Category: Xavier Carbonell

Remnants of the Cuban Censor Who Attends Me

Xavier Carbonell in a debate last month in the Tenerife Noir Film Festival, the Atlantic Festival of the Noir Genre, organized each year in the Canary Islands. (Facebook Tenerife Noir)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, May 22, 2022–Those who think that all ciberclarias* are slick and anonymous are mistaken. Some come with pedigree and martial ranks. There is a group of ever-loyal comrades, trained in military or Party schools, who do not understand the Five Grey Years, nor the special periods, nor have they foreseen crises other than capitalism.

Antonio Rodríguez Salvador belongs to this caste of commissars, censor by vocation and certainly by trade. Last week, I came upon an article by this subject where he demonstrated stupefaction at one of my statements, published in this and other dailies: that the Italo Calvino Prize for Novels — one of Cuba’s most prestigious — had been awarded to me last year and I rejected it in favor of another literary award offered in Salamanca, where I now live.

With more reluctance than skill, what Rodríguez Salvador suggests is that the author of this column must be unhinged, a pathological liar, and that the news outlets that interviewed me, among them El País and 14ymedio, displayed lack of professionalism by speaking with a deranged man.

My first reaction was compassionate laughter, because I understand that the business of defending Castroism is ever more difficult and everyone has to make a living. I understand that Humberto López’s yapping and that of the so-and-so from Con filo — I never remember his name — eclipse the humble trade of censoring in writing, in La Jiribilla or in Granma. continue reading

The nonsense of this CDR [Committee for the Defense of the Revolution] member — inconceivably, a reader of independent news outlets — not only implicated me, but also a colleague at this daily. Thus, to dispel any of my censor’s doubts, I will clarify a couple of points about that day when I received two awards for a single novel.

Toward the end of October 2021 a dark personality called me from Uneac (National Union of Writers and Artists in Cuba) — I don’t plan to identify him, but Rodríguez Salvador must know who I am speaking of: “Don’t act like you don’t know,” he said, “you won the Italo Calvino.” My interlocutor assumed that the Uneac officials in Santa Clara, where I lived and worked, had already spread the rumor. But they were miraculously discreet and I only found out during that phone call. “We do not have a way to get you here, so figure it out.”

Then he read to me the remarks of the judges, which included Roberto Méndez, Carlos Zamora, and Gaetano Longo, which included beautiful and very generous words about the novel. If they are gentlemen and honorable, they will say whether I lie.

On that day I received two missed calls from a Spanish number. I responded and it ended up being the office of the mayor of Salamanca, who on the following day gave me the news of the other prize. When I presented the situation to the person at Uneac, his words were these, “The Spaniards will take the money back when they find out and furthermore you will cause political issues for us with the Italian Embassy, which funds the one here.”

Due to copyright, I could not accept both awards. I opted for the Peninsula’s award, and not for metaphysical reasons: it offered more money and would allow me to leave an oppressive, castrating country where those who travel, live, and triumph — paid by the Government — are the commissars like Rodríguez Salvador, who takes photos of himself “strolling in Buenos Aires” during that country’s book fair.

“Well,” clarified the person from Uneac when I communicated my decision, “we’ve reached a new agreement and there is no problem with your resignation. Send it to me in writing.” His tone, always vulgar and now evasive, had changed since our last conversation. “You know,” he said before hanging up, “that if you say anything, we will categorically deny it.” The prize was awarded in November to writer and finalist, Dazra Novak, who undoubtedly deserved it.

They knew the results since the beginning of 2021. Uneac kept it a secret because the pandemic restrictions prevented Italians from traveling to the country with the 4,000 euros. The fact that one novel on surveillance, paranoia, and censorship had won the prize is a symptom of how weary they, the commissars themselves, are of the game, the act, and the secrecy.

Paradoxically, Uneac opted to hide everything, begin from scratch, and “categorically deny.” The Association’s panic of the “irregular” explains why Antonio Rodríguez Salvador does not have the slightest idea of what happened and accused me of post-modern piracy.

Among other finesse of intellect, the Sancti Spiritus-based writer rambles on about my opinions of the Pope, spiritual fulfillment, and life on the island. “It may be that for this author it is less profitable to publish his works in Cuba than portray himself as censored by the regime,” he concludes.

