Xavier Carbonell – Page 3 – Translating Cuba

The Havana Law: The Authentic Face of the Cuban Tourist Paradise

It is important that a book like this is published in Europe, where some newspapers are still promoting the Island as a paradise of communist nostalgia. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 15 March 2023 – In the film The Lives of Others, the writer Georg Dreyman encapsulates his break with the regime in a report about suicides in communist countries. He writes it in red ink on a secret typewriter and under the vigilance of secret agent Wiesler, alias HGW XX/7. When I had just finished reading The Secret Island, by Abraham Jiménez Enoa (born in Havana in 1988), it seemed to me to be the reverse kind of book — almost tropical, although no less dramatic or oppressive.

The book doesn’t hide its scars. It talks of a nervous people, hungry, people who want to escape or kill themselves. Every page was written as the polar opposite of the official tourist guide to Cuba. It is important that a book like this is published in Europe, where some newspapers are still promoting the Island as a paradise of communist nostalgia, with cheap hotels, cigars and mulatas.

Jiménez Enoa goes further even, than just describing the “real and the incredible” poverty of Havana, ‘invention of foreign correspondents’. His interviewees, who come from a wide variety of provinces and dangerous neighbourhoods, live for la bolita — a lottery-type betting game prohibited by Castro — and they cure their illnesses using only water; they have two religions (“yoruba culture and football [soccer]”); they build portable houses out of cardboard and go out chasing French or Italian women, “the uglier and fatter the better, because those are the ones who need affection the most”. continue reading

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

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

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

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

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

Exile, as the only way out

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

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

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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‘Cubadebate’ Exhumes Fidel Castro’s Speech That Gave Way to the UMAP Camps, and Removes it Hours Later

On Tuesday morning, the publication had been removed without explanation.

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 14 March 2023–Universidad de la Habana, March 13, 1963. Fidel Castro leaned on the podium, at the top of the stairs facing thousands of students. Dressed in a suit, grimacing, are: President Dorticós; the adventurous geographer Antonio Núñez Jiménez; youth director José Rebellón; and the parents of Camilo Cienfuegos, who had died just a few years earlier. He gives a long speech. The next day, the press repeats the same headline, Castro promises a “firm hand” for the “weak,” the “lazy,” the “religious,” the “blue jeans,” the “lumpen,”and all kinds of “worms.”

Sixty years later — this Monday — the regime’s press dusted off what was one of the most sinister speeches given by the caudillo after 1959. On Tuesday morning, the publication, shared as a special in Cubadebate, had been taken down without explanation. The speech, however, remains accessible at this link there is the cached version created by Google which Cubadebate cannot erase.

Attempts have been made to tone down or even justify the so-called “speech at the staircase,” which gave way to the creation of what were called Military Units of Support to Production (UMAP) and the persecution of homosexuals, members of several religions and “off-track” intellectuals.

Personalities like Mariela Castro Espín, the leader’s niece and founder of the National Center for Sex Education (Cenesex) have not viewed Castro’s assault on homosexuals favorably and try to attribute his intolerance to “the times” and not to a political strategy.

Why are they interested in rescuing the regime from an oratory piece which ends by requesting the assassination of Jehovah’s Witnesses and capital punishment for common delinquents? The answer, given the context of ideological radicalization pushed by the Communist Party nowadays, is unsettling. continue reading

Leafing through the newspapers of the time or the popular “Bohemia” magazine allows us to take the pulse of the era. (“Bohemia” March 22, 1963)

Leafing through newspapers of that time or the popular Bohemia magazine allows us to take the pulse of that era. Military slogans, threats against any “Elvispreslian” attitude — one of Castro’s barbarisms that went down in history — interviews with leaders and news from the Soviet Union. Even the comics are eminently misogynous and sexual, to confirm the leader’s mandate: 1963 must be, even “by force,” the Year of Organization in all areas of life.

When Castro rose to the university podium, he was supposed to commemorate the sixth anniversary of José Antonio Echeverría’s death and the young men who took control of the Presidential Palace and the Radio Reloj station in 1957. After the failed assault against dictator Batista, the group was brutally assassinated.

However, the comandante dedicated a mention to Echeverría — a Catholic leader with a strong personality, whom Castro always viewed as a rival — to “apologize” for having allowed a group of radicals to erase from his statement “an invocation to God.” That act, he said was “erroneous and not revolutionary.”

Then, the “commemorative” speech took a spectacular turn and centered on the problems of the present. The recurring theme was Echeverría’s own religiosity: “Today, I will speak about others who, invoking God, want to make a counterrevolution.”

In a couple of phrases he neutralized the hierarchy of Catholic bishops who had published furious letters against the infiltration of Soviet communism on the Island. His government, he stated, “did not close churches, did not create obstacles for any priest willing to carry out his proper religious functions, and it could even be said that conflicts between the Revolution and the Catholic Church have begun to disappear.”

The waters have “leveled” with the bishops, Castro lied. His true objective was another, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Gideon Evangelicals, and the Pentecostal Church, three “Yankee sects” that had penetrated the Cuban countryside and that, to the chagrin of the military, proposed peaceful civil disobedience.

They drove him crazy, he admitted. “When it is time to harvest cotton, coffee, or sugar cane or when special work is required and the masses are mobilized on a Sunday, or Saturday, or any day, then they come and say, ’Do not work on the seventh day.’ And then they start with the religious pretext to preach against voluntary labor,” or they say, “Do not use weapons, do not defend yourself, do not be a militant.”

Castro accused them of being superstitious, of offending the homeland and the flag, and later asked what should be done with them for “preaching idiocies.” None of the young people hesitated, “Paredón!” — To the wall! That is the firing squad

It was just the beginning of the speech. The then Prime Minister continued talking about the ills they had inherited from the “capitalist past” and how they must draw a line between that and the present revolution.

“Many of those young slackers, children of the bourgeois, go around with their pants that are too tight; some of them with a guitar and their ’Elvispreslian’ attitudes.” (’Bohemia’ March 22, 1963)

Several “infectious focal points” remained, composed of “antisocials, thieves, pickpockets and parasites.” He stated that the police had been corrupted and the judges were soft in their sentencing. “The result: the need to take harsh measures,” he said, and asked the crowd what measures should be taken. Once again, drunk with enthusiasm, the university students responded, “Capital punishment!” and also, “Fidel, paredón for the thief!”

Satisfied, Castro increased the response. What can be done, then, with the young men who gather in the “pool halls” and other recreational establishments, “full of slackers and lumpen”? With the prostitutes, dedicated to the “repugnant profession”? And with the rest of the religious? He invited those who wished to leave to the United States to walk away. “What do they expect?” he asked and his audience broke out in laughter.

The “soft” who dare to complain, he dug in, “we understand they should undertake physical labor, which is the type most needed at the moment, and that they should go work in agriculture,” as a “little reinforcement, but not much!”

He then stated the most famous phrase from that speech, the one that would decide the fates of thousands of young people in the sixties and that today the official press repeats intentionally, about what he called a social “subproduct” of 15 or 16 years: “Many of those young slackers, children of the bourgeois, go around with their pants that are too tight; some of them with a guitar and their “Elvispreslian” attitudes, and they have taken their debauchery to extremes, wanting to organize their feminoid shows freely in public.”

With the spiel against those with “weak legs” and the “crooked trees” he abandoned the podium. He’d leave them, he said, with a big lesson, “All the worst comes together. Don’t ever forget that, don’t ever forget it.”

In 1965, the UMAP system was already operating in Camagüey. “We have made our calculations,” warned Castro about that measure and its impact on “the New Man” that the Revolution desired. Thanks to that speech of 60 years ago, notable cultural figures paraded through the UMAP, such as future cardinal Jaime Ortega, troubador Pablo Milanés, and author Reinaldo Arenas.

On December 31, 1963, Arenas — an aficionado of “the world of Havana show business” — hugged his lover, a young man named Miguel and wished him a Happy New Year despite the “sexual persecution.” Miguel returned the hug through tears and said, “It’s unbelievable that Fidel has already been in power for four years.”

