Havana Noir

A REVIEW OF
Havana Noir
edited by Achy Obejas
CENTRAL QUESTION: Why is Havana so surly?

Format: 355 pp., paperback; Size: 8" x 5"; Price: $15.95; Publisher: Akashic Books; Editor: Achy Obejas; Print run: 7,000; Title of Chicago Tribune series for which the editor shared the Pulitzer Prize as part of a 2001 investigative team: “Gateway to Gridlock”; Book design: Aaron Petrovich; Cover design: Jon Resh; Cover photograph: José Figueroa; Typeface: California FB Text; Representative sentence: “Behold Havana… a morning like any other morning. It changes its skin, it’s both man and woman, it’s the god Changó’s city sacrificed at mid-century….”

In Lea Aschkenas’s “La Coca-Cola del Olvido,” one of eighteen stories collected in Havana Noir, drizzle turns to a downpour and “the few unfortunate souls still in the street ran as if on fire, intent on getting home before the dilapidated balconies above them began falling.” What makes the Havana of the seventeenth title in Akashic Books’ popular urban noir series so surly? Editor Achy Obejas writes in the introduction of a city where “the concept of sin has been banished by the urgency of need… [turning] the human heart feral.”
In 1991, the last shipment of Soviet oil entered Havana harbor, ending thirty years of Soviet economic aid to Cuba, and Fidel Castro announced the “Special Period in Peacetime” to gird the island’s 11 million inhabitants for the hardships that would follow. Cuba in the early 1990s became an island of contradictions. It was prohibited for a Cuban to carry dollars, but American money was the only currency accepted at most Havana businesses. At government stores, salesmen in name only sat all day behind empty old mechanical cash registers in front of stockless shelves. In dark, desultory cafeterias, waiters took monotonous orders for sugar water and stale congris of black beans and rice, the only items on the menu.
As collected in Havana Noir, the fictive repercussions of the Special Period range from absurd to terrifying. In “Nowhere Man,” Miguel Mejides constructs a (literally) underground syndicate of dwarves supplying the city above with black-market sausages. In “What for, This Burden” Michel Encinosa Fú introduces characters of cruelty so shocking you may need to set the book down. Leonardo Padura abandons the colorful cool of his Mario Conde mysteries for the spiraling decadence of “Staring at the Sun,” whose narrator gazes from a luscious mist of liquor and parkisonil upon greasy walls as the grotesques accumulate. “The black guy’s head explodes and rolls back. Even I get splattered with his blood. It’s practically black, like the dog’s, although it’s got little white dots.”
Obejas hardly gives herself credit, but she shines as a translator. (Besides contributing her own story, twelve of the translations are attributed to the editor.) Padura’s garrulous perversion is as distinct as the soliloquy of a deaf babalao in Arnaldo Correa’s “Olúo”: “In a quiet area, we fished for langostinos and cooked them in an old can of Spanish sausages that my father had brought in his bag…. Life can be so marvelous!” Obejas’s translation of “The Red Bridge” by the author Yoss captures the idiom of a pair of outcast socios from El Patio: “If he bends to get the blade in front of Yako, those Nike 48s are gonna leave footprints all over his face.”
Perhaps this Havana is so surly because she is for sale, pimped by the government and by every Habanero out to make an American buck. In Mylene Fernández Pintado’s “The Scene,” a bureaucrat making room for a tourist remodel evicts a woman caring for her ailing mother. “Everything was architecturally and financially aligned. Emptying the building was just the first task.” At its best, noir is in the darkness of the human heart. And in urban noir, humanity is the darkness at the heart of the city. In Havana Noir, better than half the stories are truly gripping, and all of them resuscitate a dark Havana that seethes beneath the idealized island of our imagination.
—Robert Arellano

Robert Arellano teaches at the Taos branch of the University of New Mexico. His graphic novel Dead in Desemboque, a collaboration with three comic-book artists that was inspired by the illustrated pulp fiction of Mexico, will be published this spring by Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press.