Rodríguez Salvador forgets — conveniently — what I said in that same magazine and now repeat. I am not interested in playing the role of a censored intellectual (although I was and many times); I am not a writer of political literature (though I am a citizen with the right to criticize the Government of his country) nor do I dramatize exile. I care about writing and living, freely and  decently, and that is impossible in Cuba.

“On the conscience of glorified ciberclarias like Rodríguez Salvador are the young prisoners and exiles of the Island. Those who die crossing borders to escape their country. Their families. The censors, for cowardice, money or the inherent malice of mediocrity, are the dictatorship’s most sordid accomplices. If they weren’t so dangerous and infamous, they’d only evoke pity.”

*Translator’s notes: The so-called “cyberclarias” are accounts that hide behind false identities and photos to defend the actions of the Cuban government on Twitter and attack criticism made by dissidents or activists. (Source)  

Translated by: Silvia Suárez

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‘That Secret Symphony’, Holguín’s Poetic Dissidence

Reinaldo Arenas, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Delfín Prats, Rafael Vilches, Luis Yusef y Jamila Medina. (Collage)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 21 May 2022 — Holguín exists thanks to a plague of ants and bibijaguas [leaf cutter ants]. It is the strangest and most enigmatic region of the Island. Columbus entered Cuba through it and in Nipe – the largest bay in the archipelago – the Virgin of Charity was found. In that province, according to Cabrera Infante, a dangerous “Bermuda triangle” was formed: Banes, Birán and Gibara. Batista was from Banes, Birán was the Galician fief from which the Castro brothers would emerge, and the writer himself was born in Gibara.

To that list of people from Holguin – both brilliant and disastrous – should be added General Calixto García, the pianist Frank Fernández, the great poet Gastón Baquero, Arnaldo Ochoa – the most famous person executed by the revolution – and even the current Prime Minister, Manuel Marrero Cruz.

Holguín, with its warmth and mystery, is also the city of “rebel” poets, the uncomfortable, imprisoned and exiled ones par excellence, such as Reinaldo Arenas and Delfín Prats. Both have gone down in history for their dissident vocation and because they did not remain silent in the face of power. The two were marginalized and deprived – in their time – of the place that corresponded to them in national literature.

Arenas – the best Cuban novelist after Carpentier – opened up the possibilities of a nonconformist and harsh voice, which embodied all marginalizations: homosexuality, “illiteracy” according to the parameters of its censors, drama, the drive towards death, and its eastern and guajira origin. Like a protective ghost of his own, the example of Arenas returned to his land and was fruitful. continue reading

Offering a testimony of that dissident tradition of Holguin writing is Esa secreta sinfonía [That secret symphony]. More than 30 “heir” poets are grouped around a common and imaginary space: the intimate homeland, the city of the Cruz and the parks, and the lands and towns that surround it.

The anthology, with a selection by Beatriz Torrente and edited by Orlando Coré, reviews the most significant authors of the province, whose generations are clearly outlined: the first, inaugurated by Arenas himself, involves already classic and renowned poets, such as Delfín Prats, who lived their youth at the beginning of Castroism.

The second is that of the “sons of the revolution” – such as Ghabriel Pérez, Rafael Vilches or Luis Yussef – who see the Berlin Wall fall and write during the Special Period, with blackouts and shortages.

And the third is that of those who are now 30 or 40 years old, born of disappointment, and many of them exiled or about to be: Moisés Mayán, Javier L. Mora, Camilo Noa, Yunior García Aguilera and Jamila Medina, perhaps the voice most important of this time.

Beyond the usual themes – time, sexuality, death, passions – they all share a meditation on History that often turns into anxiety: “Hemlocks, gallows, crucifixions, bonfires, exiles, castrations, executions and torture, and you impassive,” claims Arenas in the poem that opens the book.

But even when the denunciation, the prophecy, is demanded of him, the poet remembers that they are watching him and they will come looking for him, without anyone defending him: “How to speak of smells and times – of another terror – / when there on the corner / perennially a patrol car pulls up.”

Other poets, such as Orlando Coré, transform personal memory into writing, and offer evidence of their youth in the capital: “From the University of Havana they expelled / birds and diversionists. / Furtively, the / some recognized each other; / surreptitiously , the others, / passed the proscribed titles: / we conspired.”

The motif of the Great Journey, the Journey of Initiation – from east to west, from “the hill” to “the plain” – is frequent in provincial writers, but the generations after Arenas and Coré seek their horizon in exile.