“Wretched,” wrote Arenas as he recalled that hug. “I thought that was too much time. He ended up arrested and taken to one of the concentration camps. I never saw him again.”

Translated by: Silvia Suárez

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Cuba: All Books Have an Owner

Raúl Martínez’s “Nine Repetitions of Fidel and Microphones” (1968) serves as a metaphor for Castro’s obsessive rewriting of the historical narrative and his own image.

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Havana, 26 February 2023 — History is the most deceptive and refined form of fiction. The talent of historians to disguise their prose, hide their voice and their focus, how discreet the selection process and editing of life, the skill with which they choose a leader, a time, a territory, converts their discipline into verbal acrobatics.

Luckily, citizens or readers have something in their favor: an absolute brotherhood of historians does not exist, there is no complete book compatible with all regions and policies. We cannot count on, to state it that way, one true universal history. That helps so that a simple comparison between a book in its own country and another abroad may reveal anachronisms, conspiracies and splinters.

There are some familiar examples. What is known in Cuba as the War of ’95 or — as the martiana* propaganda called it — Necessary, in Spain is referred to as the War of ’98. While 1895 marked the end of containment for us, three years later the Spaniards would see their fleet bombed, the nation in a depression and the old empire defeated. For Cuba, ’95 brings independence; for Spain,’ 98 was Baroja and Unamuno**, crisis, meditation and a rebirth.

Since 1762, islanders spoke of the takeover of Havana by the British, as if they were not conquerers, but tourists, who had entered the city. The British, who referred to the Spanish War of Independence using the gentle name of Peninsular War, correctly define it as a seige or invasion.

But, there is no need to go so far back. No era has been more battered by official historians than the last 120 years. The Republic born in 1902, after decades of tension and bloodshed, Castro dismissed as a Pseudo-republic, a Mediated Republic or Neo-colony. That is how we learned it, wasting words, and that is still repeated — with little innocence — by our grandparents, often loyal to the caudillo, forgetting Eliseo Diego’s bittersweet poem: “It has to do with how my father used to say it: the Republic. . .with his chest puffed, as if referring to the soft, ample, sacred woman who gave him children.” continue reading

Contrasting one book with another it is not only fruitful to consider the space where it was written, but also the time. It is sufficient to compare the first histories of Cuba–those of Bishop Morel and José Martín Félix de Arrate — with the manual of Soviet echos used by university students. Clearly, I’m not referring to the evident differences in style, the methods or the rigor of the research. I am referring to the master which the books serve — all books have an owner — who is interested in viewing life a certain way, who wants to reassure or to destroy.

The misrepresentation of national history that Castro made was so grotesque, and the historians so submissive, that very early on, it provoked the mockery of Manuel Moreno Fraginals in History As a Weapon. “Students,” he worte in 1966, “are perplexed by the works that pretend to be the immediate antecedents to the present we are living and that nonetheless have nothing to do with it.” The new past Castro offered was an epic series of nonsense that, I imagine, the old republican authors such as Roid and Ortiz would not be able to read without blushing.

Moreno Fraginals, lucid and misunderstood, author of the best book ever written on the history of Cuba, died in Miami in 2001. Fidel Castro, for his part, was rewarded for his delirium with the 2008 National History Award. His brother, Raúl received it in 2021.

We’ve always been at the mercy of words. Playa Girón, booming and triumphant or Bay of Pigs, geographic? October Crisis or Missile Crisis? Separatism, reformism, or anexationism? Blockade or embargo? Socialism, communism or capitalism? Protests or disruptions? Emigration or exile? The confusion, which spans from the private to the judicial, is contagious.

The drafters of the Constitution of 2019 ignored that it is an error to refer to La bayamesa*** as the Hymn of Bayamo. When it was printed, disregarding the warning, several writers proposed that — to be true to the sudden fervor of referring to all symbols by their place of origin — they should refer to the Seal and Flag of New York, the city where Miguel Teurbe Tolón designed them in 1849.

But if dictators know how to calibrate history and reorganize words, nothing compares to the way in which the domestic narrative is concocted and, even more shameless, the personal narrative. At the end of the day, we are the stories we tell about ourselves, the versions that become nuanced or disolve, a fiction continually touching up what we said, did, or thought. We were the first to use history as a weapon — more like a pocket knife or dagger.

Translated by: Silvia Suárez

Translator’s notes:
*”Martiana” refers to José Martí
**Baroja and Unamuno were two Spanish authors of the late 1800s.
***La bayamesa is the Cuban national anthem.

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The City of White Stones

Every time I returned to the cemetery of my town I tried, in vain, to guide myself in the labyrinth and find the tombstone of my ancestors. (Facebook)

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 12 February 2022 — Somewhere in the town where we were born, turning down a certain aisle and advancing to the third or fourth corridor of the cemetery, the family vault is located. The word pantheon, in most cases, is excessive. It is more like a rectangle of two meters by one, which overlooks a kind of endless beehive. There, in small aluminum boxes or in heavy coffins, our dead rest.

No one suspects how horrifying the sight of an open tomb can be for a child. I, who accompanied the funeral march of my grandparents, cannot get out of my head – not as a trauma, but rather as vertigo of memory – the act of uncovering the vertical passageway, its niches numbered, where the gravediggers dropped the sarcophagi with the help of ropes and pulleys.

It didn’t impress me so much to learn that my grandparents would no longer belong to the world of the living, they would no longer come to lunch, they would not smoke compulsively, they would not take me to a municipal band room or sit me in the barbershop chair, to cut my hair against my will, as did the fact of seeing them hidden, covered and under stone. Of the old, I thought then, only the name, the dates and a mortuary address remain, which I refused to learn and, for this reason, today I would not know how to recognize my family vault.

I suppose that, more than one tomb, I get two or four or sixteen, due to the multiplication of relatives. I don’t know if my brother or my parents know that information, which comes with adulthood, like the keys to the house and the bank account number. My resistance to memorizing these types of figures comes, perhaps, from having forgotten where my ancestors were after they died. In fact, I never even went back to my maternal grandfather’s or great-grandfather’s house. When one leaves his country, the last thing he thinks about is the deceased. continue reading

As a child, my father took me to place flowers for his grandmother. I only remember that the tomb was in the northern sector of the cemetery and that to get there, an unpleasant thing, you had to step on several sepulchers. There he showed me a rectangle covered not by a stone but by earth, whose tombstone he had made himself, as a young man. On a molten cement plate and with the help of a stiletto that served as a chisel, he carved the names of the deceased he knew. I don’t remember if there was any Carbonell or Echevarría, but there were the Beltráns and the Seijos, a strange Galician surname.

Before we left, he offered me some clues — a sepulcher that was a miniature chalet, a mutilated angel, a flag — to locate the grave in the future. Every time I returned to the cemetery of my town I tried, in vain, to guide myself in the labyrinth and find the tombstone of my ancestors. I have chosen to think that it never existed and that my memory is invented, another fiction, material for a novel.

A few weeks ago I leafed through a Cuban newspaper that talked about grave robbers in Matanzas. I thought for a moment of Howard Carter, the Valley of the Kings and the pharaohs, but the photos in the report grounded me. The bandits destroyed the coffins with a very peculiar viciousness, scattered the bones on the ground – like Kubrick’s monkeys – and evicted the works of art and any bronze rings from the pantheon.

The cemetery I went to as a child did not have the value or the history of San Carlos Borromeo, it mattered much less than that of Colón and Santa Ifigenia. But on the gate was a phrase by Tito Livio that my friends and I repeated without understanding, and that reminded whoever passed by that every death was, at the same time, liberation and compensation for wrongs. Or, to correctly translate the word, revenge.

Other cemeteries that were familiar to me had more serene inscriptions – I am the door of peace – or more resigned ones – death is the last reason – but always in the Latin language, perhaps because it is a reassuring and remote language, like death itself. Behind the gate the avenues, chapels and white stones appeared, figures always broken, sculptures of dogs and cats, a miniature ship, busts polished by the rain. Or, in the Hebrew cemeteries – my town had one – pure and incomprehensible text, characters arranged from right to left, the same with the dates.