 

SUSPENSE | HAVANA NOIR
DECAY AND DESPAIR
THE LATEST IN THE NOIR SERIES FOCUSES ON THE HEARTBREAK OF LIFE IN THE CRUMBLING CITY OF HAVANA
Posted on Sun, Nov. 25, 2007
BY SAM HARRISON

HAVANA NOIR. Edited by Achy Obejas. Akashic. 355 pages. $15.95 in paper.

Sewer-dwelling dwarves who run a black market. An engineer moonlighting as a beautician to make ends meet. Street toughs pondering existentialism. An aging aristocrat with an unsolvable dilemma. A Chinese boy bent on avenging his father's death.

These are the characters you will meet in this remarkable collection, the latest edition of an original noir series featuring stories set in a distinct neighborhood of a particular city. Throughout these 18 stories, current and former residents of Havana -- some well-known, some previously undiscovered -- deliver gritty tales of depravation, depravity, heroic perseverance, revolution and longing in a city mythical and widely misunderstood.

This is noir of a different shade and texture, shadowy and malevolent, to be sure, but desperate, too, heartbreakingly wounded, the stories linked more by the acrid pall of a failed but seemingly interminable experiment than by genre. Ambiguities abound, and ingenuity flourishes even as morality evaporates in the daily struggle for self-preservation.

In this dark light the best of these stories are also the most disturbing. What For, This Burden by Michel Encinosa Fu, a resident of Havana, is a brutal and wrenching tale of brothers involved in drug deals and child prostitution; they peddle their own sister. The Red Bridge, by Yoss, another Havana resident, depicts a violent incident in the lives of two friends with apparently great potential who, though acutely aware of the depravity of their situation, are powerless or unwilling to extract themselves from the mean streets of El Patio.

Cuban engineer Mariela Varona Roque's offering, The Orchid, is a short but powerful tale of the demise of a young boy frequently entrusted to the care of a browbeaten neighbor obsessed with his solitary orchid.

Isolation, poverty and despair even in the midst of friends and family, lead to unthinkable cruelty, a common thread in these and other stories. But just as prevalent are resilience, hope, honor and ferocious devotion to the island. Pablo Mendina's Johnny Ventura's Seventh Try centers on the oft-repeated theme of getting to La Yuma, the United States. After six failures a man succeeds in building a boat sturdy enough to safely cross the Straits, only to find himself turning in circles in excruciating angst once out of the water.

Alone in a decaying building overlooking the Malecon, a woman in Mylene Fernandez Pintado's The Scene sustains a semblance of quiet elegance for her dying mother. Then she's free but decides to stay on the island rather than join her brother in San Francisco. And in Carolina Garcia-Aguilera's beautifully rendered The Dinner, an elderly gentleman, his wife and a servant who hasn't been paid in 40 years agonize in their crumbling, once elegant mansion, over their inability to find the ingredients for an annual dinner for friends. With faint echoes of The Gift of the Magi and perfectly bridging the pre- and post-revolution days, the story is achingly splendid.

Several murder stories, including one about an arrogant serial killer egged on by a woman he phones to brag about his exploits, and a film-noir style piece featuring a San Francisco private eye sent to bring out a thrill-seeking rich kid on the eve of the revolution, round out the collection and justify its place in the series.

But if you're looking for slick, moody, detective noir, sunsets, mojitos at La Florida, or dancing girls at La Tropicana, you won't find them in Havana Noir. Along with grit and pluck and the disintegration of structure and values, there is an overarching sadness to these stories as evidenced by perhaps the most disturbing commonality: repeated loveless, disconnected sex, including rape and incest, but more often just mindless, pleasureless consensual copulation, all that's left to fill the time while waiting for something to change.

Sam Harrison is a writer in Ormond Beach.

Mystery Review: Havana Noir, edited by Achy Obejas
Oline H. Cogdill | Mystery columnist
December 2, 2007
Havana Noir. Edited by Achy Obejas.

