another base. Trying to track down the Russian, who had abandoned him, the enemy surprised him.

Now he is imprisoned somewhere in Ukraine, but at least, he acknowledges, he is alive. Three months – from his trip to Russia last January to his capture in March – were enough to disrupt his life, which he tells 14ymedio in great detail. It is the first time that a prisoner of war from the Island speaks with a Cuban or Latin American media, an exclusive conversation that the Ukrainian authorities provided to this newspaper.

Jarrosay and his companions now await the outcome of the conflict, about which they avoid commenting. According to the Ukrainian Army, neither Havana nor Moscow “want to take them” or answer for them. “In my mind there is no guilt. I haven’t killed anyone. I never touched a gun. I am not a mercenary even if they consider me one,” Jarrosay states bluntly.

In Guantanamo, Jarrosay graduated as a Geography and Mathematics teacher, a profession he abandoned to dedicate himself to music. In Cuba he left his parents, his grandmother and a brother. It had cost him work and a lot of money to buy the cell phone on which, one day, he saw a publication that promised him a work trip to Russia. “For a Cuban, going to another country to work is more than an achievement. My goal was to help my family move forward,” he alleges. continue reading

According to the Ukrainian Army, neither Havana nor Moscow “want to take them” or answer for them

Jarrosay says he does not remember the name of the Facebook profile where he saw the ad, to which he responded by stating that he had “experience in carpentry and masonry.” He also cannot say whether a Cuban or foreign person wrote to him. “I gave them my phone number and they sent me a message on WhatsApp. There was a form and a request to send copies of my license and passport. The blanks: name, sex, age, illnesses and abilities. The document was in Spanish and promised a salary: more than 200,000 rubles per month – just over $2,000 – to be transferred to a bank account in Russia.

“Shortly afterwards they told me where I had to leave from: the Varadero airport.” He didn’t hesitate. He sold his phone to pay for the trip from Guantánamo to Matanzas by car. “There were five Cubans on the plane. “We didn’t confide in each other.” When he arrived in Moscow, he was met by a person who spoke Spanish and who had a copy of his passport.

He was immediately transferred to a military base in Rostov, one of the Russian cities on the war front against Ukraine – where the Wagner Group was briefly based during its uprising against the Kremlin in June 2023. Jarrosay describes the place as “a warehouse.” There were other Cubans there, although he refuses to say the estimated number. All of them, he insists, came from the Island and had arrived recently “deceived.”

Frank Darío Jarrosay Manfugás, during the interview given to this newspaper / 14ymedio

“They showed up with a contract in Russian,” he says, “nobody explained it to us. We signed a paper that we didn’t even know what it was about. “We were thinking about the work form that we had filled out in Cuba.” From Rostov he was transferred to a military base in a location he identifies as Donetsk, a city in eastern Ukraine occupied by Russia since 2014: another of the strategic points of the war. “There I met four other Cubans,” he says. “They were very scared. They didn’t know what they were coming for. They filled me in on things and told me what we were really in Russia for.”

He did not recognize soldiers of other nationalities, only Russians and those from the Island. The ages of his compatriots – who were “separated in a cubicle” – he estimated to be between 29 and 50 years old. The Russians communicated with them in a cumbersome way: with a translator on a cell phone. There were no interpreters.

They did not receive training in Rostov or Donetsk, although the Russian Army offered them uniforms and weapons, Jarrosay says. Like any Cuban, he had had to undergo mandatory military service in a unit of the Island’s Armed Forces. “I did not have military training because I was in the Youth Labor Army (EJT). “What we did was plant and harvest.” He did not even, he alleges, pass the preparation known as ’prior’.

In their attempt to get the Cubans to accept their weapons, the Russian officers limited their food

“The Cubans who were at the military base when I arrived were on strike. They didn’t agree with what was happening. Our stories were similar,” he explains. “When they gave us weapons we refused to take them. We hadn’t gone there for that. That’s why when the Ukrainian troops took me prisoner I had no weapons, no vest or helmet.”

