In Report Against Myself, Eliseo Alberto confesses to what many Cubans learned to do to survive: speak with two voices
14ymedio, Málaga, José A. Adrián Torres, November 15, 2025 — There are books that are neither written nor read: they confess. Informe contra mí mismo (Report Against Myself), by Eliseo Alberto, belongs to this rare category. It is the story of a man who writes a police report — not against the enemy, but against his own family — and discovers that the real informer is not the one who signs the paper, but the system that managed to make it possible.
The novel, written from Mexican exile and silenced in official Cuba, could be read as the Cuban version of The Lives of Others. In the German film, a Stasi agent spies on a playwright and ends up redeeming himself out of compassion. In Report against Myself, on the other hand, the narrator does not redeem himself: he undresses. He does not save anyone. He only tries to save his conscience. Surveillance does not come from above, but from within. The snitch becomes his own victim.
Both works share the same moral axis: the abolition of the individual by the totalitarian state. But Eliseo Alberto adds something that the film cannot offer: the warmth of betrayed affection. There is no cold basement or interrogation room. There is a house in Havana, a poet father, a mother who puts out a lit cigarette, a family that sings while the son — a soldier in the reserves — receives the order to spy on them. It is horror with the smell of rum and the sad light of the kerosene lamp.
Eliseo Alberto was the son of Eliseo Diego and nephew of Fina García Marruz, heirs to a poetic tradition that believed in the dignity of language. That is why his testimony hurts even more: because it shows how a regime that proclaimed itself the redeemer ended up destroying even faith in the word.
The Lives of Others ends with a redemption; Report Against Myself does not. In the Cuba of the report, the guilt is not expiated: it is archived. The author says it with bitter irony: “I am imprisoned in a file.” That bureaucratic file is the real Cuban prison: one that does not need bars, just a people educated to distrust themselves. And he adds on another page: “No one is entirely guilty of his fear.”
Eliseo Alberto was not a counter-revolutionary; he went from “red” to “pink.” He loved the Revolution as one loves a youth, and that makes it more painful. Because he understood that the great success of the process was not literacy or reform, but to perfect the art of depersonalization. The Revolution turned obedience into moral virtue, loyalty into a test of faith continue reading
The Cuban speaks like a militant in the ration store, a skeptic at home and a victim with foreigners or in exile.
From that moral experiment emerged a phenomenon that still defines Cuba: the multifaceted self. It is not a psychological split, but a pragmatic identity that rotates according to the context without being dissociated: a strategy of moral and linguistic adaptation in an environment where personal coherence could be dangerous. It is the ability, or need, to change both face and language according to the context. The Cuban speaks like a militant in the ration store, a skeptic at home and a victim with foreigners or in exile. Each environment activates a code, a lexicon, a “way of thinking.” That verbal and moral plasticity, born of fear, ended up becoming — like jokes and humor — another survival strategy: learning to say the “right” thing where appropriate.
It is not hypocrisy, but adaptation. In a country where sincerity could cost at least a punishment, work or freedom, discourse was fragmented. This created a culture of interchangeable opinions, where words serve to protect, not to reveal. The result: a people who, by force of pretense, ended up not knowing at all who they are.
Report Against Myself is the autopsy of that loss. Eliseo Alberto does not accuse, he does not pontificate; he shows how the system managed to install a censor within each citizen. And although the author wrote from exile, his book is still relevant on the Island. Every time someone shuts up out of prudence or fear, disguises his thinking in order to survive or changes his vocabulary so as not to be out of tune, he himself rewrites that report.
“The Revolution has grown old, but its most enduring work is still alive: the Cuban divided between what he says, what he keeps silent -but thinks- and what he seems to say.” That depersonalization triumphed where the five-year plans and the harvest of ten million failed.
‘Report Against Myself’ is not a political allegation, but an inner atonement
Perhaps the only thing left to do, on behalf of all those who unknowingly signed it, is to write the reverse: a report in one’s own favor. A report in favor of freedom. Even so, lucidity and candor do not exonerate. Eliseo Alberto was a victim and participant at the same time, like many of the intellectuals of his generation. The problem — and here is something uncomfortable — is that many, for aesthetic, family or ideological fidelity, kept silent too long. Some did so out of fear; others, believing they could still save the project from within. But when the cultural and moral repression was already evident, staying was also a form of complicity, even if it was passive or sentimental.
This moral ambiguity should be recognized: not to judge it harshly, but to remember that the sensitivity and intelligence with which a pain of conscience is expressed in writing are not enough when a long past silence perpetuates the damage. Eliseo Alberto faced the monster, yes, but he did it late. And he paid for it with a chronic remorse, not with the personal and committed political action that would have been more redemptive. Report Against Myself is not a political allegation, but an inner atonement.
His friend Héctor Abad Faciolince, from Colombia, expressed it with the clarity of someone who did not share this servitude: he admired his talent, but could not forgive him for taking so long to break the “spell.” That remark, more fraternal than cruel, sums up the moral dilemma of a generation that believed that the word — poetry, essay, criticism from within — could redeem a Revolution that had already lost its soul, given itself to the same “devil” … that it itself had created.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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