Holguín, like Cuba, is scattered around the globe. As Yunior García notes: “We are not an island, damn it / We are an archipelago / One that holds on with brittle threads / Its unconnected parts / One that has already lost islets at night / And keys in the fog.”

The anthologists place between the pages of That secret symphony an old map of Holguín. In this symbolic space, poets, living and dead, exiled or insular, gather to share their painful memory. This book not only fulfills the role of a poetic collection, but also represents the spirit of that yellowish map of the city: a compass with which to find the deep, lucid and anguished voice of Holguin, which is also Cuban.

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Editor’s Note: That secret symphony. Cuban poets from Holguín, selection by Beatriz Torrente and edition by Orlando Coré, Loma de la Cruz Ediciones. Holguín-Miami, 2022, 312 pages.

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

Cuba: The Old Guard

Masonic Lodge, corner General Navas and San José. (mapio.net)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 10 April 2022 — Memory is made of places, paths and faces. We go through them again and again, while the rum is spent and the tobacco is burned; taking advantage of the conversation with a stranger, during dreams and obsessions. The one who remembers knows that the world — his world — is constantly eroding into oblivion, and that every gesture or word we said, over time, gives way and withers. Smells that disappear, faces of people — often near and dear — that are no more than yellowish shadows, voices.

However, there is always something that resists loss. Each has his own: a phrase that serves as a code of honor; the last words of an uncle or a grandfather; a kiss; the taste of guarapo that we drank, when we were young, and that we never tasted again. Things so alive and so ours that we preserve them as a talisman.

If you ask me, the place is always the same: the veteran temple of the Freemasons, in my town, a collapsing mansion that I can see if I close my eyes. Rampant, solid, gritty, giving no respite to the cyclones that have wanted to knock it down.

When I was a child, my grandfather gave me his father’s Masonic jewels — a builder’s apron and a necklace with the silver square — I already had the pipe the old man had smoked all his life, some photos and a touchstone: being the great-grandson of a high-caliber Mason allowed me to play in the lodge gardens, browse among the columns and play dominoes with the elders. continue reading

To get to the temple I just had to open the door of my house and cross the street. There, a brotherhood of gentlemen in guayaberas was waiting for me, of musty and correct speech, who had organized the game of dominoes as a series of pitched battles. They allowed me to use their canes as magic wands, read leaning against the walls, and run around the corridors.

On Friday nights, some young people would come and lock themselves in a room that I thought was sacred, because they had never allowed me to enter. I saw everything from afar: the silence, the tranquility and the impeccable dress — inconceivable today, between poverty and carelessness — then, a complicit tobacco in the armchairs, a coffee perhaps.

The next day I peppered one of my gray-haired, smoking friends with questions. The old man explained to me as best he could — I was eleven or twelve years old — that free men of good will met in that place, that they were forbidden to talk about religion and politics, and that everything that was done and said within those walls was secret, so the order had been preserved for centuries by discretion and honor.

Then he led me to a wall full of portraits. They were old photos, moldy, pressed together. He pointed to the center of the wall and told me: that’s your great-grandfather. There he was, in a suit and with glasses very similar to the ones I’m wearing, smiling. They are the old guard — he continued — the teachers of forever, those who were here from the time of the mambises until we fell into disgrace.

They were the ones who had painted the constellations on the ceiling of the loggia, the ones who had commissioned the dark varnished seats and chairs. They had bought the encyclopedias that had survived the dust in a mighty wooden bookcase, next to the broken clock. The hands of those noble ghosts grasped the swords — lion-knobbed, flaming and solemn — that I played with.

To me they were gentlemen. People from another time. And although I never became a Mason, that mythology of honor and tradition, the value of a man’s word, the sense of homeland and duty, I learned from them, from the peculiar history of Freemasonry in Cuba. The bond I have with the Freemasons, familiar and remote, still makes me proud.

I don’t have to remind anyone that almost all of our founding fathers were members of the order; nor that much of the progress of small towns during the republic is due to them — music bands, asylums, charities — everyone knows that Machado was expelled from the lodge for being unworthy and murderous, and that they were persecuted again and again after 1959, like the priests in their parishes and the nuns in their convents.