No sane person is concerned with death or immortality. Any preparation is useless and nothingness must be as thick as in the dream, similar to medical sedation, and hopefully just as painless.

My grandparents. My parents. My favorite writers. The guy who composed the piece we hummed insistently. The desecrators of San Carlos Borromeo. The cats I raised and the ones that ran away. The objects, even. The meditators and the carefree, the loud and the silent, the dictators and the exiles, the bad and the noble. The undertaker. Who reads this text. I. What will we think with the last bar?

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Horoscopes, Divorces and Bikinis

Vogue’s iconic new year cover in 1974, photographed by David Bailey, featuring actress Anjelica Huston and the designer Manolo Blahnik. (Pinterest)

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 29 January 2023 — It must be 15 or 16 years since I last flicked through the pages of a celebrity magazine. I remember the sparky covers with their 1990’s celebrities — Liv Tyler, Uma Thurman or Andy García — a bikini on the front page and the headlines were always about the mysterious reappearance of some actor, or a duchess’s secret, or a millionaires lover, or the second to last royal scandal.

These days, all serious and grown up now, I go down to the news kiosk in search of some bread or a literary supplement, and when I see the celeb mags I feel a wave of nostalgia. The covers no longer feature Angelina Jolie but Ana de Armas. Princess Diana has been replaced by Princess Leonor, Cher by Dua Lipa and Tom Cruise by Thimothée Chalamet, which, if we are even half awake, is almost an improvement.

I don’t know how all the mothers, grandmothers, aunties and their friends used to get all these mags through the customs and the censorship of the Island. To run their fingers over the dazzling pages, to admire Brad Pitt’s biceps or catch up with the latest diet to beat hypertension was their way of being transgressive, of staying young and of defying their parents, husbands or grandparents with this rather chaste print-based version of sexuality.

We too, still young boys, hoped that no one saw us cutting out a lingerie advert or a centrefold poster of Kate Moss, Claudia Schiffer or some chick in Karl Lagerfeld’s service. All those exotic names, the perfect face make-up, the long suntanned legs, the supernatural cleavages and the feline eyes, they fixed themselves upon our retinas and, I can guarantee, they will never leave them.

But it didn’t stop there. The models, singers and actresses, the scandals and heartbreaks were only the mere surface of the wider universe that those fifty pages covered. Every celeb mag, as we discovered later — whilst in search of tricks (always useless) for seducing our first girlfriends — was a tiny encyclopaedia. continue reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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Ana Belen Montes: Anachronistic Spy for Cuba

Austrian actress Lotte Lenya, playing Soviet Colonel Rosa Klebb in the film “From Russia with Love” (1963), one of the most remembered villains of the Bond saga. (Screen capture)

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 15 January 2023 –The spy is defined by an ability to keep a secret. The secret configures everything else — temperament, friendships, love, fear, sex and loyalty. The accumulation of confidential information makes the spy a danger to both sides. The expiration date depends on how quickly the secret changes hands. The vertigo of such a life has to be addictive.

For several weeks I was obsessed with the way in which the spy Ana Belén Montes had been shaped by the secret. It was, above all, a communication problem. Montes started from resentment against her country and a bulletproof loyalty for Castro. We know that she had been transmitting data to Havana since the eighties and that she met every day with her contact, like a disciplined reporting machine.

Her appearance couldn’t be more mediocre: short hair, office worker’s dark circles and cheap suits. It’s revealing that Havana has celebrated her release with such reluctance after twenty years in prison. Only the back benches of the regime showed some enthusiasm in their propaganda.

The release of Ana Belén Montes reminds the world of things that Havana would prefer not to reveal. For example, the fact that Cuba’s espionage network is still in action, although its scope is modest and its methods are outdated. One sees Montes and knows that at the end of the line Castro is waiting, in suspense, holding the phone. Both figures — Mata Hari and the Kaiser — are dinosaurs, parodies, relics of the Cold War.

If Montes were a villain in a James Bond movie, she would not be the blonde Tatiana Romanova but the repulsive Rosa Klebb. Unappetizing, Sean Connery would have avoided seducing her. I find it easier to see her behind an old Macintosh, downloading the Pentagon files on a floppy disk, while nervously drinking coffee. continue reading

Twenty years after her capture, we still don’t know who Montes is. Was she in love with someone when she was handcuffed? Had she planned her retirement, did she get bored of playing? What was the last movie she saw as a free woman, what did she like to eat? What did she think of the situation on the Island — hunger, poverty, the Special Period — and the paranoid twilighted Castro of 2001?

The fundamental problem that Montes brings the discussion back to what is the ideology of the spy. No modern intelligence service is effective because of the political loyalty of its agents. Money, blackmail or coercion are less fragile than enthusiasm for a certain government. Montes, however, said she did not receive any remuneration for her services. She acted out of fidelity to an ideology, out of resentment toward her country, because of her strange bond with Castro. That is the most obvious mark of her anachronism.

Not even Bond — who worked for Queen and Country — could say so much. Alcohol, remorse and women are his territory. On the contrary, Montes’ homeland does not exist. It is not Puerto Rico, even if she has relatives there; nor the United States, whose government she does not support; nor Cuba, where it would be a hindrance to the diplomatic romance with Washington. She has no other region left but her guarded personal freedom and her memory.

There is another explanation for Montes, perhaps more credible than ideology. Lust for the secret. The accumulation, classification and possession of secrets. The exhaustion of a life dedicated to the flow of data, typical of a machine, of a superior intelligence. Her capture, at a time of maximum overload, was the system’s response to the virus.

When a spy is burned, the best thing that can be offered to her, after such a long time, is anonymity. Reality, always gray and ordinary, recently brought us back to an Ana Belén Montes with gray hair, crows feet and a benign smile. She doesn’t want to talk; she doesn’t want to know anything about her past. As if Havana whispered instructions to her again, as if she were still wearing Rosa Klebb’s costume with honor, she announced the spy’s first commandment to the press: “I as a person am irrelevant. I have no importance.”

Translated by Regina Anavy

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‘To Write the Biography of Lezama is to Write a History of Cuban Culture’

“Lezama himself said: ’I don’t have a biography.’ He defended the autonomy of the literary work.” (Facebook/Casa Museo José Lezama Lima)

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 2 January 2022 — In a calm voice, Ernesto Hernández Busto (Havana, 1968) says that, at the funeral of José Lezama Lima, an alleged spy filmed everything with a camera. The video, which no one has seen, must have been hidden in the secret archives of ICAIC [Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry] or in a drawer of Villa Marista since that summer of 1976.

Lying on a tomb, with the apparatus on one shoulder, the unknown person recorded the faces of the mourners: Cintio Vitier, Ángel Gaztelu, Fina García Marruz, Raúl Roa, Ambrosio Fornet, Raúl Hernández Novás, Heberto Padilla and countless writers, officials, enemies and troublemakers.

From that moment on, says Hernández Busto, each of those present defends a different story about Lezama. Multiple anecdotes, opinions formulated at coffee time, plagiarized, misunderstood, distorted, forgotten and redone by his disciples. It is a complex region, in which the biographer always advances at his own risk.

Exiled in Barcelona, since the late nineties after several years in Mexico, Hernández Busto has been accumulating material for decades to write the first biography, in the strict sense, of Lezama. The book has become a kind of legend, and the author has only offered fragments to tempt the reader. Judging by these chapters — published in magazines such as Rialta, El Estornudo and Hypermedia — the Cuban project is cathedral, absorbing and does not even exhaust the Lezamian universe.

Lucid, Hernández Busto understands the magnitude of his commitment, in conversation with 14ymedio: “Whoever writes the biography of Lezama has to write, in reality, a history of Cuban culture, especially the republican one of the twentieth century. And perhaps also the history of a city: Havana.” continue reading

The problem is no different from that of those who established the canon of the sacred scriptures, speculates Hernández Busto. You have to face testimonies, contrast versions and sayings, consult multiple manuscripts, often apocryphal, as the evangelist Lucas does in El Reino [The Kingdom], the novel by Emmanuel Carrère.