He did not participate in any combat, he insists, and gives an argument with a shrug: “I don’t have any gunshot wounds.” In their attempt to get the Cubans to accept weapons, the Russian officers – says Jarrosay – limited their food. “One day they left us without breakfast, another without lunch. It was his punishment.” Breakfast, lunch and dinner consisted of a single food: “Soup.”

They were assigned, yes, minor missions. On March 4 – the day of his capture – Jarrosay and two other companions, escorted by two Russian recruits, were tasked with carrying some power banks or portable batteries to a bunker not far from their unit. “In the middle of the night, the Russian was ahead of me and suddenly left me behind. I was running. I saw shadows and then the Ukrainian troops captured me.”

“In the middle of the night, the Russian was ahead of me and suddenly left me behind. I was running”

The Ukrainian Army feeds him and has made him aware of his rights. He does not know if Havana or the Kremlin have been interested in his case, but the officers guarding him explain that they have refused to admit his repatriation.

Asked for his opinion on the war before traveling to Moscow, Jarrosay is clear: he had none. “In Cuba they only talk about the United States. About Ukraine I only knew what they said on the news: that Russia was going to start an armed conflict. They hide everything, they cover everything. But it’s never known about. This is how the press works in Cuba,” he argues. Now, however, he does not dare to take sides for one or the other. “Russia should not have attacked Ukraine, that is my opinion,” he limits himself to saying.

In Cuba, Jarrosay insists that he had nothing to do with politics. He did not participate in the protests of 11 July 2021 (’11J’) – “I didn’t get involved, I was at home” – even though he wanted to leave the country. “I don’t want to go back” and he hopes that some NGO will “rescue” him, since his government does not want to. Although he does not feel mistreated by the Ukrainian Army, he does not want to stay in the country when the conflict ends. If Kyiv proposed to rehabilitate him by having him help to repair the country, he would not accept

I would like the war to end, but then… if I stay here, there, if I’m dead… I wouldn’t know what to say”

“Before Russia, now Ukraine. It’s like ping-pong,” he says, bitter, “I want the war to end… but then… if I stay here, there, if I’m dead… I wouldn’t know what to say.”

“I wouldn’t even want to call Cuba,” says Jarrosay. He doesn’t know if they know his situation. If it were up to him, they wouldn’t know. His mother is sick and when talking about her, he becomes emotional. “These are things that happen,” he laments. To those – in Cuba or already in Russia – thinking of joining Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Jarrosay sends a message: to desist, despite the misery that the country is going through. “Do not be fooled. When you arrive it is something else.”

Now he doesn’t know what will happen to him. The war continues. After a few dizzying months with multiple dangers, he has come to understand the phrase that has become his mantra: “The future is uncertain.”

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Cuba: How to Convert a Distinguished Pioneer Into a Vile Elvispreslian Worm

Cover of “This is your house, Fidel. The History of a Grandson of the Revolution” Xavier Carbonell

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 6 March 2024 — Carlos Lechuga Hevia was a machine for the Revolution. His grandfather, Colonel Manuel Lechuga was a machine for Independence. What type of machine is his grandson, Carlos D. Lechuga? His first last name is barely a letter, an elipsis, interfering with the nice ring of the clan name. Lechuga Hevia, red aristocrat, Castro’s ambassador in New York during the Cuban Missile Crisis, returns as a ghost to settle scores with his grandson for converting him into a fictional character and stealing — for the title of his book — the golden rule of communist hospitality: This is your house, Fidel. You better run, D. Lechuga.

Published by De Conatus, the grandson’s 137 pages are an insult to the memory of the ashen comandante, familiar idol and devil upon the shoulder of pioneer Lechuga. The mantra, from preschool through sixth grade, was one, “Fidel-Alejandro-Castro-Ruz!” The fantasy: that his grandfather would die so that he’d attend the funeral, with a sensational bodyguard, the supreme grandfather, Fifo. His biggest desire: to extend the hand of the Revolution itself, with its long, chilling nails.

