English Translations of Cubans Writing From the Island
When the high creole hierarchy enjoyed the arrival of the 51st anniversary of the insurrection which elevated them to power on 1 January 1959, a violent cold front was ravaging the west of the country. In Mazorra, a psychiatric hospital located on the highway that leads to the principal airport, a major scandal was uncorking … Continue reading “In 2010, Bad News Abounded in Cuba / Iván García”
Jose Lezama Lima (1910-1976) is not gone. This is the feeling you get when you visit the museum of the master of Cuban prose in Trocadero street, in central Havana. You don’t need to be supernatural to sense the weary, asthmatic breathing of the fat Lezama while you pass through the halls of this house, … Continue reading “100 Years of the Fat One of Trocadero / Iván García”
Last week I participated in an exceptional experience. For two days I spoke on camera for the fictionalized documentary Trocadero 162, Bajos, by director Tomas Piard, about the last years of Jose Lezama Lima: his final ostracism when the doors on the island were closed to him; his resistance to the Cuban vacuum, until he … Continue reading “Open Letter to the World (Excepting Abel Prieto, Cuban Minister of Culture) / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo”
Like Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (Camaguey, 1814-Madrid, 1873), the great poet, essayist and journalist Gaston Baquero Díaz (Banes, Holguin, 1918 – Madrid, 1997) moved between Cuba and Spain, where he went in March 1959, when the revolution toppled the social pyramid to which his talent had elevated him, despite poverty and racial prejudice. Unlike Madam … Continue reading “A Poet of “Sumptuous Sensuality” / Miguel Iturria Savón”
For a decade critics have been talking about the poetic, Baroque, telluric and zoomorphic painter Ibrahim Miranda Ramos (Pinar del Rio, 1969), who presents his swarm of metaphors in UNEAC’s Manuela Villa gallery, where he invites us to unravel his allegories on Cuba and the world through the prints of his series Punishment, Bondage and … Continue reading “An Invitation to the Pictoral Universe of I. Miranda”
Friday, July 2, while waiting at the Cinemateca to see the French film Rapt (Kidnapping), I was surprised by the commotion of chairs, books and the songs of Joan Manuel Serrat on the Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez, a recurrent figure in Cuban publishing houses, which they were celebrating on another Book Night at 31 points … Continue reading “Authors Blessed and Authors Proscribed”
If the Cuban generals had liked rock, things in Cuba might have been different. Perhaps the soldiers would not have gone out in their vulgar Russian jeeps, scissors in hand, cutting the hair of those devoted to this type of music. And they would not have had to arrest thousands of young people whose only … Continue reading “If the comandante danced to rock…”
14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar, Havana, 27 December 2022 — Reading economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe in an article published in 2003, a few weeks after his inclusion among the Black Spring prisoners, I learned and understood the importance of the concept of “decapitalization of the material base” in the Cuban economy, especially with regard to the absence … Continue reading “Cuba is Worth Less Every Day and the New Generations Will Inherit an Exhausted Country”
EFE (via 14ymedio), Miami, 27 April 2021 — The well-known public confession of the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla (1932-2000), which shocked the literary world 50 years ago because it was a manipulation of Castroism, has been staged in a new choral reading, with English subtitles. [See English transcript here.] About twenty Cuban artists and intellectuals read … Continue reading “Giving Voice to the ‘Self-Criticism’ of Cuban Poet Heberto Padilla, 50 Years Later”
14ymedio, Rosa Pascual, Madrid, 10 March 2016 — Moscow 1989. Mario, a Cuban journalist working in the press department of the secretariat of the Organization for International Economic Cooperation (OCEI) representing the island in the Soviet capital, attends, with his family, the premiere of the play The Master and Margarita, whose main female part is … Continue reading “‘Matryoshkas’ of Exile / 14ymedio, Rosa Pascual”
Jeovany Jimenez Vega, 4 November 2015 — The recent termination of Juan Carlos Cremata as a theater director, the previous suspension of “The King is Dying,” his last work on the stage of the Theater Center, and the publication online some days ago of an inflamed letter from the prestigious critic, Enrique Colina, motivated by this … Continue reading “Censorship, the Vital Artery of the Cuban Regime / Jeovany Jimenez Vega”
By Ambrosio Fornet / See here for background information on this series of posts. 1 It seemed as if the nightmare was something from a remote past, but the truth is that when we awoke, the dinosaur was still there. We haven’t found out — and perhaps will never know — if the media folly was … Continue reading “The Five Grey Years: Revisiting the Term / Ambrosio Fornet”
Interview with Carlos Alberto Montaner, writer, journalist and political REINALDO ESCOBAR, Havana, 24 June 2014 — Carlos Alberto Montaner has long been a kind of black beast in the official Cuban government propaganda. Accused of being a terrorist, a CIA agent, an eminence gris in the world counterrevolution, in real life he is an academic … Continue reading “I Am Nothing Else But Cuban / 14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar, Carlos Alberto Montaner”
Translated by Karen González Nicolasa Guillén, Virgilia Piñera, Regina Pedroso, and Josefa Lezama Lima leave to go to paradise for a week. However, upon getting there they find out that, in fact, they have arrived at the steps of a ramshackle hotel for writers where they must imagine that they’ve arrived at paradise. In addition, … Continue reading “Four Cuban Writers Go To Paradise / Carlos Esquivel, in Sampsonia Way Magazine”
By Reinaldo Cosano. Havana, Cuba Posted in the blog of Wendy Iriepa and Ignacio Estrada The veil covering violent homophobic repression is slowly being drawn back, but the gulity aren’t asking for public pardon. It is hard to specify just how the virus of homophobic repression was incubated, sharp-eyed with the machismo of the days … Continue reading “Taken Out of the Closet, But No One Asks Forgiveness / Reinaldo Cosano”