“It is an unstable territory, because you have to differentiate gossip from history, always mixed with biographical anecdotes. A good example are the circumstances of his death and burial, told by various sources. That lack of definition turns any story into quicksand.” The writer also looks for the details, objects and evidence that give solidity to the text (such as knowing that Lezama’s funeral limousine was a 1959 Cadillac, a symbolic and ominous number).

“Moving between myth and exaltation is very uncomfortable, a constant doubt,” says Hernández Busto, who enjoys the challenge of collecting testimonies and detecting, after much research, who takes the right step in the labyrinth of versions. “The challenge is to make an English biography, more focused on the vital circumstances than on the works themselves; hence the provisional title: José Lezama Lima: a biography.”

The origin of this volume was a series of interviews he conducted, years ago and with a small recorder, with friends of Lezama, such as Father Gaztelu and José Triana. It was Triana’s wife, Chantal Dumaine, who provided him with several photographs of the burial where, in fact, the stranger appeared on the camera. “In a world of versions and assumptions, the discovery of a photo like this allows many things to be clarified,” he says.

Over time, the work grew in volume and difficulty. “A fundamental problem has been what to expose in the body of the text and what to place in the footnotes, which sometimes become small essays,” says Hernández Busto. The advances he has published attest to that temptation: with the secondary characters — the father, the mother, the sisters, the friends — another book could be composed.

To this must be added that it is intended to trace the biography of someone who distrusted the biographical exercise. “Lezama himself said: ’I don’t have a biography.’ He defended the autonomy of the literary work and repudiated Sainte-Beuve [whose critical method privileges the life of the author]. However, there are few more autobiographical books than Paradiso. That novel is a bit like the biography of a city, Havana, and a country, Cuba. Of course, in Paradiso, the biographical is recreated, used for a larger project, sublimated if you want. But all the scaffolding of the novel is deeply biographical,” he argues.

“The scarcity of biographies is a characteristic of the Cuban canon,” laments Hernández Busto, which is why he sometimes looks for neutral readers, outside the “Cuban world,” to evaluate the text. “Every time I finish writing a chapter,” he says, “I consult with friends, with people who met Lezama or lived during that time, but also with non-Cuban friends, who may have the perspective of a common reader. It is difficult to find the tone of the story while still being exhaustive.”

“If Lezama’s life is so interesting, it is because it includes two big unanswered questions,” Hernández Busto calculates: “Lezama and the Revolution, Lezama and homosexuality. Sex and politics. They are two great taboos, not only for this writer but for a culture and an era. Perhaps, after all, they are impossible to solve. But it’s worth trying.”

Translated by Regina Anavy

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‘With the Years You Learn That You Don’t Have to Dissent’

The scars that the Quinquenio Gris (The Five Grey Years) and the decades that followed left on Delfin Prats weren’t easy to conceal. (Omar Sanz/OnCuba)

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, Spain, 29 December 2022 — The only mention of Delfín Prats in the Historia de la Literatura Cubana [History of Cuban Literature] is a piece of critical sanitation, a general cleansing. Lenguaje de mudos [Language of Mutes] (1968), explains the text, was “a book that, for short-term reasons derived from an extremely deficient cultural policy… did not circulate.” The following sentence, dedicated to the collection of poems, Para festejar el ascenso de Ícaro [Celebrating the Ascent of Icarus] (1987), is followed by a great ellipse of twenty years and, after another tasteless comment, a sudden cut, a silence.

Published in 2008 and hatched much earlier, the third volume of this Historia – La Revolución (1959-1988), heroically reads the subtitle — is the most condescending and also the most ambiguous, because it does not refer to the deceased poets of modernism, nor to the chroniclers of war or even to the old authors trampled by Castro’s memory. If Volumes I and II are the “Cuban Book of the Dead,” Volume III is the “Book of the Living” and — as in the apocalypse — only those whose names are inscribed in its pages will be saved.

Time did not allow me to meet Delfín Prats, but I did get to know his contemporaries in Santa Clara, that charming city of poet-spies, chameleon editors, portable storytellers and professional flatterers. There his name was invoked by authors who had produced, after 1970, mediocre books with some daring ideas – more sexual than political — which fell under the scythe of the parametradores* [censors].

They presented themselves with those war wounds, just before clearly drawing the border between then and now. Justice had been done to them and, if there were mistakes, they were always personal, of a barely “defective” cultural policy. If they hated someone, it was Pavón or his provincial tyrants. It was not the Revolution that rejected them, it was the men.

The rehabilitation of Delfin Prats was, however, a more delicate operation and required tact. The documentary Entre el esplendor y el caos [Between Splendor and Chaos] — it was never known if it was an independent film or a commission from the Holguín telecenter — brought to light the image of a trembling writer, of a bohemian past and Soviet days, who resorted to rum as an anesthetic and isolation as the only way to survive. continue reading

Prats commented on his nights in Havana — avoiding mentioning Reinaldo Arenas, for whom he was a friend and finally a whistleblower — and warned the journalist not to put much pressure on him: “If I see a threatening situation, I get drunk and fade into the background.”

The scars that the Five Grey Years and the following decades left on Delfin Prats were not easy to hide. How to appease that nervous subject, who said on television: “If you ban a book in your country, those who are outside want to win over the author to their cause. And then, “it is possible that for some years it was thought that I, because of those open approaches of my youth, was going to be a poet of dissent.”

Luckily, his survival instinct led him to nuance everything, and he retouched the phrases like the most experienced censor. “Over the years you learn that you don’t have to dissent.” And also: “The poet only has to take care of his words.” As for the rest, “it’s better to leave it to the politicians.”

It has shocked me to see the Prats who won — in the opinion of those who kicked, spied on and lobotomized him — the National Prize for Literature. He remained impeccable. He is an old man in a blue guayabera, more wrinkled, if possible, gray and finally still. He is different from the cursed poet of the documentary, the young man who wore a ushanka [Russian fur hat] in Moscow and, of course, that boy who claimed to be called Hiram, to hunt his lovers on La Rampa.

“It is the testimony of a wreck, the shreds of a man,” Jorge Ferrer wrote on Wednesday, when he learned of the prize that was just given to Prats and that he, cowardly, had accepted.

Delfín Prats – “alcoholic and depleted,” according to Arenas – after the exhaustive and late cleansing of his memory, will finally be able to spout that “he always had someone powerful interceding.”

*Translator’s note: *Parametrados / parametracion: From the word “parameters.” Parametracion (parameterization) is a process of establishing parameters and declaring anyone who falls outside them (the parametrados) to be what is commonly translated as “misfits” or “marginalized.” This is a process much harsher than implied by these terms in English. The process is akin to the McCarthy witch hunts and black lists and is used, for example, to purge the ranks of teachers, or even to imprison people.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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Reading and Hunting

Johnny Depp as Lucas Corso, the ’book detective’, in The Dumas Club – Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s novel adapted for the screen [as The Ninth Gate] by Roman Polanski. (Captura)

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 1 January 2023 — Long before I changed countries, I had become a more or less civilised vagabond. Like a frenzied dog, I would scour the streets of my city in search of books, smuggle in a cigarette and find a quiet corner to devour them. This kind of habit doesn’t leave you, it gets worse over the years. At the moment however, it’s cold, and in order to find my books I have to put on a raincoat, a la Humphrey Bogart, grab an umbrella and sniff out the bookshops of my new city.

I continue to use my old tricks and keep sharpening my instincts.I enjoy haggling as if it were a hunt, an intellectual sport, and if the bookseller is a cultured type, courteous, and if he knows what he has, and what he’s talking about, then this promises to be the most stimulating of duels. Any respectable bibliophile knows that if he finds what he’s looking for, he has to contain the tension that runs down his spine — that childish joy he feels at every new discovery — and prepare for combat.

The bookseller, old pirate, comes up to you immediately. “Ah”, you declare casually, “I see you’ve got this copy”. “Indeed”, he replies, manipulatively, “yesterday we cleared out the library of a deceased person and found this, and this”. You don’t counter-attack straight away, you leave the book where it is, but half-hidden — there’s always someone ready to come sniffing around the books that you’ve left alone — and continue to prowl the bookshelves.