Lechuga Hevia, red aristocrat, Castro’s ambassador in New York during the Cuban Missile Crisis, returns as a ghost to settle scores with his grandson for converting him into a fictional character

But Lechuga has no reason to run. He is far from the tropics and his childhood, and ghosts don’t bite. The main character of those 137 pages is him and no one — not even the other children born in the 80s — can steal the show, which begins with the imaginary funeral of the old man and ends with the suitcase he brought to Spain. “Am I leaving anything behind? Anything that defined me? Was I leaving myself behind?” I get the impression that Lechuga still has not answered these questions and that one book is not enough for him to do so. But, let’s get back to the pioneer who dreamed about Fidel. continue reading

Lechuga seems — we see him — with the neckerchief and white shirt, distinctive of a good student and a last name that opens doors. García Márquez visited his grandfather’s house frequently; he and the old man had in common that both were surrounded by girls, women and matriarchs. Lechuga was the first boy of the family and he was named after the ambassador. “If the baby is a boy he will be named Carlos, like his grandfather; if it is a girl, she will be named Carla; and if it is born gay, it will be named Carlota.”

Childhood was idyllic. Thinking in Russian, dreaming in American, the hierarchy was clear and it always imitated the State. Lechuga Hevia was the household Fidel; Carlos the child, a little proletariat at the bottom of the cosmic order. When anyone brought his grandfather a sweet, his wife would toss it, in case they were trying to poison him like the comandante. One day the child discovered that Castro not only had a symbolic double–his grandfather and the rest–but also a real one. A slightly heavier farmer but with the same face. One of many, he later learned, who played the Fidel game to such an extent that every year, the Spanish film about Franco’s double, Espérame en el cielo, would air on television.

With adolescence, which coincided with the Special Period, the world begins to crack. Lechuga feels that, like his mother, there is a magnetic field that wants to expel him from the family photograph. “Life has put me in an inferior place,” reasoned the child when workers at the Romanian Embassy, near his house, threw “things” across the fence. But the mental breakthrough arrived when he saw the “enraged people” crushing an independent journalist. The possibility of turning into part of the mob, the dilemma between being complicit or protesting, resulted in an instinctive reaction, “I had to censor myself. Edit. Delete.”

The possibility of turning into part of the mob, the dilemma between being complicit or protesting, resulted in an instinctive reaction, “I had to censor myself. Edit. Delete.”

We will always doubt whether Lechuga is telling the truth when he describes falling in love with a young man whose code name is the Afghan whippet. If he had any “Elvispreslian attitude” or whether anyone had to tell him to deepen his voice and stop being “soft”. But sexual rebellion was only the result of political rebellion, and the sharpest hierarchs came to warn him, “We hope to continue knowing you as the good kid, Lechuga’s grandson, and not as a vile worm.”

It was quite late. When grandfather died, Fidel did not go to the burial. The world of Lechuga Hevia, the loyalty machine, was in ruins. “Traveling down Quinta Avenida, you could see its books in the trash, its old passports, its bar in the shape of a globe, the painting of the singing fish.” The “comrades in arms” looted his mansion before the family could act.

But this is your house, Fidel is not only the dialogue with the dead, but rather a prologue to his exile, his new life. In 2013, Lechuga managed to screen his film and State Security got wind of — and recognized — the typical worm. He had to leave a couple of years ago. The rest is life, neither fiction nor memories. Lechuga in color, not in black and white. Owner of his cigar. Without having to offer his house to undesirable spooks.

Translated by: Silvia Suárez

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Why Does an Intellectual Become a Communist? Six Writers Provide Some Insight

For writers, it was easy to get excited about Lenin’s victory in Russia. (Russia Beyond)

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, February 17, 2024 — Two communists are in Red Square, contemplating Lenin’s mummy, still fresh. At the dead man’s feet, a procession of grimy peasants shuffle past in veneration. One man says to the other, “I suppose you love Lenin.” The other nods. (Both had known Vladimir Ulyanov well.) “That being the case,” he continues, “how about we find two cans of gasoline and torch this dump along with the idol?” The other turns pale and begins to tremble. He suggests that his comrade forget such inflammatory ideas, drop the subject and, if possible, immediately leave the country.

One of the men – the jokester – is Ignazio Silone, founder of the Italian Communist Party and then a diehard believer. The other is Lazar Schatzky, leader of the Russia’s Communist Youth League, who was persecuted by Stalin and ended up being shot in 1937. Let’s suppose that the joke has a moral and that the moral comes a few pages later in Silone’s own words: “To judge a regime, it is very important to know what it is laughing at.”

