Raul Rivero. Published Monday, November 20, 2000, in the
Miami Herald
HAVANA -- Not even the most pompous bureaucrats in Cuban culture can conceal
the power of exile literature, but they do manage to obscure "inxile''
literature.
That's natural, because Cuban writers who live and work in other countries
have earned their places by dint of talent and ability in a complex and
competitive world. And their names cannot be erased in one stroke by hatred,
intolerance or decrees.
Yet the dozens of writers who remain in Cuba and don't take to the streets,
waving little flags in support of the daily slogan, are still within range of
officialdom's displeasure. Needless to say, there's no room for their books in
Cuba's publishing houses, which -- as is well known -- belong to the state.
There's not even a little space for a poem of theirs in a literary magazine.
It's all a scientific design intended to silence the voices that don't harmonize
with the choir.
Is that alienated poetry dead? Have the men and women who live and work in
cities and have integrated into some of the patterns of the new society been
silenced? It seems not.
This fall the dissident group Reflection held a poetry contest called Silver
Spur. I worked as a juror, along with two poets from Villa Clara province.
The books we read and evaluated were at the same level as the books being
published in Cuba and elsewhere in the hemisphere. But the poet Néstor
Leliebre Camué, a native of Santiago de Cuba, cannot publish here a poem
that ends:
Don't plunge into the sea/ for the love of God./ Wait. A fascinating
brightness/ is rising from the land.
Official publications won't shelter this text from poetess Adela Soto of
Pinar del Río province:
Look at me, out in the open,/ bound to the dry trunk of life,/ without land,
without stars, without freedom or trees;/ counting every footstep with a
weakening pulse/ and broken wings.
I'm not going to fill this column with the beautiful verses I found in the
notebooks we read, but I do want to talk about the special situation in which
these people find themselves in Cuba.
Some are independent journalists; others are human-rights activists,
free-lance librarians or militants in opposition parties. That means that
they're under permanent police watch and that their poetry, deemed to be
subversive, is kept under a double lock.
Those are the real writers of the "inxile'' movement, baring their
chests at the repressive density of government, protected only by their verses
and the feeling of invincibility produced by the slivers of freedom they have
won.
They are Cubans who, amid shortages and harassment, read Emilio Ballagas and
José Lezama Lima, Heredia and Martí, Plácido, Walt Whitman
and Rimbaud.
They are people who, fueled by a 5-peso pizza, board a train to go read a
poem with friends in another province. People who make notes while traveling in
the back of open trucks, reading the Bible or Rabindranath Tagore.
Deep in Cuba, they write poems, earning no compensation, in hermit-like
enclaves, stubbornly, in a civilian society where they invent themselves and
reconstruct the nation. Poet Díaz Cutiño of Las Tunas helps me to
explain the poetic art of those writers:
I refuse. I refuse and remove/ my voice from the mortal choir;/ I stand
against the fatal judgment/ that buries my pride in gray.
Raúl Rivero is a Cuban independent journalist whose writing is banned
at home. He was denied an exit visa to read from his new book, Ojo, Pinta, at
the Miami Book Fair International.
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