“Are you going to take it then?”, the bookseller insists suddenly, from behind your back. “Best not”, you reply, “look at it, the cover’s broken and at least four pages are creased”. “Let me have a look”, he says, taking the book in his hands, weighing it up as he turn its pages, which rustle at his touch. “No it’s a good book! Take it! Go on!” “Another time”, you say. “Another time it may not still be here”, he reasons. continue reading

You have to smile: that old ruse is an ancient and effective one. The enemy – as the bookseller knows well – is time, or, more specifically, that anonymous other potential reader who knows the book’s value as well as we do. The threat of this possibility troubles us for a moment and our adversary has taken us for defeated. He throws us an ultimatum: “You can pay me later”.

Protocol establishes a certain struggle, but he negotiates a few alternatives — delayed payment, a deposit, guarantee, even a curse — until finally you accept, you put the book under your raincoat and you go out, trying to dodge the downpour with your umbrella.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I owe my bookseller thirty euros. I’ve yet to pay for my yellowing Lumen edition of Ulysses, in two volumes, and Ship of Fools, by Cristina Peri Rossi — which I don’t even like. I maintain that all this compulsive and innocent buying, pathological at times, would have been just the same in any other country or in any other currency, be it in pesos, dollars, drachmas or rupees.

The habit of hunting for books and haggling on the price over a coffee with my bookseller is a behaviour for which there’s no cure. The game is addictive: I read in order to write, I write in order to earn a living, and when I do earn something — apart from the money I need just to survive — I spend it all on books. In today’s cynical and fast-paced world this ritual stops me from getting old.

Besides, the reason behind the book-mania is so personal and deep that it justifies any and every excess. Someone who is obliged to be on the move, to keep changing their bed and their city, keeps their books in boxes, either somewhere else far away, or turns themself — rucksack on shoulder — into a portable library. I always have to keep certain titles, certain authors, close to me, because if I don’t, I’m lost.

Available in a mental space, in an order which is known only to myself, in each country I recreate the library that I lost on the journey. I have always lived like this, fully aware that any attachment towards books — towards any object — is useless. Once a nomad, always a nomad.

Despite the warnings, I am surrounded and protected by a sea of books. In just one year their number has multiplied to a level of fanaticism, I’ve read them, thumbed through them and protected them, knowing that one day — the day I die, or long before — someone will disperse and overturn what I have created. This thought — the true end of a world — obsesses everyone who has made reading their religion.

We gamble this secret mythology, which reminds us that we are still young, irreducible and doglike, in each duel with our bookseller. It doesn’t matter who wins. What we keep under our raincoat, to shelter it from the drizzle… is a time-machine.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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A Country Ill from Chronic Laughter

Published, ironically, by a printing house on Calle Amargura (Bitter Street), the sketches in the book are by Conrado Massaguer. (Collage)

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, Spain, 18 December 2022 – If oblivion had a physical form, or a symbol, it would be that of a faded photograph. From an original shaky camera shot, or just from the degrading of the resulting photographic paper print itself, a photo that has lost its sharpness doesn’t tell us very much. One is tempted to think that, just as the paper deteriorates with the passage of time or even through the work of termites, so the person depicted in the photo also ends up in the land of abandoned things.

This thought occurred to me yesterday while I was looking at a photo of Gustavo Robreño, the forgotten Cuban republican writer who joined the team at the celebrated Alhambra theatre in Cuba in 1900 and composed El velorio de Pachencho (Pachencho’s Vigil) with his brother Francisco.

I’m looking at Robreño now, in a kind of daguerreotype of image; he has all of that fresh elegance of the nineteenth century — a white hat on his head, suit and walking cane — or at least he appears to have these details from what can be made out from the fading yellowing image. The picture looks as if it’s under water and it’s difficult to tell whether he’s looking genuinely surly or just mocking, whether his face is wrinkled or even if he’s sporting a moustache.

A man scattered across two centuries, stirred by theatre and politics, he was born in 1873 in Pinar del Río and died in 1957 — perhaps anticipating how the good times were about to end. As a young man, in Spain he read and discussed with all the intellectuals of the ’Generation of ’98’. The language of his books is creole, mocking — it’s impossible for him to write a single word without it having an opposite or a calculated crosswise meaning.

In 1915, Robreño undertook a kind of ’settling of scores’ with Cuba’s past, in order to better explain the convulsive beginnings of its early Republic. If I’m not mistaken, he wrote one of the first histories of the Island in the twentieth century, possibly the only one — apart from the comic strips of Vista de amanecer en el trópico (A View of Daybreak in the Tropics) by Guillermo Cabrera Infante — in which Cuba is described as an incoherent, not very serious place, sometimes charming but at the end of the day tragic and irredeemable.

Historia de Cuba: narración humorística (The History of Cuba: a Comic Narrative) is also a rare edition. Published, ironically, by a printing house on Calle Amargura (Bitter Street), the drawings in the book are by Conrado Massaguer, a promising young artist of 26 at the time. continue reading

On the book’s cover, Massaguer has drawn an amazed Christopher Columbus holding out a nappy (diaper) to an indigenous baby there in front of him on the ground, crying inconsolably. Behind them some Spaniards peer across at a palm grove from where a nanny goat gazes out suspiciously.

The scene is a forewarning of what’s to come. Robreño launches into a hillarious revision of the Cuban story from the first arrival of this famous Admiral up to the birth of the nation. No one escapes his satire. The prologue, signed by a skeptical ’Attaché’ — a pseudonym that isn’t difficult to attribute to Cabrera Infante himself in a previous life — puts the book into context: “The time of blood and heroism over, now experience Cuba in the time of caricature, in which it governs itself, legislates, and even makes revolutions to the sound of loud guffawing”.

It was the first cautionary note: the Cuban people have a historical compulsion to “sell their soul to the devil…and then live happily, unconcerned…inebriated”, “with a firefly in their hand and a big cigar in their mouth”. Robreño demonstrates this in his book, pointing out the ridicule of a multitude of episodes in which opportunists dress up with much ceremony.

Of the burning of the indian man, Hatuey, romanticised by historiography, Robreño says that it was “an admirable case of civilised savagery…or savage civility”. According to this writer from Pinar: the artist Velázquez “died of envy” because of Hernán Córtes the Brave — “as one couldn’t give the other up” — and Alejandro de Humbolt was a “German flora-fauna geologist who tried to show the world that Cuba was an almost habitable country and not a tobacco factory”.

In 1762 the Spanish treated the English invaders politely and asked them “if they would like [to take] anything” [meaning: to eat or drink]. The Count Albemarle’s reply was no less polite: “Havana!”. Rather circumspect, governor Juan de Prado then puts a scary warning out to Havana’s residents: “Citizens, the English are five miles away from the capital and according to reports they are all wearing ’pointy shoes’, strong and new. So have your backsides (asses) prepared because I fear it won’t only be on the ground where the invader puts his feet”.

Robreño’s book becomes positively acidic when he talks of the “patriots, traitors and loan sharks” of 1868, who argued against his “little memo” after the ’burning of Bayamo’, and even more when he refers to the first years of the republic, in a magnificent portrait of families who never will pardon neither the living nor the dead.

The history of Cuba — “A country ill from chronic laughter” — should, for Robreño, be evaluated from a higher perspective, that is, “from an aeroplane but with a handkerchief over your nose”. I wonder whether the collective rage of the nation would not have wanted to hide away Robreño’s book, deny his very existence, give him up for lost, or even burnt.

And it’s not surprising. If anyone wanted to undermine or subvert the the ’gravity’, fiction or convenient silence of all the Cuban politicians — and those of today are a grossly inflated version of those from antiquity — you only need to read Robreño’s apocryphal history to the kids.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

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Saramago’s Havana Book

“The house which I see in the photos is obviously not the house of a proletarian, but of an accomplished and wealthy novelist.” (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 4 December 2022 – A colleague of mine went to Lanzarote – the most eastern island of the Canaries archipelago – and on her return she sent me some photos of the house where José Saramago lived. I’ve always been an admirer of the Portuguese writer, famous for his large spectacles, his bitter, faithless prose, his reflective atheism and his fervour – scarred with age – for a communist utopia.