Like the Italian, the five other great writers featured in The God That Failed were communists and lived to tell the tale. The book, which Moscow banned shortly after it came out in 1949, is now being rescued from obscurity by a Spanish publisher, Ladera Norte. Assembled by British parliamentarian Richard Crossman, the collection of essays contains accounts from Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender, Louis Fischer, Richard Wright, André Gide and Silone.

In only a handful of countries is The God That Failed not a historical document but rather an instruction manual. Cuba is one of those countries. The stories of the six authors, who describe communism as either a religion that they renounced or a drug that almost destroyed them, will strike a familiar chord on the island. It is a drug because it produces addicts. It is a religion because it offers eternal life, expects obedience and provides nothing. No matter how much time passes. continue reading

Cubierta de 'El dios que fracasó', editado por Ladera Norte en España. — The cover of ‘El dios que fracasó’, published by Ladera Norte in Spain.

The idea for the book came from a conversation between Crossman and Koestler. The theme is the all-too-familiar disconnect between those who escape communism and those in from Western democracies who admire it. “Either you cannot or you do not want to understand,” summarized Koestler after recalling what led him to join the party in his youth only to leave it seven years later. Why does an intellectual become a communist when the regime is always so distrustful of writers, artists and philosophers? For Koestler, it is a matter of faith, not reason. Faith that a political doctrine can alter reality and end the world’s injustices, something that was easy to get excited about after Lenin’s triumph in 1917.

“All true faith is uncompromising, radical, purist,” warns Koestler. “The revolutionary’s utopia, which seems to represent a total break with the past, is always modeled after some image of Paradise Lost, of a legendary Golden Age.” Rebellion is the only way to believe in mythology again when one lives in “a disintegrating society thirsty for faith.”

On the other hand, there is the intrigue and secrecy, the false identities, the espionage, pamphlets and passwords, everything that constitutes – and Koestler’s analogy is a gem – “the mental world of the drug addict,” something difficult to explain to people who are not initiated. In the lethargic phase — when one has left all optimism behind, when all that is left is compliance — one discovers the necessary lie, the lie you want to believe, the lie that makes failure taste, rather unsuccessfully, less bitter.

Those who died, those who are dying in prison, is this what they sacrificed themselves for?

Silone, a man of a thousand stories, remembers an epiphany he had when locked up with a group of communists being persecuted by fascists: a fake painter, a fake tourist, a fake dentist, a fake architect and a fake young German woman. The long and incomprehensible story that Silone tells that night has a bitter end and begins with the injustices that he witnessed as a child. Maturity and the search for freedom led him to communist ideas but he became disenchanted after Stalin’s schemes to enforce his will. One night In Moscow, someone asked the question, “Those who died, those who are dying in prison, is this what they sacrificed themselves for? The unsettled, solitary, dangerous lives that we ourselves lead, foreigners in our own countries, is it all for this?”

Richard Wright, an African-American writer, was invited to meet some white communists from Chicago. His first reaction was one of suspicion but he decided to go anyway. After the initial idyllic phase, he discovered the factions, the struggles for power and the frustration of party members. Despite working as a street sweeper, a female comrade issued the verdict. “We keep a record of the problems we’ve had with intellectuals in the past,” she said. “It is estimated that only 13% of them remain in the party.”

We keep a record of the problems we’ve had with intellectuals in the past. “It is estimated that only 13% of them remain in the party.”

Gide, perhaps the best known of the writers in the book along with Koestler, was one of the pioneers in dismantling the Soviet myth. His essay, taken from his celebrated book Return from the USSR, was written after a 1936 trip to Moscow which opened his eyes. Officials hosted receptions and banquets that were designed to tempt him into saying flattering things about Russia. Meanwhile, people were going hungry and dying from the cold. The state, he wrote in his diary, exploited workers “in a very formal and twisted way so that they no longer knew whom to blame for their situation.” The conclusion did not earn him many friends in Moscow. “I very much doubt,” he wrote, “that there is any other country in the world, including Hitler’s Germany, that has so enslaved the intelligence and spirit, and that has terrorized more of its people, than the Soviet Union.”

