By Achy Obejas. The
Village Voice. Published February 2001
A New Generation Faces Cuba’s Dark Reality
In Havana, a life-size statue of John Lennon sits on a park bench,
accessible enough so that his glasses were stolen by a passerby during a recent
thunderstorm. Soon afterward, Cuban writer Arturo Arango anonymously e-mailed
his friends a faux Internet column, claiming the thief had been caught in
neighboring Matanzas trying to place Lennon's glasses on the statue of a
deceased Cuban poet who had needed glasses throughout his lifetime. Taking a
gentle jab at the island's cultural bureaucracy—which has yet to honor
Cuban cultural heroes such as Bola de Nieve or Benny Moré—Arango
quoted the writers' union president passionately declaring that, if anyone had
petitioned for glasses for the Matanzas poet, glasses he'd surely have.
But almost immediately afterward, Arango had to send out notes to friends
explaining it was all a joke. His satire was believable because, well, in Cuba,
anything can and usually does happen.
Contrary to North American critical insistence that all things in the Latin
American literary imagination are magic realist, life on the island is, as Cuban
writer Alejo Carpentier once said, "real maravilloso," or marvelously
real. Abilio Estévez's "Thine Is the Kingdom," Pedro Juan Gutiérrez's
"Dirty Havana Trilogy," Antonio José Ponte's "In the Cold
of the Malecón," and Abel Prieto's "El Vuelo del Gato" are
glimpses into an unvarnished and ever shifting Cuba, absurdist perhaps, but
still anchored in the tangible world. These writers—from Prieto, the
current minister of culture, to Gutiérrez, a rumored pimp—also
provide a curious status report on how the islanders view the Cuban revolution
itself.
All four of these writers creatively came of age during the Special Period—the
1990s—when the island's economy became a wasteland and Cuba's ideas about
its place in the world were forced to change. The literature of the Special
Period is vastly different from what came before: often nihilistic and dark, but
also darkly funny. The Cuban revolution ceases to be an axis or player in these
books, written by writers from a generation born or raised completely within the
revolutionary era. In these stories, no one dwells on the revolution or examines
it critically. It is simply there. Of these four writers, all but Prieto are
making their U.S. debuts.
Whether perceived as good or bad, the 1959 revolution that turned out
Batista has always provided plenty of material for the island's writers.
Castro's rebels sprung not from rage but hope, and they would focus their
energies and resources—including culture—on creating a New Man. This
New Man was, of course, the revolution's protagonist and therefore the lead
character in its early literature. In Edmundo Desnoes's 1965 novel Memorias del
Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment)—in many ways the signature
book of the early revolution—the narrator is ambivalence personified, a
struggle between his old bourgeois self and the new revolutionary ideal.
But by 1980, when the Soviet presence in Cuba was peaking, there was a
seismic shift in Cuban letters. That year, Carpentier died; the enigmatic
Desnoes slipped away in Venice, and the brilliant Reinaldo Arenas escaped during
the chaos of the Mariel boatlift. Not surprisingly, Cuban literature in the '80s
retreated. Nonetheless, there were books like Un Mundo de Cosas by Soler Puig,
and Las Iniciales de la Tierra by Jesús Díaz, considered by many
the great critical novel of the revolution.
Estévez's Thine Is the Kingdom (Arcade, 327 pp., $13.95 paper) is a
direct descendant of these novels. It's a big, expansive story about life,
death, and dreaming in pre-Castro Cuba. In its original Spanish, Estévez's
work is a feast of language. (Unfortunately, the English translation by David
Frye is flat and colorless.) Set in a rundown Havana neighborhood called The
Island, it boasts a formidable cast of characters, from Merengue the pastry
vendor to a tropical Saint Sebastian. In Thine Is the Kingdom, Estévez
also offers up Doña Juana, a nonagenarian who is caught in an eternal and
insular dream, never waking and refusing to die. Though technically set in
pre-Castro Cuba, Thine Is the Kingdom's wistful, dreamy state could just as
easily unfold in the early '90s, during the worst years of the Special Period—immediately
after the fall of the Soviet Union and the loss, for Cuba, of its considerable
economic support.
But Estévez breaks with novelists of the past: Mightily nuanced, the
presence of the revolution is felt somewhere beyond the page, not as a new dawn,
but as something more ambiguous. The mood is expectant, as in today's Havana,
where change is anticipated but the form it will take remains a mystery. Thine
Is the Kingdom ends on the eve of the rebel victory, making it impossible not to
speculate about Doña Juana and what she will wake to—or from.