The house which I see in the photos is obviously not the house of a proletarian, but of an accomplished and wealthy novelist (he deserved it, without a doubt. He earned it – through his writing, not through government fawning and handouts). There’s a collection of beautiful inkpots on a shelf, pictures of some friends, the bed in which he died, a small green table where I’d like to sit and smoke, palm trees and cactuses on the patio, and, in the distance, a landscape which he described as “dark, and covered in bits of crushed lava”.

And books. Many books. Legions of heavy tomes which now rest on top of armchairs and bookshelves. Titles in various languages and from many cultures. Volumes, owned by a writer who travelled, dreamt and invented with intensity – though not about the other way in which we should live, dream or invent.

Not very much more than a few days ago – on 16 November – Saramago would have been 100. Few people remembered him in Cuba – a rough and volcanic island, much like Lanzarote – where the novelist was welcome, until he made a famous pronouncement which mortified Castro: “I’ve come this far” [“…and if Cuba is to continue their journey I’m staying behind”]. continue reading

I believe [when he died, in 2010] the National Library hung up a few posters and the usual crew got together to formalise his burial. Saramago donated the rights to his works to an island that ended up executing, much to his horror, the three Cubans who attempted to abandon our oppressive stone raft in 2003.

“The worst thing about Islands”, the lucid Portuguese novelist had written a couple of years earlier, “is when they start to imitate the sea that surrounds them. Under siege [from the sea], they [put their people under] siege”

Amongst the photos is one of Saramago’s bedside table. Underneath his spectacles, which now lie closed for ever, is one of his Lanzarote Notebooks: his diaries 1993-1997, which, either through boredom or excess of work, he abandoned. The following year, and after a long wait, the Swedes awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature.

It’s a frenetic decade: the end of the century. In publisher Alfaguara’s classic edition of the Notebooks that I have in my hands, he reflects upon the hypocrisy of Diana Princess of Wales and Mother Teresa, the embarrassment of Gorbachev appearing in a pizza comercial and the failure of the communist project; there are transcriptions of letters from Christian believers, infuriated by The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and there’s an account of how An Essay on Blindness was written; in these, Saramago is intimate, courteous, ironic and endearing, as if he’s conversing at the little green table on his Lanzarote patio.

And of course there’s an abundance of references to Cuba, to Roberto Fernández Retamar – the grey prominent figure at the Casa de las Américas – to Cuban writer Cabrera Infante, to the Castro-Guevara duo, and to the local version of socialism during the ‘Special Period‘.

In May 1993, the young poet Almelio Calderón – in exile today – sent him a letter written in pencil. “Our editorial policy is very slow. At the moment there is a huge paper crisis”, he told him before admitting nervously: “There isn’t any”. Fueled by a hope for change that didn’t happen, the young man with no pen concluded by saying: “Here we are living through historical moments, very unique, very important, very intense, and I hope that history will know how to record them in its pages”.

I continue turning the pages. On 5 January 1994 a planned journey to the Island falls through, a journey which he interpretes as “the last opportunity to return to the socialist Cuba that I admire”. At the end of that year he even pledged to stand up for Castro with Clinton.

The most intense link with Cuba in the Notebooks was the obsession which took over him after reading the beautiful Muestrario del mundo (The World’s Sampler) by Eliseo Diego. In 1993, Eliseo -“one of the greatest poets of this century, and I’ve said this both inside and beyond Cuba”, Saramago noted, – had just won the Juan Rulfo Prize. Shortly after, death came knocking at his “modest door”.

Heartbroken by the friendship that was not to be, the novelist retired to his library to read all of Eliseo’s poetry works. And it’s here he makes a discovery: “Matías Pérez” – proclaims a known passage by the Cuban, and which sounds to him [Saramago] like an incantation – “toldero [a seller of canopies] by profession, what was there in your huge pretensions that took you away with such elegance and haste”.

He feels the possibility of a new novel like it were a command from the dead. “Matías Pérez, who are you?” he notes down various times – in Lanzarote, in Lisbon, in Madrid or in Río de Janeiro. He dreams about the hot air balloon and starts to investigate – “I wanted to know the how and the when of such an appealing story” – and he writes to Retamar asking him for a clue, a lead, a ’silhouette’ of this Portuguese guy who disappeared forever over the rooftops of Havana. “Who knows, maybe I’ll go to Cuba to uncover the mystery of Matías Pérez. If not, I’ll just have to invent him, from head to toe”, he notes, and throws in the towel.

The end of the story is, I’m afraid, not very romantic. The sinister Retamar replies years later with a letter. Inside the envelope, carefully folded, there is a newspaper cutting about Matías Pérez, written in almost forensic tones, ending with: “The military authorities of the day carried out a thorough investigation. There was no trace. But months later, the remains of a hot-air balloon were found, in the coastal keys close to the Pinos Islands”.

Saramago must have destroyed the actual article – who knows whether or not he was instructed to by ‘inspector’/ curator Retamar, in order to deter him from writing the story – the ‘Havana novel’ that José Saramago might have written. Retamar, like Mephistopheles, later came to demand a favour: in exchange for that newspaper cutting he wanted a “brief portrait” of Guevara for his magazine.

On 2 July 1996, in his Lanzarote library, Saramago mentioned Matías Pérez for the last time: “If I get the time and I keep my determination up, perhaps one day I’ll get out and look for him”.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

*Translator’s note: Matías Pérez was a nineteenth century Portuguese-born Cuban, who was a canopy tradesman and an amateur balloonist, who disappeared mysteriously during one of his balloon flights from Havana.

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‘There is Only One Person Responsible: Fidel Castro,’ Reinaldo Arenas Wrote on December 7

Reinaldo Arenas was born in 1943 in Holguín, a telluric and difficult region, from which Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Fulgencio Batista and Castro himself also emerged. (Reinaldo Arenas Archive)

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 7 December 2022 — On 7 December 1990, 32 years ago, Reinaldo Arenas committed suicide “without first having to go through the insult of old age.” He himself recounts that, when they told him that he would soon die of AIDS, he went to his apartment and made a wish, half a prayer and half an insult, in front of the portrait of Virgilio Piñera.

“Listen to what I am going to tell you,” he snapped at the deceased, “I need three more years of life to finish my work, which is my revenge against almost the entire human race.” With unfortunate punctuality, three years after that sentence, and maintaining “equanimity until the last moment,” he killed himself in New York.

Of all Arenas’s texts, the most brutal and serene was his brief farewell letter, written to be published. “There is only one person responsible: Fidel Castro.” The phrase falls back on the Cuban reader, lapidary and current. “The sufferings of exile, the pains of exile, the loneliness and the illnesses that I may have contracted in exile, surely I would not have suffered if I had lived free in my country.”

Arenas was born in 1943 in Holguín, a telluric and difficult region, from which Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Fulgencio Batista and Castro himself also emerged. Of Guajira origin, he always kept the rusticity and innocence of a boy from the provinces. Ruffled with hair and imagination, with a deep and seductive speech, the young man soon made his way in Havana and maintained a long friendship with José Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera. continue reading

His best-known book, Antes que anochezca [Before Night Falls*], attests to the surveillance, persecution, and imprisonment to which he was subjected by Castro’s political police. The cruelty of the State against the writer, the cornering of him in the most unusual settings – from Lenin Park to a precarious boat heading to the US – could only engender in Arenas a lucid, spiteful memory that was true to itself.

His novels – which he had to secretly send abroad – had already made him famous. But when a journalist traveled to Havana to interview him, he had to solve a labyrinth of clues and tricks, audacity and passwords, to find Arenas in the end, like a happy minotaur, in some dilapidated lot.

The succession of photographs that accompany Before Night Falls allow us to see how his face, mischievous in childhood, flirtatious in youth, and sad and sentimental about to board the boat in Mariel, becomes spectral and serene in 1990.