With pain, those old men tell me that they have to open the minute books — documents prohibited for the uninitiated — so that the police can review them. Not to mention the countless infiltrators they are forced to tolerate, most of them unscrupulous and disrespectful young people, who will never understand the meaning of decency.

But I don’t want to embitter this page or the reader: there have always been informers and poor devils, and even those who pay them are disgusted. Let them fix them as they can with their conscience and with history.

I like to remember that the imprint of these ancient Cubans is there, available and alive. That behind this island of survival and impudence they want to turn us into, there is a lineage of calm gentlemen who play with their grandchildren and give them books as gifts. A family that is not yet crushed by exiles, prisons and boarding schools in the countryside. A fondness for our essentials — food, tobacco, Sunday afternoons — and the hope of its return.

It is a legacy of the old guard, the country that we yearn for with memory. We may have lost it, but we never forget it.

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

Cuba: The Loss and Recovery of the Caudillo

Educated for war, violence and insomnia – are we not descended, perhaps, from conquerors and navigators? – we are fascinated by the silhouette of power, we are pursued by the voice of the strong man, of the great captain. (Cubadebate)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 13 March 2022 — I examine my conscience about our dictators and warlords. Educated for war, violence and insomnia – are we not descended, perhaps, from conquerors and navigators? – we are fascinated by the silhouette of power, we are pursued by the voice of the strong man, of the great captain. It is not about obedience, about the primitive fear of the cacique, but about an almost metaphysical morbidity for authority. That morbidity encouraged and continues to drive the destiny of the nation, our political life, our literature and even our family world.

Cuban history often seems to boil down to the tension between the president and the struggle to free ourselves of him. In each case we were exhausted after a long war; disappointed – in the mambises, in the liberals, in democracy – pained by a previous tyrant – Batista, Machado, Weyler – and willing to give up anything, land, freedom, family, as long as there is a little peace, a little silence between the bullets.

I look at the photo of a great-uncle of mine in the thirties: a picket line of friends, in a T-shirt and suspenders; they pose shamelessly in a Machado prison. They laugh, the damned. They were journalists and troublemakers. City cockerals who made fun of the illiterate and obese president (’a nice fat man’, Langston Hughes said of him).

Hunched and nostalgic over a desk, I see my great-uncle again in a photograph from the sixties. After battling Machado and Batista, he was now fleeing Castro in his New York exile. I add – as an additional credential – that he was a close friend of Martínez Villena, the poet, and he kept some photographs of him that are now in my Cuban home. continue reading

His political conversion was methodical and slow, screened through the death of his friends and police repression. He was hardening, becoming more disbelieving. When Castro came, he recognized the whiff of despotism and understood – that dog had bitten him before – the cliff we had gotten ourselves into.

In other words, I come from a long tradition of being uncomfortable and distrustful of power. I carry that suspicion in my blood and I don’t believe in any of those who sit in the Palace armchair, I say this to avoid future inconveniences.

When I see myself so far from home, in the coldest and most memorable corner of Castile, wondering what remedy there is for what happens to my generation – writers, painters, philosophers, filmmakers, young people and good people, prisoners and exiles – how can we manage our national salvation, I return to my great-uncle, laughing at the Machado policeman who threw his photo in prison.

That memory gives me strength.

Physically we inhabit a space, but sentimentally – said Saramago – we are inhabited by a memory. We have the experience of our dead and a catalog of totalitarian bastards whose movements we analyze. We have culture and knowledge to avoid falling into the traps of nationalism, shouting and oblivion, which are the marks of the tyrant.

For my part – and after reading a lot about stabbings and flash fires in Asturias, Carpentier and Vargas Llosa – I am giving a public reading of my brief manual to sniff out dictators, in case it helps.

The despots understand our history and take advantage of it, they know how we functioned fifty, one hundred, two hundred years ago. They juggle time and words – they are excellent storytellers – they convince us of their logic, of the correctness of their statements. They aspire to be masters of history, which rarely absolves them.

They bring the rhetoric of the messiah, of the chosen one. Since Céspedes couldn’t, nor could Martí, since the others are corrupt or dead, I am the capable man. The one who came to save them. In their support they invoke the evil enemy: the imperialists, those from the other shore, those who are not with us, always better armed and with more viciousness.

