Knowing how the hierarchs of the regime live, what they eat, who they sleep with, the watches they wear, what jokes they tell, produces a poisonous effect: that is the true merit of Norberto Fuentes
Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, July 28, 2024 — Arnaldo Ochoa was shot 35 years ago. Will anyone have remembered him on July 13, or Tony de la Guardia, or the others who shared lead, sweat and fear with him? I would also not have noticed the date if I hadn’t finally found, after two and a half years of searching, a copy of Dulces guerreros cubanos [Sweet Cuban Warriors]. I could never get the book in Cuba, with the photo of the executioner on the cover shooting his AK-47, a man making his way through history by fire and death. The exterminating angel.
Roberto Bolaño didn’t like that book. Bolaño, who probably only read the first pages – the condemnation of the reviewer out of necessity – dedicates to him the hardest words that have been said about Norberto Fuentes: “It is as if Raúl Castro today went into exile in Miami and wrote a book lamenting the injustices committed by his brother in forty years of dictatorship.” To Fuentes, the survivor par excellence of Cuban literature, there is no way to approach him without having an opinion. Few have read his work, but all of us – including me – read it with rage against Fuentes; we read to refute or get pissed off with Fuentes.
“It’s as if Raúl Castro went into exile in Miami today and wrote a book lamenting the injustices committed by his brother”
Bolaño fell into that trap. He criticized the ‘syncopated style’ of the book, its chronic imitation of Hemingway, the revolutionary double standard – two Rolexes, two houses, two women, two pistols, two passports – and the fate of someone whom the writer does not consider, a soul in pain. Going, not without disgust, through the 459 pages of that book does not transform the reader. There is no apology or excuse anywhere – that also displeased the Chilean – and the author doesn’t like it any better. Nor the man.
However, Fuentes delivers an outsider’s guide to the Cuban Revolution that is at the level of – and perhaps surpasses, because it is written by an old agent – other horror chronicles, such as the Mapa dibujado por un espía (Map Drawn by a Spy) by Cabrera Infante or the now worn out Antes que anochezca (Before Night Falls) by Reinaldo Arenas. As a writer, one regrets that Fuentes — obsessed with the center of power, with killing his Personal Jesus, ‘Fifo’ [a nickname for Fidel] — and enthroning the heroes, does not explore the margin any more. From that hive of minor agents, informers without salary, lovers with ration books, crazy scientists and useful idiots one wants to know more, because they still exist.
Ochoa’s phrase about the type of business that others do – ‘little boys’ things,’ little money – directs the focus to the right place, but Fuentes resists. He wants epic. He wants, with good reason, literature. ’There was death and regret for this book,” he cries.
It is a book about the toxin, the non-enjoyment, the dialogues that would annoy anyone. A new language for a new generation
Witnessing the intimacy of those bastards, knowing how they live, what they eat, who they sleep with, what kind of watches they wear and what they do to relax described to paroxysm produces a poisoning so effective that it is the true merit of Fuentes. A book about the toxin, the non-enjoyment, the dialogues that would annoy anyone. A new language for a new generation: “Viking. Buffaloes. Prophets. Ranger. Crossbow. Everest. Moccasin. Stuka.” Two images summarize that environment: Raúl Castro’s aluminum flask, which he continues to use to get drunk, and the breakfast scene of Fidel and Dalia Soto del Valle, the teaspoon of honey, the buffalo milk, the dictator’s slippers.
Ochoa, the mulatto philosopher, the Greek – although Raúl insists on calling him the Negro – plays with the essential powers, “the Party and the Mafia”; that is, the proverbial monkey* without his harmless chain. Ochoa is the man who laughs, the joker, who clashes with the Jesuit severity of the Castros. “The officer of the Armed Forces to whom I have drawn attention most times, whether sitting in front of him at a desk, at a family meal, in a corridor, is named Arnaldo Ochoa Sánchez,” Raúl lectures in the famous recording. “And the first thing I started to criticize is that he is always talking, he is always joking, you never know when he is serious.”
The “tormented brain,” the “absent dream,” the installation in reality – “I went to brush my teeth in the bathroom behind my office”; the pathos – “I saw tears running down my cheeks”; the epic sprinkled with kitsch, rosy death: those are the qualities of the true revolutionary. “As you can assume, I was first outraged with myself. I immediately recovered and understood in the act that I was crying for Ochoa’s children,” he exclaims.
Bolaño failed to understand Dulces guerreros cubanos (Sweet Cuban Warriors) as the great epitaph of Tony de la Guardia, the Cuban Achilles
But Ochoa is the least in that book. Bolaño failed to understand ’Sweet Cuban Warriors’ as the great epitaph of Tony de la Guardia, the Cuban Achilles and, like Achilles, reserved for death. It is possible that Fuentes’ portrait is exaggerated, as all memories are exaggerated, but there is no doubt that it is moving. The lack of understanding of the panorama, the lack of warning in the face of disaster – they were the great strategists of the Army! – the assurance that death awaited them and was going to take them away, that those people were lost. The family portrait is so touching that one almost forgets that they were elite murderers.
A few years ago, when Patricio de la Guardia – Tony’s twin – left the dungeon where he had been locked up since 1989, Fuentes celebrated him. Patricio was already an old man, as weak as Raúl Castro or Ramiro Valdés, although he was born in 1939 and had the mantra of his clan tattooed on his forearm: Never say die (“Nunca digas morir”). With those three words, worn out on his transparent skin; with Raúl’s aluminum flask; with hundreds of dirty uniforms, broken pistols, frayed epaulettes, whose memory is not sweet; with all that dust and that shit, one hopes that the Cuban Revolution will finally end.
*Translator’s note: From a common expression in Cuba – referencing ordinary people’s relationship to power – “You can play with the chain but not the monkey.”
Translated by Regina Anavy
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