Lucas Garve, CPI
HAVANA, July - Among the dollar stores in Havana, those that specialize in
selling everything and anything for a dollar are the most frequented. For a
dollar, or 21 pesos in the local currency, you can buy a liter of shampoo,
ceramic ornaments, a package of clothes pins, can openers, plastic toys,
sponges, disposable pens, toothbrushes, double-A batteries, glue, music boxes,
and the thousands of sundry items that merchants have traded in since mediaeval
times.
The arrival in Havana of the king of the beat generation, Jack Kerouac, is
also related to this mode of merchandising.
Kerouac had intended to visit Havana in the 50's, but never made it. Only
now, in 2001, has Kerouac arrived, along with a contigent of Americans such as
Djuna Barnes, Nastacha Rambova, Rudolph Valentino, Louise Brooks, Georgia
O'Keefe, Robert Maplethorpe, and Nina Berberova, all suitably embalmed and bound
in biographies published in Spain and selling for a dollar.
It's a pity that Kerouac cannot come out of the pages of the book, alive and
drinking. He wouldn't regret starting a Babylonian drunk in the Two Brothers bar
and in the Rum Museum; he would have enjoyed himself.
Here he would have found a way to soothe the restlessness of his emotional
misadjustments in the enforced promiscuity of a Havana bus ride at eight in the
morning, or in the dishonest propositions of anyone at a discotheque late at
night. Maybe he would have written a novel about the Cuban delirium tremens for
transcending the globalized world.
Yet, he would have been saddened to find he was an unknown to the majority
of habaneros. I asked the sales clerk at the bookstore where I bought the book
about the people whose biographies they were. She had no idea who they might be.
But she assured me that I would be getting "a book with 651 pages for only
one dollar," a bargain, no less.
Besides, we must read to acquire culture. Especially at present, when
culture in Cuba is dispensed with slogans.
Versión
original en español
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