A novel by Pavel Giroud, an anthology by storyteller Alberto Garrido and a farewell to Juan Manuel Salvat.
14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 30 November 2024 — Marked by borderline figures – she died at the age of 32, one year younger than Christ, in 1999, before the beginning of the millennium – Belkis Ayón created a world no less divided between two dimensions: that of color and that of the spirit. Observing her prints and paintings leaves a metaphysical doubt: if Ayon already shows us the other world, the spiritual plane, why does she give the feeling that there is still much more, hidden behind those Abakuá faces?
Ayón’s suicide – she locked herself in a bathroom and shot herself in the head with her father’s revolver – only reinforces the mystery. Her silence makes one despair. During the Special Period, when the country was plunged into extreme poverty, the artist focused on her black, white and gray works. The themes of loyalty and betrayal, of lost paradise and desire, as well as the Abakuá religious worldview – the sacrifice of the goddess Sikán – surrounded her in her last decade.
In 2021, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid dedicated a major retrospective exhibition to her, commissioned by Cristina Vives, her friend. It was the sign that Ayón had awakened the public’s and critics’ interest all over the world. This November, the Spanish publishing house Turner publishes Nkame mafimba, a compelling catalogue raisonné of her work that expands on an earlier version.
Nkame mafimba means “praise, deep conversation.” The phrase synthesizes Ayón’s relationship with her prints and also the ideal reading she demands for her work. With texts in English and Spanish, the book explores how the artist delved into the Abakuá universe, the research she conducted and how the symbolic translation of those myths came about.
Ayón was born at the end of a decade of international enthusiasm for Fidel Castro’s Revolution. In 1960, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir traveled to Havana to see with their own eyes the “hurricane over sugar.” Their impact on the generation of young Cuban intellectuals was enormous. The newspapers of the time were filled with articles about the two visitors.
Sartre and Beauvoir in Cuba. “La luna de miel de la Revolución” (The Revolution’s Honey Moon) (Casa Vacía) reconstructs step by step that visit and the chronology of that decisive year for Castro’s international image. Compiled by Duanel Díaz Infante and Marial Iglesias Utset – author of a fascinating study of the birth of the Republic in 1902, “Las metáforas del cambio en la vida cotidiana”(The Metaphors of Daily Life) – the volume gathers the meaning of the presence of both French intellectuals in a country that, according to Sartre, “had to triumph.”
Filmmaker Pavel Giroud, who was at the center of many controversies last year after the release of “El caso Padilla” (The Padilla Case), makes his debut in novels with Habana Nostra. The story is based on an old script by the director about the gangster Lucky Luciano, a regular in the Cuban capital during the 40’s. Finalist of the Azorín Novel Prize, it was published by Traveler and has already been presented in Spain and the U.S.
An anthology by storyteller Alberto Garrido, “Gritos y susurros” (Cries and Whispers), was published this month by Ilíada Ediciones. Novelist Amir Valle has said of these stories that “they shook in many ways the panorama of national literature. Undoubtedly, pieces of excellence by an authentic Cuban short-story writer on par with Alejo Carpentier, Lino Novás Calvo, Virgilio Piñera and Onelio Jorge Cardoso.”
With the death of Juan Manuel Salvat on November 26, the Cuban exile community lost the man who did the most to bring Cuba’s literary heritage within reach. Born in Sagua la Grande, Villa Clara, he was part of a generation that, without forgetting Cuba, knew how to rebuild his life and think about the future.
El Gordo (The Fat Man), as his friends called him, did not hesitate to take up arms first against Batista and then against Castro. He protested against the visit of Soviet leader Anastas Mikoyan and was expelled from the University of Havana. He left Cuba clandestinely and returned by sea. He was imprisoned. He fled again and went into exile in Miami, where he realized he had to change his strategy.
An exile needs books, and Salvat became not only the rescuer of old authors, who also left the island but also the publisher of new ones. From Lydia Cabrera to Reinaldo Arenas, he nurtured his catalog with names of excellence. Thanks to those books, he told me, he could utter the phrase in which his legacy is summarized: “I have managed to live as a Cuban all my life, even though I have been far from the country.
Translated by LAR
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