If Estévez's work owes much to the revolutionary canon, Gutiérrez's
Dirty Havana Trilogy comes from a bastard lineage. Though Estévez is
considered an official heir of Virgilio Piñera—the openly gay author
of Rene's Flesh, marginalized during his lifetime and now considered canonical—it
is Gutiérrez who embraces the obscene and perverse in him. And though
Gutiérrez surely lacks Piñera's grace, he embodies his profane
spirit and inhabits a similar place in the margins of polite society.
Dirty Havana Trilogy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 392 pp., $25) is a novel
made up of interconnected short stories, each featuring a protagonist named
Pedro Juan. Though initially Pedro Juan seems sad and broken, by book's end he
is king of the squalor, a player in and creator of wretchedness. Written in a
thick and unique Havana street argot, Dirty Havana Trilogy presents particular
translation problems that are mostly overcome by Natasha Wimmer's English
version. Some passages are a little stiff, and some things don't translate well—for
example, "negro" as a term of endearment—but Wimmer captures Gutiérrez's
voice with both sympathy and clarity.
The stories portray a society in decay and a people determined to survive at
any cost. Pedro Juan's only goal is to stay alive, so he does it all: deals
marijuana and sells empty soda cans on the black market, hustles tourists,
smuggles art, and has lots of sex. In Gutiérrez's hands, sex is not
romantic, soothing, or even especially passionate. Sex is dirty, grimy, sticky;
sex is a balm from the constant frustrations of survival; sex is entertainment
in the face of boredom, as cheap as a matinee, as empty as the grocery store
shelves.
I checked my pockets. I had ten pesos and two dollars. Jack shit. I couldn't
pay the woman a dollar hot dog for giving me a handjob. And it would probably be
with a dry prick because most likely she wouldn't want to wet it with her
saliva. . . . Sitting down facing the sea, with my back to the city, I scrubbed
away. A few minutes later, I ejaculated, shooting a good jet of come into the
dark, calm water. The Caribbean received my semen. There was lots of it. Too
many days without a woman, letting time slip away.
Yet Gutiérrez's bland sensationalism feeds the worst stereotypes
about Cubans as insatiable sexual creatures, creating a strange tension: On the
one hand, Gutiérrez's vivid testimonies to Cuba's terrible days are
refreshing and necessary; on the other, they reintroduce Cuba as the most
depraved brothel of the Americas. There is, however, an insistent sexism and
racism in Gutiérrez's writing that can't be explained as either cultural
difference or benign in content—a cool overall detachment, a disdain
almost, that Gutiérrez might be aiming as much at his readers as at his
characters or even himself.
In Dirty Havana Trilogy the revolution doesn't exist. Socialism's
infrastructure has collapsed: Nothing works, not even the bread lines. Without
ever acknowledging the revolution, Gutiérrez presents its results with a
cold eye: the scarcities, the desperation, the humiliation of a people taught
and trained to be avatars of change—the New Man—now exploited and
dependent on international charity and personal pity.
Ponte's In the Cold of the Malecón (City Lights, 127 pp., $10.95
paper) mines the Special Period as well, but instead of Gutiérrez's
disenfranchised, Ponte's characters are, for the most part, disaffected
professionals (or what might be viewed as a Cuban middle class): A student
returning from the former Soviet Union finds his knowledge of Russian now
useless; a child prodigy travels to meet his chess-rival pen pal only to
discover he is a disappointing old man; a historian and an astrologer fall in
love and wind up homeless.
Ponte writes in a spare style more akin to Eastern European writers than
anything usually associated with the bounty of the Caribbean, Cuban or
otherwise. His sentences are short and sharp, his settings bleak and cold. There
is an extraordinary amount of dialogue—the title piece is nearly all an
exchange between an old married couple—but what's important is what's not
said. The conversations are for the most part elliptical, like short bursts of
thoughts rather than actual talking. (The translations, by Dick Cluster and Cola
Franzen, are excellent.)
"He chopped the meat into small pieces. Too small."
"Like his apartment," the mother commented.
"Yes. . . . And you know what I thought, seeing him cut the meat in the
kitchen of the tiny apartment?"
She could imagine.
"I thought how strange that we've had a son."
In contrast to Gutiérrez's characters—who brawl and jerk off for
release—Ponte's are more educated and sophisticated, more repressed and
resigned to their aimless fates. They are aware not just of their discomfort,
but of the circumstances behind them. They make choices, perhaps, that Gutiérrez
cannot, and so they are more complicated because they are complicit. Smart and
haunting, In the Cold of the Malecón sees the revolution as neither Estévez's
ambivalent cloud nor Gutiérrez's Roman ruins. It appears instead as
defining and ever present as the sea, so much that to mention it at all would be
redundant.