Closing out the book are two pieces: one by the American writer Louis Fischer, who wrote a biography of Lenin; and Stephen Spender, who became disenchanted with communism after the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939. Fischer explores how the party instilled a sense of guilt in its members (“How can you complain about the potato shortage when you were building socialism?”). Spender quickly soured on the “poetic purity” that Moscow promised.

A few years ago, a group of university students — some of whom were friends — thought they could reclaim the legacy of Jurassic communism that had excited Gide, and later Sartre and company. They venerated Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, and even allowed themselves the luxury of idolizing Fidel Castro, their go-to talisman whenever problems arose, which says a lot about their mental state. They hated Cuba’s official party newspaper Granma and communist officials, starting with the current president Miguel Díaz-Canel. They languished between disciplinary councils and calls to order. It was they – whom I remember as ragged, smoking and spectral – who first came to mind as I was reading this book, which serves as an epitaph to them. Their god, in addition to failing, thrives on failure.

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A Country of James Bond Villains

A still from Octopussy, a film in which 007 is on a mission to destroy a base in Cuba.

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 11 February 2024 — Only once in my life have I been in the same city as James Bond. It was Havana. Or rather, a fake Havana that had a seaside promenade like the Malecón but no Morro Castle. It was actually the Spanish city of Cádiz, used as a stand-in for the movie Die Another Day.

While in Cádiz I returned to the capital of my imaginary country where 007 travels in search of a North Korean hit man who, improbably, wants to undergo a face change at a Cuban clinic. From La Caleta beach, where I smoked a cigar, Halle Berry emerges wearing a bikini — copied from one Ursula Andress wore in 1962 — while Pierce Brosnan spies on her with binoculars from a hotel bar.

Bond arrives in a cardboard Havana and walks into a cigar factory. It couldn’t be any other way. Cigars, old cars, women and drink – and that yellow hue that Europeans imagine when they think of the tropics – make Cuba the ideal hideout for Moscow’s men. There are Cuban flags, Young Pioneers, and posters with Camilo Cienfuegos on every wall along with decorative hookers. continue reading

The tobacco shop – actually Cádiz’ Mercado de Abastos – belongs to a certain Raoul (played by the Mexican actor Emilio Echevarría). To see him, Bond must use a password: Delectados. He wants to smoke this rare brand – also fake though the Dominicans did try to patent the name – which has not been produced since Castro took power.

Raoul, in suit and tie, waits for him on a terrace with views of the cathedral – of Cádiz, of Habana, or maybe Cabana, I don’t know where I am — and slips in an anti-tobacco message. To smoke Delectados you must have a license to die, not just to kill. Bond, who has been smoking cigars for decades, tells him that he is well aware of the risk. Delectados have a dangerous tobacco wrapper that “burns slow and never goes out.” Password accepted.

“We may have lost our freedom in the Revolution but we have a health care system second to none”

It is assumed that Raoul — a fervent communist, we later find out — is an informant for MI6, the British secret service, working as a sleeper agent in Castro’s court who ends up ratting out the North Korean. The terrorist, who is not a tourist – the joke is 007’s and sounds better in English – is at the Organs, a center for the study of a type of gene therapy to “extend the life of our beloved leaders.”

Raoul comments, “We may have lost our freedom in the revolution but we have a health care system second to none.” Bond raises his eyebrows. The viewer does too.

For more than fifty years and across twenty-five films, Cuba has always been part of the bizarre James Bond landscape. The impossibility of speaking ill of Castro in Castro’s fiefdom has been fertile ground for the imagination. If Cádiz is Havana, London is Santiago de Cuba and Puerto Rico is Guantánamo. Luckily, Miami has always been Miami.

Goldfinger confesses to 007 that, with his plans upended, he is left with only one option. “In two hours, more or less, we will be in Cuba”

In 1964, the evil millionaire Auric Goldfinger confesses to 007 that, with his plans foiled, he is left with only one choice. “In two hours or so I will be in Cuba.” If the tropical paradise had hosted Trotsky’s assassin, Ramón Mercader, a few years earlier, why not another Kremlin stalwart? But it was not to be.