More than three decades after his death, the work of Reinaldo Arenas continues to be terra incognita for the majority of Cuban readers and almost none of his books are published in his country, thanks to the censorship of the same government that exiled him.

Reading El Mundo Alucinante [Hallucinations*] or Celestino Antes del Alba [Celestino Before Dawn*] clandestinely, enjoying the pages of La loma del ángel [Graveyard of the Angels*] or savoring his poems by the sea, continues to be the most endearing way to remember Arenas on the anniversary of his death.

*Translator’s note: The translated titles are not necessarily direct translations but rather those used in the English editions

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A Stranger is Shipwrecked in Cabo Lagarto, Land of Tobacco and Forbidden Women

The ruin and demolition site of the Hotel Cosmopolita, in Camajuaní, originating from 1880, inspired a number of passages from Náufrago del tiempo (Castaway in Time). (Elena Nazco)

- An extract from the novel ‘Náufrago del tiempo’ (Castaway in Time), published by la editorial Verbum (2022)

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 26 November 2022

The village lives in a perpetual silence, as though words had the power to unleash a tempest. The women believe that any festivities would bring bad luck and catastrophe; the men never speak to one another and the children are forbidden from playing outside, to avoid the wind from disorientating them and snatching them away from their mothers.

When my daily work is done, someone from the village will usually give me the basics to survive. They think I’ve gone crazy because I keep breadcrumbs, fruit skins, grains and bits of anything digestible in the deep pockets of my shirt. These are for the little cat that follows me day and night, which is, after all, the only companion I have in the old hotel.

It’s to him that I owe the old pallet that I use as a bed, and the continual revelations that I have about the building.

His body is as skinny and ghostly as a blade, and it’s because of this that he’s able to understand the anatomy of the hotel better than I do. He knows all the passages, all the cracks that lead into the bedrooms, the crevices between the bricks, the strange creatures that live in all the pipes and tubes.

I try to sleep when I arrive back at the old hotel, in order to save any energy I get from the little food I have to eat. Even from within the ruins you can feel the electrified air and an atmosphere that becomes more and more charged, as though a hurricane were to come and shake the village’s foundations at any moment. continue reading

Sometimes the insomnia is too strong and I only get to sleep as morning approaches. In those moments I drift in and out of dreaming like someone drowning at sea, I hear all kinds of vermin scratching at the hotel’s walls, I see my father’s face, and the women’s faces. At the same time the creatures start to move, scuttle inside the piping, watching me with their little eyes, burning with night blindness. I know I’m not just imagining these creatures because the cat, which is my night guardian, also follows them with his hunter’s eyes.

Yesterday, thanks to my companion, I found a hotel bedroom door that was easy to break down. After I’d cleaned up the debris I was able to sleep, once again, this time on a relatively soft mattress.

I get the impression that everything I do is somehow bound up with the cat. He guides me through the hotel’s darkness, a veritable labyrinth that he knows better than I do, and he shows me which wall to tear down or when I should sleep. Whilst I get hungrier and hungrier and can start to see my ribs showing, he grows fatter, feeding on whatever I bring him each evening, as an offering to stop him from abandoning me to my fate in the middle of the storm that will soon arrive.

***

Since the dawn, the cat has started to nibble affectionately at my big toes. He does it to demand food, or when he wants to show me something new in the hotel. Obstacles broken through, and new passages discovered, the cat has brought to my attention a shaft of light, very weak, coming from the other side of a wall where I’d thought there were no more rooms.

I looked for the iron bar that I use for pulling down walls and gave this one a blow. On the third attempt the bricks gave way and I walked through the cloud of dust and into the space where the cat wanted to take me.

What I found there was both marvellous and terrible, and words themselves are useless at describing it properly.

***

In one place, as the prophets had foretold, there was the serpent and the dazzling bird, the stream filled with fish of every colour, docile beasts which grazed on grass and creatures that crawled up into the branches of the trees, the scaly bright lizard, bees, moths and ants in search of food; there were all kinds of plants, clinging onto healing stones and onto walls sculpted by time, fruit which ripened in seconds and fell to the ground only to become at one with the soil and the coldness there; and there was light, a golden, greenish light, almost as if the air itself were covered in moss, all a brightness and a heaven, with no indication at all of the approaching storm.

It was then that I remembered the hotel had once been a monastery; perhaps, before being a monastery it had been a piece of Eden itself, later recovered by the very words spoken by the monks.

Cover of the novel ‘Náufrago del tiempo’ (’Castaway in Time’) released in November by the Spanish publisher Verbum.

But there, in the middle of all that, there was also a man, sitting at the head of a long wooden table, being served with fruit and other delicacies, which the animals had brought for him. He remained completely still, eyes half open, naked as though it was his turn to be the Adam of that garden. His hands, long and bony, were ploughed through with small wounds that looked as though they’d been caused by a needle.

The cat jumped onto the table, took a bite from the fruit and lay down, very close to the man. Cautiously, because one doesn’t expect anything good to come out of Cabo Lagarto, I asked the man who he was, and where were we.

“I am the rock which supports the world”, he said to me, hardly opening his lips. “And when I fall, the globe too will fall”.

***

The man’s throat sounds deep and dusty, full of words, but from a place where time gets bogged down and becomes stone, bones, motionless matter. A rheumy liquid runs from his wrinkles, as though he had never closed his eyes. His grey beard covers his throat and his chest, and he spreads his hands as if, indeed, the very destiny of the cosmos depended on his steadying of the table and everything on it.

When we speak the animals look at us, from the grey cat to the lizards whose bodies are impossible to see completely because of all the weeds covering them.

The man speaks little and always replies in riddles. On the first day I limited myself to looking around the cloisters or the inner courtyard of the hotel, which was already a small universe for me. As the days went by the man became more revealing.

Sometimes he would say:

“I am as old as the stones and the mountains; the moon gave birth to me, the sun gave me life; I pronounced the first word ever spoken in the world, but I forget what it was. That’s why I’m here.”

Or he’d lower his forehead until it touched the table, and then changed his story:

“I fought hard during the war. The victors accused me of being a spy; the vanquished said I brought them ill fortune. Both sides sentenced me to death and decreed they’d erase my name from everywhere. I escaped and came here to take up this monastery”.

His hands appeared to be tied by some invisible chain. He moved them only once: to explain to me why he didn’t eat any of the delicacies on the table.

“I swore I’d kill the world and the world never forgets”, he said, as he moved his fingers to reach out for an orange. “Watch what happens if I dare to contradict my own blasphemy”.

At that moment, mice, cockroaches, insects and other vermin I can’t even name began to climb up the table legs. Birds came flying down from all parts of the ruin, and, while the old man tried to reach the fruit, the animals bit his fingernails and pecked his hands until his thick blood began to mess up the food along with the birds’ feathers and all the bugs.

“Now do you understand the weight that I carry?”

I wanted to reply, but I couldn’t speak, I was too full of revulsion for what I’d just witnessed. The only thing I could do was run, knock down the walls, get covered in dust and fall exhausted onto my rickety bed in the reception hall.

Translated by Ricardo Recluso

____________

“The Silences and Scandals of Cuban Freemasonry” is Presented at the Miami Book Fair

Acosta defines the post-1959 stage as the “decay of Cuban Freemasonry.” From one of the nations with the greatest influence of the order worldwide, it became one of the weakest. (14ymedio)

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 18 November 2022 — The book, Del templo al temple. Silencios y escándalos de la masonería cubana [From Temple to Temple. Silences and Scandals of Cuban Freemasonry] (Editorial Primigenios, 2022), by journalist Camila Acosta, will be presented from November 18 to 20 at the Miami Book Fair. It’s a history of the Masonic order on the Island, which details in a special way the order’s vicissitudes after 1959.

Acosta’s research, which had as its background a documentary that she recorded for her graduation thesis at the University of Havana, is presented as the reverse of the story that the regime — in the figure of historians such as Eduardo Torres Cuevas — has attributed to Cuban Freemasonry.

In the back-cover note, the writer and Freemason Ángel Santiesteban Prats points out that the book allows access to a history that “had been extinguished for six decades because that was decided by Fidel Castro,” and he affirms that Acosta has provided a “response to the censorship of the totalitarian regime” on the circumstances in which the order was forced to operate after the revolutionary triumph.”