They grudgingly tolerate intellectuals, journalists, artists, priests, military officers, diplomats, and international managers, because they need them. But if they can manipulate and educate them, the better. They don’t always show their faces. Batista or Castro is not the same as Díaz-Canel – a guy who looks more like Laredo Bru, a forgotten Republican figurehead – gray eminences scare me more, the tropical Richelieu, like the famous Orestes Ferrara or the sinister López-Calleja.

There is always something grotesque about them: a couple of severed fingers – Machado was a butcher among my people – a dirty beard and too long fingernails; an intolerable, Quevedian nose that cannot be covered with guayaberas. Or a demon appeal. There is everything.

They gave us free rein for infamy, denunciation, fratricidal crime. And even so, all of them – perhaps less so now, which is not the time for enthusiasm or open forums – were applauded or admired. Machado asked the time and they told him “whatever you want it to be, president.” Castro was the horse; Batista, the man; and so all our monarchs have had their dose of adoration, molasses, idolatry.

God, who saves the metal, said Borges, saves the slag. Tradition retains all our leaders, to give us a feast in conversation and reading; so as not to skid on the old enemy of Cubans: bad memory. And meanwhile, sitting on this balcony where I seem to see the island from afar, smoking, I wait.

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

The Trade of Nostalgia

Stories like this, sudden and bloody, of nostalgia and affection for what was lost. People who talk about what they didn’t have and what they wanted. (DC)
    • With this text, the author, originally from Villa Clara, inaugurates his collaboration with ’14ymedio’. He requested asylum in Spain after giving up the Italo Calvino Award for El fin del juego (The End of the Game).

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 27 February 2022 — I have him in front of me, calm and austere, in a café in Madrid. He is a hard-boned guy with an old jacket and a broken nose, as a reminder of an old fight. Your country is not easy – he tells me – I tried to stow away there several times, to find out. To understand. Once I arrived along the coast — he pauses and sips his tea — with a new passport and on a boat.

Those were the hard years, and to see myself with so and so should be in a hotel, publicly. I had been a war correspondent and had a nose for who was watching me. After interviewing one of those characters, an exceptional and dangerous man, a waiter recognized me and I stormed out of there. The car was going full throttle and behind it the police, howling like in the movies. Traffic lights magically turned green.

I eluded them, but a few days later they managed to grab me alive and gave me a most educational beating. In a briefcase was my camera and other equipment. They took everything, including the deferred seaman’s passport.

I arrived at my embassy with a blood-stained shirt and a boxer’s face. They gave me a piece of paper with which I could file the complaint. The station secretary, a skinny and skittish girl, was waiting for her boss’s look to type the statement. What would those chimpanzees, with their rudiments of Havana karate, imagine I was carrying the cassettes of my report hidden under the seat of the car?

You were already an old dog, I tell him. An old dog — he repeats, smiling — just the same. continue reading

In the end I found her again – he adds, as he wraps the scarf around his neck. Who? The secretary of the station, who managed to leave the country and escape from her husband, a guy with airs and contacts who wouldn’t let her leave. But she made it, you see: the world is a handkerchief. She detailed her life to me, as I have now done with you.

If I had to count all the shipwreck stories I’ve ever heard.

Stories like this, sudden and bloody, of nostalgia and affection for what was lost. People who talk about what they didn’t have and what they wanted. People who, like me, have nothing but words and that is what they take everywhere. Words, laughter and cigar smoke – which is what I feel like now, to accompany the conversation of a friend, who says goodbye and hugs me.

I will have to tell this sometime, I say. And that’s what I’m doing here and now. Everything new is timid and, to some extent, crooked. However, I want to make this commitment to writing, calibrate it, measure the limits of my voice. I think of all those who preceded me in the Shipwrecks that give this column its name, coming from the sea and marked by calamity.

The island bites them but also gives them a reason for writing. It offers them small consolations: cigars, books, friendship, the rituals of good eating, the enigma of the Creole phrase, a whole literature and a destiny. In short, it offers them nostalgia as a trade and words as anesthesia.

I am going to talk about all this, if you allow me to place here the only valuable thing I have: my memory and the memory of others, which I have accessed through voice and books. Shipwrecks of existence that end up on paper, mediated by tobacco and rum that warms the soul, as in Conrad’s novels.

Here we will see each other – I hope – from time to time, in this room that I would like to imagine as an antique shop or a cafe. Two armchairs to talk, an ashtray to flick the words into and soft music, if possible a bolero. This being the case – with a good wind and better fortune – this shipwreck will not be so bitter.

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