After a mid-air struggle with Sean Connery, the original 007, Goldfinger ends up splattered on American soil. Bond is then able to fulfill his true, and highly criticized, mission: seducing Pussy Galore, a lesbian who has managed to fend him off the entire the film.

No one turns to James Bond in search of political correctness. However, the pressure to make 007 less macho, less of a smoker, less of an alcoholic, has borne fruit, as demonstrated in the 2021 film No Time to Die. His films even became self-critical. In 1995, when Judi Dench made her debut at the head of MI6, her first meeting with Bond is anything but warm. “I think you are a mysonginistic, sexist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War.” And this was something said between friends.

Roger Moore, the actor who appeared in the most Bond films, was also an unrepentant Churchill cigar smoker and carried out several missions in Cuba – the fake Cuba. In 1982’s Octopussy, agent 007 enters and leaves the country illegally.

I have no idea if the film was ever screened in Havana but, if so, it will have stimulated the migratory imagination of many. Bond is there to destroy a military base run by a Cuban army general, Luis Toro, whom he assassinates. A conspiracy theorist would have a field day with that surname. In 1982, the chief of the General Staff was the very faithful Ulises Rosales del Toro. Everything ends in explosions and missiles.

Fidel Castro has been the most silent villain of all the James Bond films and in some ways has served as inspiration for all the others

Disguised in the ugly uniform of the Armed Forces, 007 finds the device that will take him out of Cuba: a Bede BD-5, the smallest plane in the world. He says goodbye to Bianca, a mulatta who helped him, promising her in his Bondian way, “I’ll see you in Miami.”

Watching the getaway is an astonished Fidel Castro, a kind of swarthy hippie who pushes everyone aside as he walks. A soldier with a Guatemalan or Salvadoran accent breaks the bad news to him: “The Englishman has escaped.” A few years later, Castro – the real one – saw fiction become into reality when the pilot Orestes Lorenzo hopped into a shiny MIG-23 belonging to the Cuban army and followed James Bond’s route.

Fidel Castro has been the most silent villain of all the James Bond films and in some ways has been the inspiration for rest. Head of a criminal network like Ernst Stavro Bloefeld, tropical dictatator like Dr. Kananga, frustrated scientist like Julius No, bloodthirsty soldier like Ourumov. What role has the comandante not played? Cuba has also provided its own cheap thug and Bond girl but that is a topic for another day.

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‘Writers and Artists Under Communism’, a Chronicle About the Cuban Government’s Hatred of Culture

Caption – Alfredo Guevara, Nicolás Guillén and Alejo Carpentier talk to Fidel Castro at a reception during the second UNEAC Congress in 1977. (Mario Ferrer/Cubadebate)

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, January 6, 2024 — “Down with the apolitical writers! Down with the supermen of literature!” “Their original sin: they are not authentically revolutionary.” “Outside the Revolution, no rights.”

The law of eternal return presides over the tension between the intellectuals and communism. Guevara repeats Castro, and Castro repeats Stalin or Mao. Hundreds of pages can be filled about espionage, shootings, accusations and complicity with “red-flag fascism”. This is demonstrated by the formidable Writers and Artists under Communism (Arzalia), by the Spanish journalist Manuel Florentín.

The vortex has its origin in Lenin, the historian Antonio Elorza explains in his prologue to the volume. In 1905, long before his troops assaulted the Winter Palace, the Bolshevik leader defined what he would do with writers and artists if the revolution materialized. In one of his libels, Lenin openly affirms that the problematic Russian intelligentsia should behave like another “wheel and screw” of the great social watchmaking. For the misfits, exile or bullets.

Since then, the communist regimes of any continent have followed the advice of Moscow. The intellectual must be an “engineer of the soul,” a servant of the State, which will pamper him with perks and recognitions, or he must not exist at all. continue reading

As a reader and imitator of Lenin, Fidel Castro dodged the “problem” of the intellectuals until 1961. By that time, the writers close to the “maximum leader” had already prepared the ground. The well-known “guilt” for not having fought in the Sierra Maestra – of which Guevara knew well how to take advantage – impregnated numerous poems and slogans: “We, the survivors, to whom do we owe survival?” the cultural commissioner Roberto Fernández Retamar wrote early in 1959.

