English Translations of Cubans Writing From the Island
On February 10 the Havana International Book Fair began in the La Cabaña fortress, extended to March 6 in the capital’s bookshops and in the provincial centers of books and literature, which sold more than 2,000 titles of publishers from Cuba and abroad, among them the Bicentennial Alba collection with a score of works from … Continue reading “Of Absences and Other Troubles / Miguel Iturria Savon”
Dear Reynaldo González: In the middle of the little avalanche of e-mails that have been stirred up by Luis Pavón’s return to the stage, I have respectfully read your views. I am writing just to let you know that I fully agree with you, with every one of your words. Only in place of “mistakes,” … Continue reading “Message from Ena Lucía Portela / POLEMICA: The 2007 Intellectual Debate”
Dear Desideri, Receive once more a warm embrace from this friend “beyond the capital.” I welcome your fair challenge to the title of “GROUP” being applied to the large and diverse number of participants in the current debate, and the last paragraphs, about our “culture of spectacle” (and their “controls”), motivate me even more. But … Continue reading “Messages from José Rojas Bez / POLEMICA: The 2007 Intellectual Debate”
– From Josefina de Diego – I confess that I didn’t remember the full text known as “Words to the Intellectuals,” delivered by Fidel Castro on June 30, 1961, at the National Library to a group of intellectuals. I think that, like many people, the only thing I remembered from the text was his famous … Continue reading “Thoughts on Fidel’s “Words to the Intellectuals” and other texts / POLEMICA: The 2007 Intellectual Debate”
ASHITTEDOrlando Luis Pardo Lazo It was on a P-10 road from La Víbora to Paradero de Playa. With the night falling over Cuba, one broken under that indecisive weight of violets and depressions that remind us that there is a sky over Havana. That the world is also here and now. To add to it … Continue reading “The Old Man and the Bus Trip / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo”
I suspect that somewhere from the island firmament, the writer José Lezama Lima (Havana, 1910-1976) is smiling at his supporters, or winking at the editor who introduced the latest edition of his Collected Works. Our literary rhino should be happy with so many celebrations. “Seeing is believing”, he would say at one of the gatherings … Continue reading “Of Ostracism and Sanctification / Miguel Iturria Savón”
The Cuban filmmaker Tomás Piard now faces ideological pressure in his work for having interviewed me in his most recent documentary “TROCADERO 162, LOWER,” filmed last November for UNEAC, its producer. The debut of the film planned for 19 December 2010 (the 100th birthday of the Cuban writer José Lezama Lima, the subject of the … Continue reading “SOLIDARITY WITH TOMAS PIARD / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo”
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”
His face is a catalog of discouragement. Sitting with his elbows on his knees, his horse’s reins in his hands, he seems to me like a pillar of salt from another time. With several days growth of beard, and a yellowish coat he must have exhumed from a closet in these days of winter. “Would … Continue reading “In a Coach, Down a Dark Alley / Ernesto Morales Licea”
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”
NOVEMBER ESLINDA Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo There is a month in the world when I watch a Cuba film. I watch it in a paleolithic format, on VHS, the only one that preserved the greys from the actual film, without the high contrasts of digital copies. A Cuban film from the ’70s and, as such, … Continue reading “A SOLACE OF SANDALWOOD / 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”