“Camila Acosta entered a world forbidden to those outside the Masonic fraternity,” continues Santiesteban, who also regrets that the “majority of the Masons themselves barely knew about their own history.”

In a volume of 422 pages that is now for sale on Amazon, Acosta reviews the historiographic tradition that precedes the order and provides details about the female branch, the Daughters of the Acacia, and about the Masons who, in turn, have participated in movements opposed to the Government. continue reading

Criticizing the material she addresses, Acosta defines the post-1959 stage as the “decay of Cuban Freemasonry.” From one of the nations with the greatest presence and influence of the order worldwide — with more than 34,000 members — it became one of the weakest in its context. Confiscations of property, infiltrations and aggressive propaganda against its postulates were part of Castro’s strategy to dismantle Cuban Freemasonry.

Obsessed with the possibility that institutions such as fraternities, secret orders and churches would form an opposition front, the Revolution launched systematic attacks on the Masonic infrastructure and threatened young people not to join its ranks.

The exile of many Cubans — including numerous Masons — between 1959 and 1970 is another cause for the decay of the order, says Acosta. Those who remained in the country were forced to report to the Government who attended the meetings, what issues were discussed and who espoused them, as well as “deliver copies of the minutes” and “pay heavy fines for not doing so or delaying,” she says.

“The very fact of belonging to Masonry or some fraternal or religious institution was interpreted by the authorities as a symptom of lack of revolutionary devotion,” Acosta explains in the ninth chapter of her book, which details the schism that the order experienced when it tried to move the headquarters of the Great Lodge of Cuba to Florida.

From the more or less intense persecution of those years, the Cuban Freemasonry organized different initiatives such as the Clandestine Masonic Movement, with expressly anti-communist guidelines.

After several decades of tension, with the arrival of the so-called Special Period, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of its financial support, and the return of Cubans to religion and other related practices, Freemasonry experienced a boom in membership. However, in 2011, the program Razones de Cuba [Cuba’s Reasons] revealed the complicity of former Masonic Grand Master José Manuel Collera Vento with State Security, which increased disappointment with the order and suspicion among its members.

This episode triggered numerous difficulties and tensions between the Government and the order, and exposed the constant “manipulations” — in Acosta’s opinion — that Freemasonry suffered at the hands of the Office of Religious Affairs of the Communist Party.

The most recent stage in the history of the order, including the imprisonment of several Freemasons during the so-called Black Spring of 2003, or the letter signed by the Masonic Grand Commander to Miguel Díaz-Canel against the police repression of 11J [the protests of 11 July 2021] are also addressed by the journalist in her investigation.

Acosta, born on the Isla de la Juventud [Isle of Youth] in 1993, is a correspondent for the Spanish newspaper ABC in Havana and writes for several independent media. From Temple to Temple was published by Primigenios, a Cuban publishing house based in Miami with a catalogue of almost 500 titles, directed by the writer Eduardo Casanova Ealo.

Translated by Regina Anavy

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‘Life in Cuba is Almost a Heroic Act’

Adrián Martínez Cádiz has had to “chat” several times with the political police. (Facebook)

14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 25 October 2022 — Silent, emphatic, direct in what he thinks and says, the young Havanan Adrián Martínez Cádiz has had to “chat” several times with State Security. The agents are difficult interlocutors and gesticulate too much. The last appointment, on October 21, lasted an hour, with an effusive and rough lieutenant colonel who calls himself “Kenya,” a well-known stalker of numerous activists.

Martínez, who works as a journalist in several initiatives of the Catholic Church in Cuba and for the EWTN network, tells 14ymedio what it’s like to “dialogue” — so to speak — with the G2 officers, at the police station in Plaza de la Revolución.

“The gestures, the looks, the tones and the manner were threatening all the time,” says the young man, who spent an hour in interrogation with Officer Kenya and another soldier who identified himself as José Antonio.

“They wanted to officially warn me that I’m engaging in pre-criminal behavior by posting on my networks, ’inciting a crime’ and publishing texts that disparage Díaz-Canel, which they consider contempt,” says Martínez, who was threatened with criminal proceedings if he continued to be critical of the Government on his social networks.

The agents showed him photos of himself with activists and opposition figures such as Anamely Ramos, Omara Ruiz Urquiola, Rosa María Payá and rapper El Funky. “They won’t do anything for you,” they told him. “What they want is to send you to do things from the United States and ’perform theater’.” He replied that Ruiz Urquiola and Ramos, for example, had been prevented from entering the country. continue reading

Lieutenant Colonel Kenya then raised his voice and said that “it was a lie,” and that the Government didn’t prevent anyone from entering the Island. “Almost at the end he asks me what I was committed to, to write it in the warning act,” Martínez says. “Nothing at all,” he said, refusing to sign the document.

“Better for me,” the officer spat and left the room. After the interrogation, the police let in two officials of the Ministry of Communications. Martínez left the station with a fine of 3,000 pesos, although — by order of the officers — they didn’t confiscate his phone.

That day, activist Adrián Cruz, known as “Tata Poet,” a friend of Martínez, was also questioned. A group that included several Catholic priests was waiting for both young people outside the station.

“They’ve never clearly told me to ’get out of Cuba’,” he says, but indirect campaigns have become increasingly aggressive. Ciberclarias [online “catfish”], he continues, are increasingly active in the groups that buy and sell, on common access sites or popular pages. “And, unfortunately, there are people who still believe them. I have friends in Camagüey who went to a family member’s house where I was the subject of conversation, saying that I’m paid from the United States to publish and tell the truth,” he says.

Another notable difficulty arises when it comes to temporarily leaving the country. “It’s an odyssey,” complains Martínez. “They always review me exhaustively and ask me questions. Upon my arrival from a trip I was interrogated for 45 minutes in a room at the airport, and I was threatened with jail if I kept publishing.”

On that occasion they examined his luggage piece by piece, and kept “under investigation” two laptops, hard drives, USB sticks, cameras and other items related to communication. “When the objects were returned to me, the laptops had been forced and didn’t close well.”

For Adrián Martínez, life in Cuba is almost a “heroic act.” To the daily difficulties, blackouts and shortages, the surveillance of the political police is added. Religious spaces, such as Catholic university groups and “problematic” parishes, are continuously infiltrated by young agents.

“We Cubans have an ’extra sense’ to recognise them,” says Martínez, although he can’t specify what it is that immediately betrays the spies. “However, you have to be sure before accusing someone,” he says, “because there is also a tendency to think that we are always monitored. In addition, those of us who are disturbed, attacked and harassed can fall into the excess of thinking that everything bad that happens to us is caused by them.”

“There are infiltrators and collaborators at all levels,” he adds, “but you have to live without fear. We do nothing but tell the truth and try to do good.”

The persecution and surveillance of State Security on activists, religious leaders, artists and intellectuals has caused people of different ideologies to be united against the Government’s oppression. This has also contributed to many priests and nuns of the Island, such as Lester Zayas, José Luis Pérez Soto, Jorge Luis Gil and Nadieska Almeida, taking a more radical position against the regime in the capital.

’Each one of us has gone through these interrogations, through the threats, and we know what they represent,” says Martínez. “I understand that people are afraid, I am too, but there are things bigger than fear: that is what unites us in front of a police station to accompany, to embrace those who are being repressed not only for defending their rights, but also the rights of others. It’s not fair to abandon someone who is defending my right.”

The young man believes that State Security has managed to expel many “inconvenient” Cubans from the country. Those who remain on the Island — “those who are remaining” — will have to face the viciousness of the Government. “As for those who have left, I respect and hug them. I fight every day, like so many others, against the temptation to leave and forget everything.”

Regarding the passivity before the regime of which the Cuban bishops, who met last Friday with Pope Francis, are accused, Martínez points out that “many times I don’t agree with ways of proceeding, with particular opinions or other things. When I have the opportunity, I let them know and set out my opinions. I have always been listened to with respect.”

Translated by Regina Anavy

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