By Fabiola Santiago. fsantiago@herald.com. Published
Wednesday, March 7, 2001, in the Miami Herald
Sitting down to lunch at the boisterous Villa Habana on shady Coral Way,
Antonio José Ponte orders the fried snapper. But hold the mashed
potatoes, and no salad for him, Ponte quickly says.
He wants sweet maduro plantains and fluffy white Cuban rice with his fish.
"The diet that I'll keep in the North,'' he says, chuckling. "That
is, if I survive another snowstorm.''
It is in such simple moments that Antonio José Ponte's life seems
most remarkable.
Now on a teaching stint at the University of Pennsylvania, he is the Cuban
author who penned Las comidas profundas (Profound Meals, Editions Deleatur), a
book of delirious satire about the food shortages in Cuba during the "special
period'' of the mid-'90s. It was a daring work because few Cuban writers on the
island were then so blatantly critical of the Cuban reality. And the book,
illustrated and published in France by an exiled Cuban painter, was introduced
at the 1997 Miami Book Fair International by Ponte, who came from Havana
especially for the event.
Three years later, Ponte is a writer on the rise -- still living in a noisy
Old Havana neighborhood and pushing the limits of official censorship with a
book of short stories, In the Cold of the Malecón (City Lights Books,
$10.95), recently published in the United States, and a new novel, Contrabando
de sombras (Trafficking in Shadows), scheduled to be released this fall by
Spain's Tusquets publishing house. He is one of four Cuban writers featured this
month in The Village Voice Literary Supplement; and The New Yorker has bought
one of his poems.
The only Cuban writer from the island to be featured at the book fair -- the
only one to obtain the permission to travel and return to Cuba after publicly
criticizing the government -- Ponte, 36, visits Miami frequently to read new
work and participate in cultural events.
Without fail, in all the forums, someone in the audience asks the question:
How can Ponte criticize the Cuban government so candidly and return?
"I say what I think because it is healthy for my mind and my
character,'' Ponte says. "It is an exercise in freedom. The same way
pianists do their finger exercises in preparation for a concert, my opinions
about politics and Cuban culture don't constitute my body of work, but are
exercises to later construct my work. And I return to Cuba because I don't have
to adopt a mask in the crossing of the borders, not one way nor the other. My
opinions are clear, and I believe, like the Mexican Alfonso Reyes says, that my
sympathies and differences are well-known.''
He cannot answer the second part implicit in the question: Why is he allowed
to return?
"I don't want to place myself in the position of thinking about how
officials think . . . not even in a hypothetical sense,'' Ponte says. "I
can only answer the part that concerns my actions.''
A SHOT AT CASTRO
At the January presentation of his latest book in Spanish, Cuentos de todas
partes del Imperio (Stories from Every Corner of the Empire, Editions Deleatur),
Ponte denounced the new incursions of Fidel Castro's government into Cuban
cultural life. The same format of televised "round tables'' used in the Elián
González case to hammer into the public's consciousness the official
point of view are now being used to stage "boring'' government-framed
literary discussions, he said.
"That's how culture is making its way into Cuban homes,'' says Ponte,
who has a degree in hydraulic engineering from the University of Havana but has
been writing since childhood.
When it comes to his fiction, Ponte is less overtly confrontational and more
complex. His stories are often high-brow and loaded with literary references to
the writings of world intellectuals; some are set in or allude to faraway lands
like India, Iceland and Russia.
And there is not one reference to the Cuban Revolution or Castro.
"There are many reasons for that absence,'' he says. "The first
must have been fear. If I speak in past tense it's because I believe I have
overcome it. There is fear of police reprisals because I live in Cuba and fear
of reprisals from the literature itself for mentioning those two names. So
there's the fear of being arrested and the fear of a literary misstep.''
The other reasons have to do with discovering that "if you are going to
be a writer, inevitably you are a Cuban writer.'' Constantly exposed to
contemporary work that exulted the virtues of "the socialist reality,''
Ponte says, his reaction was to take the opposite view -- to illustrate the
bleakness of the human condition of those who live in such a society.
HIS 'RESERVATIONS'
But, he insists, he has done it with fear and "reservations.''
"My reservations begin with the question of whether [the Cuban
Revolution and Fidel Castro] should even be written in upper or lower case,'' he
says.
That same philosophical, renegade edge permeates his literature.
While the stories of In the Cold of the Malecón take place in the
special period after the collapse of the Soviet empire and the end of subsidies
to Cuba, Ponte's characters aren't the streetwise, oversexed hustlers so
prevalent in the literature of other Cuban authors.
Ponte's protagonists are a lot like himself and his circle of friends --
worldly, sophisticated and aware of their island-prisoner condition. They are
the thinking men and women of Cuba: a student returning from a Soviet Union
study program to find no use for his experience; an unemployed historian and an
astrologer who fall in love and become vagrants; a 6-year-old prodigy chess
player who goes up against an old man at a railroad station.
As in Cuba's state of affairs, these stories are left unresolved, almost
truncated.
In Las comidas -- which sold out its first limited run in Miami and is in a
second printing -- there is a passage about the time hungry habaneros went crazy
for tasty steaks that turned out to have been made from the cloth Cubans use to
mop the floors.
When he told the story to U.S. journalists, Ponte says, they refused to
believe it was anything but fiction.
"I had a difficult time explaining this to Americans,'' he says, amused
by the recollection.
WILL TEACH IN IOWA
These days, he is explaining to Americans the literature of Cuban icons like
José Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera, as well as leading a
workshop on creative writing techniques. Next, he will teach in Iowa, but before
that he plans to return to Havana, where he lives with his mother in a house
built in the early 1900s -- a house of high ceilings, with a patio at its
center, and a long balcony from where one can see the street.
"It's in a popular neighborhood -- almost all of them are in Havana
these days -- but a tranquil neighborhood. It is noisy -- almost all of them are
in Havana -- and there's a vibrant street life,'' Ponte says. "To exist in
that kind of life, from above, gives one a sense of distance. What I mean is, I
live in my house as if the street didn't exist, but without the street becoming
an enemy when I do venture out.''
Ramón Alejandro, the Miami-based painter who illustrates and
publishes many of Ponte's books and recently visited him in Havana, says Ponte "is
an example of how someone who lives according to the law of his conscience can
be happy under any circumstance.''
"What I think impressed Ramón Alejandro is the sense of
tranquillity amid the noise, the measure of peace in the disquiet, which perhaps
is simply a part of my personality as well as my mother's,'' he says.
For Ponte, writing is a way to "critically live out the politics of my
country.''
"Despite this,'' Ponte adds, "I consider Havana the best place I
know to work . . . Time passes more slowly there, and it is the only place where
I don't think too much about Cuba. Being in Cuba, I can forget the whole Cuban
issue a little.''
Copyright 2001 Miami Herald | 