European revolutions failed or were corrupted; the Cuban one was the hope of Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Saramago, of Feltrinelli, Sontag and Graham Greene

The “great illusion” of the intellectuals was followed by the “great disenchantment,” says Florentín in the chapter of his book dedicated to Cuba. European revolutions failed or were corrupted; the Cuban one was the hope of Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Saramago, of Feltrinelli, Sontag and Graham Greene. Others, such as Vargas Llosa or Gabriel García Márquez, soon traveled to Havana, invited by the Casa de las Américas.

The disappointment could be seen coming. Politically and militarily, dissident heads had fallen since 1959 itself, with Huber Matos and other senior officials. Castro’s chess was aggressive and incessant, and when it was the writers’ turn, he already had enough power to speak clearly.

The son of communists – and “vaccinated,” he clarified, against the viruses of Moscow – Guillermo Cabrera Infante was sitting at the same table as Castro during his famous Words to the Intellectuals. With a privileged view of the caudillo’s revolver, he soon understood what for several decades the lobotomized intellectuals tried to hide: culture was – and still is – a slave of ideology.

As a minor diplomat in Brussels, Cabrera Infante’s break with the Regime was the loudest and most militant until the arrival of Reinaldo Arenas. For Cabrera Infante, Cuba was “far from God and close to Mefistófeles”; for Arenas, who had a rougher time and life, his was a country of “scoundrels, criminals, demagogues and cowards.”

Cabrera Infante’s break with the Regime was the loudest and most militant until the arrival of Reinaldo Arenas

Florentín dedicates a section to the closure, in 1965, of Ediciones El Puente. Friends of the American poet Allen Ginsberg – who was expelled from Cuba for denouncing the persecution of homosexuals – the young, avant-garde poets were sent to the camps called Military Units to Support Production (UMAP), and, over time, they marched into exile. The cigar wrappers on which Ernesto Díaz Rodríguez wrote his poems from prison are the symbol of a generation.

But nothing better illustrates the tension between Castro and the Cuban intelligentsia than the Padilla case, in 1971, which has been the subject of debate again after the eponymous documentary by Pavel Giroud, with unpublished recordings of that day. Everything that the ideological purge had as a ritual is evident in those images.

Heberto Padilla’s punishment was the initial shot in an “uncomfortable” hunt. Paradiso, from Lezama, was removed from bookstores; Virgilio Piñera and Antón Arrufat saw their careers as playwrights cut off; hundreds of manuscripts were discarded as unpublishable; and Norberto Fuentes – fallen out of favor and rehabilitated several times – had to resort to powerful friends like Gabriel García Márquez to earn Castro’s favor once again, lost when he published Condenados de Condado.

The survival of the Cuban regime is an anomaly. So is its cultural apparatus, composed of bureaucrats and informants whose careers depend on their almost abject loyalty to power. Florentín closes his Cuban chapter with a biographical sketch of the poet Raúl Rivero, forced into exile, a long tradition that began in the 19th century with José María Heredia and continues today with so many writers and artists from the Island.

However, the worst thing – says Florentín – is the naivety, always complicit, of those who defend communist regimes as dreams of freedom. They are not, and Rivero, who suffered several boycotts from young pro-Castro attendees during his conferences in Spain, made it clear: “Their dream is the Cubans’ nightmare.”

Translated by Regina Anavy

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A Peculiar Almanac

Reading has become like a secret sect: its members recognise one another in trains and cafés. (Facebook/La Nave Antiquarian Bookshop)

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 31 December 2023 – In a freezing bookshop in Burgos; with an antiques dealer in Salamanca; talking to a bookseller in Seville; awaiting the post from a miserly bookseller from La Rioja; rooting through a hundred stalls at the Madrid fair; unpacking packages that arrive from Cuba: to narrate my year is to narrate my books. In each case I know how much they cost, where I bought them, and what they brought to me that was new to my life and to my library.