Prieto's El Vuelo del Gato, The Flight of the Cat (Letras Cubanas in Cuba,
Ediciones B in Spain), is not currently available through U.S. publishers,
although the Spanish edition is finding its way into U.S. Latino bookstores.
(His manuscript is circulating among U.S. publishing houses, but his ministerial
rank in Castro's government is likely to prevent him from receiving the same
kind of institutional welcome as his compatriots.) Yet it is, in many ways, the
book that fills in the gaps of the others, and so it becomes required reading in
order to understand contemporary Cuban literature.
It was Prieto, with a handful of other writers of his generation and
younger, who cooked up the idea of the Lennon statue in Havana. The monument was
born because Prieto, now 50 and seated close enough to Castro to sell the idea,
made it happen. Yet Prieto, a lifelong Beatles fan, didn't get a chance to say
anything during the dedication—that was left to Castro himself. In other
words, the new guard could have its hero, but the old guard still has the stage.
El Vuelo del Gato reads much like that dedication scene: The children of the
revolution want to play, but the adults are still watching.
Perhaps most ironic, this one—the story penned by the most official
writer on the island—is also the one that portrays, with love, not the New
Man but the Common Cuban. El Vuelo del Gato is told in the first person by an
unnamed narrator, one of four high school friends who come of age alongside the
revolution. Two principal characters embody the essential conflict—Freddy
Mamoncillo is sensual and intuitive, gregarious and heroic, while Marco Aurelio
is solitary and cerebral, cursed with a yearning for perfection that, no matter
how correct his analysis, is always confounded by the unexpected beauty of human
error.
El Vuelo del Gato is the most Cuban of all these books, aware of the
inherent conflict between tropical sensuality and the ethics of stoicism
required by socialism and other ways of thinking that reject materialism and
sentimentalism, awed and humbled by the fruits of syncretism and, most
appreciably, miscegenation.
Prieto writes in a familiar, conversational tone, full of puns and nimble
wordplay, homages to the Greeks and the Beatles, asides about everything from
the arrival of the mango in the New World to the fall of the Berlin Wall, as if
the entire story were unfolding over a long night and a bottle of rum between
friends.
El Vuelo del Gato is not about the revolution, but about being an ordinary
Cuban during the extraordinary days of the revolution. Prieto writes about
military service and Angola, shortages, university purges of gays and hippies,
people seeking political asylum, civic corruption, and whiskey as "the
enemy's drink," but he never names the enemy any more than he names the
revolution beyond the acronym of this or that ministry.
Where Estévez is bemused by his characters, Prieto is in love with
his; where Gutiérrez revels in his marginalization, Prieto tries mightily
to paint a tableau so inclusive its heavenly pantheon boasts Greek, African, and
Christian divinities alongside relatives exiled in Miami; where Ponte's
characters wait for change, Prieto's move along, sometimes simply evading their
guilt, other times embracing it, but each and every time exhibiting a singular
optimism that Cubans on both sides of the Straits of Florida commonly claim as
their own.
El Vuelo del Gato is not a revolutionary novel, nor is it a novel critical
of the revolution. Yet it contains a long, passionate paean to Emperor Marcus
Aurelius that can't be read as anything but a defense of Castro, and alongside
it lists enough hard times and ideological deviations that—though you sense
Prieto the party man putting the brakes hard on Prieto the artist—the
reader feels discomfort and even dread about what could happen in Cuba after
Castro.
The Philosopher-king wanted to touch his people's Reasonable Soul and
transform it, and for science and philosophy to fill the Body of the empire
intravenously, and that's why he brought to Rome well-known wise men from
Greece, Egypt, Syria. But his efforts failed: The patriarchs and their families
simply put the wise men up in their palaces as if they were exotic ornaments, or
a new kind of buffoon, and the people laughed at the wise men's flea-infested
hair and beards, and their torn robes, and nobody listened to their counsel.
Marcus Aurelius confirmed the stupid arrogance of humankind, its love of kitsch
and wrongful paths, its resistance (blind, stubborn, inconceivable) to living
the Truth. (translation from the Spanish by Achy Obejas)
This unease is not about what comes after the revolution exactly, just after
Castro: Cuba might well open up and blossom or come undone via foreign
influences and exploitation. Will it be a fresh start? Or will darker forces
prevail and turn the island into the gulag Castro's foes have imagined? No one
knows. What is clear is that, with 42 years in power, the Cuban revolution
commands about half of Cuba's history after independence from Spain. And what
these four novels demonstrate is that, in that time, the revolution has become
an indelible part of Cuban life. Long after Castro's bones are ashes, the
revolution will show itself in the Cuban cellular makeup, for good and bad.
Achy Obejas is a cultural writer with the Chicago Tribune and author of
a forthcoming novel, Days of Awe. |
