In order to leave the country, he had to go to a police station and declare himself “scum”
14ymedio, Havana, August 20, 2024 — The signature of the poet Reinaldo García Ramos was the third in the inaugural issue of Mariel, the exile magazine that marked an entire generation of Cuban intellectuals and artists. This Monday, the writer’s family reported his death in Miami, at the age of 80, after months of worsening cancer. He was, along with Reinaldo Arenas, one of the most prominent authors of the so-called Mariel Generation.
His death was announced by Milkos D Sosa, García Ramos’ cousin and one of the people – along with the painter Sergio Chávez and his cousin Marianela F. Molina – who accompanied him in his last moments. Sosa described that the poet died “quietly” at 3:45 pm and that his final thoughts were about his books, in particular Una amiga en Paris (Ediciones Furtivas), published this year. “His only wish is that they honor his memory by keeping his literary work alive,” the message ended.
García Ramos defined the Mariel exodus as an “untimely decision of an absolutist ruler,” Fidel Castro. For his colleagues – such as Arenas and the Abreu brothers – exile marked not only their life but also their writing, which acquired a strong commitment to the denunciation of the regime, attested to by the magazine.
He defined the Mariel exodus as an ’untimely decision of an absolutist ruler’
Born in Cienfuegos in 1944, the son of Galician and Canarian emigrants, García Ramos studied French Language and Literature in Havana. A student of personalities such as Camila Henríquez Ureña or Mirta Aguirre – a staunch communist – he remained, in his own words, with a “low profile” so as not to risk the livelihood of his family, which depended on him.
In 1962, the poetry book Acta – the only book of his that saw light in Cuba – was published by the controversial El Puente project, which the regime dissolved in 1965. He worked for several publishers until his exile, in May of 1980, when he settled in New York. He was a translator at the United Nations headquarters until 2001 and continued his literary work.
He was the author of poetry books such as Caverna fiel and Espacio circular, the essay Una medida exacta and the autobiography Cuerpos al bordo de una isla. His last published book, Una amiga en Paris, collects his correspondence with Ana María Simo, one of the architects of El Puente, between 1968 and 1972.
The recovery of the letters had a great impact on the intellectual community of exile, which saw in the book – in the words of Enrique del Risco – an example of “restitution of the past” in a country like Cuba, of terrible memory. For the essayist, García Ramos and Simo left “an archaeological reconstruction” of a key era for the Island.
They are the years, lived intensely by García Ramos, of the Revolutionary Offensive, the Padilla Case, the fall into disgrace – the parametración – of many writers until then literary critics, the failure of the Ten Million Ton Sugar Harvest and the persecution of his homosexuality, scenes that remain in the 33 letters that García Ramos sent to Simo, who was trying to get him out of the country. Every season of his life realizes his radicalization, which already manifests itself with total freedom in the pages of Mariel.
In an interview he gave to journalist William Navarrete, García Ramos said that he managed to leave after three failed attempts: his aunt, a resident of Miami, had sent boats to pick him up three times, but they never told him. “A neighbor told me that in order to leave by the Mariel (boat lift) we had to go to a police station and declare ourselves ’scum’,” he said. He did so and they gave him a letter; days later, he boarded a bus to El Mosquito, an embarkation point for Florida.
Every season of his life realized his radicalization
He went to New York for Simo – who then lived in that city – to help him, because Miami, according to the writer, was “a city of little importance, not even similar to what it is today. There was a lot of recession and also a lot of drug-related crime.”
García Ramos said that Mariel’s great merit was to provide a space for Cuban exiles, to whom the American cultural world, which sympathized with Castro, closed its doors. It was also “a tribute to those who were part of that exodus of 125,000 people, who were not in their entirety, as the propaganda of Castroism affirmed, criminals and antisocials.”
He returned to Cuba three times, between 2002 and 2006, to see his father, who still lived in Cienfuegos. “My impression was of total sadness in the people,” he said. “Nothing that others have not already said: disappointment, destruction and decadence.”
Translated by Regina Anavy
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