A sporting spirit brings a reader to make lists – not only of the books they’ve read but also the ones they’ve acquired, the ones they’ve lost and the ones most wanted. My list – which contains all of the above – is divided into months, and it resembles a list of diary entries of where I found each book, as well as any notes or reflections that seemed worth jotting down at the time. It’s not a bad habit to have if you’re going to want some content for future use in novels or in columns.

In my diary – a lovely little Moleskine – I also describe meals, or the weather, people I’ve met and places visited. Observations from a bewildered point of view, because, for someone who has left their native country, although they might have a bed and a roof over their head, beyond that, everything appears exotic. The reader’s diary is not short of heroes and villains, unexpected luxuries and moments of extreme hardship. (In interviews, Borges said that he had known extreme poverty. “When, Borges?”, Soler Serrano asked him in 1980. “The poverty of not getting to the end of the month”, the blind man replied.) continue reading

People who read, they get up every day with an impulse that asks them “to save Shakespeare, the Mona Lisa, Havana cigars, penicillin, the iPhone and the Kalashnikov”

People who read, they get up every day with the sense of responsibility described by María Stepánova: it’s an impulse that asks them “to save Shakespeare, the Mona Lisa, Havana cigars, penicillin, the iPhone and the Kalashnikov”. Stepánova wanted the same thing as Walter Benjamin, W.G. Sebald and George Steiner – all stateless people whom I have read with some attention this year.

I discovered Sebald via his book Austerlitz, (published by Anagrama) in Burgos, just after hitting my head on a ceiling beam: I was on the second floor [third floor, to Americans] of a bookshop, and I’d just had to climb a narrow staircase in order to reach it. When I recovered, I saw the spine of the book. Pain and illnesses also form part of memory’s arsenal. A simple example is a strip of esomeprazol, a pill with literary prestige – Arturo Belano and Roberto Bolaño took them – which marks the rhythm of my own week.

But if anything has defined my ups and downs this year it has been the hunt for the catalogue of a publisher which doesn’t exist: The Kingdom of Redonda. There are 40 coloured volumes, published by Javier Marías, with a sharpened arrow on the cover, by little known but always exceptional authors. These are cult books, other-worldly objects, which are disappearing from the bookshops. The quest for them and for reading them has shaped even my travel.

I travelled through Castilla y León by train whilst reading Los Recuerdos de este fusilero (Memories of this Fusilier), the tale of a British soldier who made this same journey on foot during the Napoleonic Wars. I travelled to Seville in search of The Religion of a Physician – the classic essay by Sir Thomas Browne – but I couldn’t find it. I eventually ended up haggling in a raised voice over the price of a copy, with a bookshop owner in Logroño. I discovered, in The Fall of Constantinople (which inspired more than a few passages from The Lord of the Rings), that the Ottomans were planning to do what Cortés actually did, shortly after, on the other side of the ocean – he dragged his ships overland, because the sea was closed by a “thick chain”, similar to the one that blocked the way of English ships during the Siege of Havana in 1762. As I’ve already said, other-worldly books, for readers from another world.

Like an inquisitive dog, a reader will always try to see what book a potential ’partner in crime’ has under his arm

Reading has become like a secret sect: its members recognise one another in trains and cafés, they show kinship for one another through the simple fact of each having the same book in their hands. Like an inquisitive dog, a reader will always try to see what book a potential ’partner in crime’ has under his arm. And if he recognises it, at the risk of appearing indiscreet, he can’t avoid breaking the ice (or at least enjoy the coincidence in silence if he’s too timid).

Winter, of endearing and indifferent books like Lolita; Spring, of Simic, Paz and Abilio Estévez; tropical August, with Divine Bodies by Cabrera Infante and The Colour of Summer by Arenas; Autumn, of classics – Jenofonte, Seneca, Homer and of obsession with Steiner, the “lay rabbi” whose books offer so much calm and optimism. Tonight, that which awaits me is The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T E Lawrence, the unforgettable Lawrence of Arabia; and for desserts an English edition of King Solomon’s Mines.

I’ll spend the close of the year reading, or talking about books. Or, at least surrounded by them, which – in these times of people being wrapped up in radicalism or poverty, political correctness or intellectual destitution – continue to be the best of company. And, obviously, with a cigar and a glass of something to hand. No need to overdo it.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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