The Cuba of flesh and blood is very far from what Carpentier called the “real maravilloso”
14ymedio, Yunior García Aguilera, Madrid, 8 December 2024 — The Cuban bureaucracy has celebrated with great fanfare that the adaptation of García Márquez’s masterpiece had its “world premiere” in Havana, before it was on Netflix. Perhaps the ICAIC [Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry] officials did not get the producers’ sarcasm. It sounded great, from the point of view of capitalist marketing, to announce that this audiovisual product had its premiere in the most absurd and dystopian place on the continent. Cuba is the Latin American country where, many years later, people still run the risk of ending up in front of a firing squad. Cuba is the dark corner of the world where children may no longer know what ice is, due to perpetual blackouts.
However, the premiere was not in Havana. On December 4, Brussels had already witnessed a special screening of the first chapter and a discussion. Two days earlier, in Mexico City, a similar event had taken place with a cocktail party, panels and talks. Anyone who knows Alexis Triana, the current president of the ICAIC, knows well that he would be capable of disguising some filmmaker as an Eskimo to inflate his festivals and announce the presence of Inuit cinema on the Island.
One of the attendees at the Havana screening, according to Radio Rebelde, said excitedly upon leaving the Yara cinema: “I was left wanting more, I have to look for the rest of the series.” Obviously he was not referring to looking for it on the famous streaming service, since only a tiny minority of Cubans have the luxury of accessing that platform. He was surely referring to getting a pirated copy on El Paquete [’The Packet’], our local Netflix. The advertising spot itself for this 45th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema pays a very unsubtle tribute to piracy, saturated with what Abel Prieto calls “cultural colonization.”
García Márquez’s novel is one of the best examples of magical realism, without a doubt.
García Márquez’s novel is one of the best examples of magical realism, without a doubt. But the Cuba of flesh and blood is very far from what Carpentier called the ‘real maravilloso’. It is rather a reality that frightens, horrifies, disillusions, depresses. One would have to be very sick to continue romanticizing the misery and oppression suffered by the overwhelming majority of Cubans. One would have to make a very toxic reading of love, to continue believing that in Cuba the ones who govern are “those who love and build” or that “the country advances.” That land, (beautiful, yes) where many of us were born, but from which millions of us had to escape, suffers the plagues of insomnia and oblivion in a more brutal way than those suffered by the people of Macondo. And still no alchemist has appeared who can find a remedy.
In the Macondo-like Cuba, the government is not governed by a Buendía*, but by a puppet with the last name Díaz-Canel. This reserve lieutenant colonel, who achieved his military ranks God knows how, is far from possessing the gift of clairvoyance. On the contrary, the subject is the favorite son of impudence and bad luck. He is also the most gifted student in the subject of “making a mistake” that is effusively taught in the Party school. We also do not know if he has a pig’s tail, we are not interested in investigating those parts. What we do know is that there are many other characteristics that he shares with the quadruped to which his loyal singers of Buena Fe awarded the title of “national mammal.”
The oldest dictatorship on the continent has already existed for more than half a century, although we hope it does not reach 100.
The oldest dictatorship on the continent has already existed for more than half a century, although we hope it does not reach 100 years… of solitude. According to the saying, there is no evil that can last so long. Borges’ anecdote is well-known when he said that García Márquez’s novel was good, but that fifty years would have been enough.
On the other hand, the novel that Fidel Castro imposed on us as reality has become a soap opera that is impossible to praise, unless bad taste dominates us. It has already been more than six decades of crisis, exoduses, prisons, mediocrity and death. The thread of blood that the patriarch left us runs through, not just a town, but an entire country, and extends beyond borders. The crazed old man ended his days tied to a chestnut tree, in the courtyard of history, reflecting with the ghosts of his enemies.
Rivers of ink will flow talking, good or bad, about the Netflix series. Although it is very likely that it will not satisfy a good part of the general public. Gabo himself refused during his lifetime to have the apple of his eye adapted to the cinema. He himself said: “I prefer that my readers continue to imagine my characters as their uncles and my friends, and not that they remain totally conditioned by what they saw on screen.” Beyond the possible success or failure of the Netflix series, what no one doubts is the desperation of a regime that is dying, capable of inventing premieres to raise the morale of the troops and elevate the chauvinist ego. The Castro apparatus should read the end of Gabo’s novel very carefully, to understand how the lineages condemned to a hundred years of solitude end up.
*Translator’s note: The Buendía family are the fictional founders of Macondo, the South American town that is the setting of the novel ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’.
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