Akashic Books. $15.95, 356 pp.

The streets of Havana teem with a diverse, complex people whose wants and needs are often neglected but who are connected by one ideal: to have a good life.

In this superb collection of short stories edited by novelist, poet and journalist Achy Obejas, myriad characters show just how far they will go for just a small part of the world and keep their dignity despite, as Obejas says, "the damage inured by self-preservation at all costs."

There's the cross-eyed young man whose "affliction" prevents him from getting a job but who finds a kind of refuge with a black market-dealing dwarf. There's a Chinese boy trying to avenge his father. And there's the woman tethered to Cuba by her dying mother.

The 18 stories by current and former residents of Havana are gritty, heartbreaking and capture the city. Each story an unflinching look at Havana, giving a sense of hope — and hopelessness — for what the city was and is now and could be again.

Says Obejas in her introduction, "In the real Havana — the aphotic Havana that never appears in the postcards, tourist guides, or testimonies of either the political left or right — the concept of sin has been banished by the urgency of need. And need inevitably turns the human heart feral."

This is the kind of keen insight we've come to expect from the Noir anthologies published by Akashic. Each anthology features a different city, such as Baltimore, Miami, San Francisco and others, and acts as a mini-guide to each area. The compressed action, the layered plots and the character studies packed into just a few pages make short stories riveting for me. Those twists at the end a la O. Henry help, too.

In The Dinner, by Miami writer Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, an annual meal with old friends becomes a symbol of an elderly man's life. A seafood dinner has the power to transport these friends "back to that time when they actually looked forward to a future." No cost is too great for these precious ingredients.

The stiff penalty of freedom and love form Lea Aschkenas' La Coca-Cola Del Olvido.

The authors pack a lot of story into a few pages. Mariela Varona Roque's The Orchid is only 4 1/2 pages, yet much power is in this chilling tale. Roque's story is a tome compared to the scant three pages of Yohamna Desprstre's haunting Abikú.

 

HAVANA NOIR
Edited by Achy Obejas, Akashic, 355 pages, $19.50

This is the seventh collection in the "city" series by Akashic in which a mystery author edits a collection of stories about his/her city: Laura Lippman did Baltimore, Julie Smith New Orleans etc. Now we have Havana and it's a rich collection of winners.
Most of these authors are unpublished in English or not well known, although Carolina Garcia-Aguilera's series should ring some bells. Among the Cuban-American contingent there are several fine writers, but it's the Cubanos who kept me wanting more. There is a European influence (several are poets as well) and they don't always adhere to the "rules" of the classic crime story. There's also the uniquely Latin version of the hard-boiled story. Achy Obejas is to be congratulated on her wonderful selections and, in some cases, her excellent translations.
-- Margaret Cannon

Achy Obejas' Malecón murder mystery brings noir to Cuba

BY CARLOS RODRÍGUEZ MARTORELL
Wednesday, October 10th 2007, 4:00 AM

Novelist Achy Obejas has turned her native Havana into a crime scene — without shedding a drop of blood.
In "Havana Noir" (Akashic Books, $15.95), the author of "Days of Awe" has gathered 17 Cuban authors to write short crime stories set in the Caribbean island's capital.
The just-released compilation is part of Akashic's series of noir genre books — called in Spanish género negro — set in different cities and neighborhoods (the Bronx, Los Angeles, Miami), and Havana seemed like a natural fit.
"Noir has been always popular in Cuba," Obejas said on the phone from Chicago, where she lives. "Cuban TV pirates a lot of American TV. And probably the most popular show on the air right now I think is ‘Law & Order.' They are addicted to that stuff."
Among the contributing authors are Leonardo Padura Fuentes, internationally known for his Detective Mario Conde novels, and Arnaldo Correa, "one of the founders of Cuban noir," said Obejas.
Another highlight is young sensation Ena Lucía Portela, who has won literary prizes in Spain and France, but has barely been translated into English.
Her disturbing story "The Last Passenger" revolves around a woman infatuated with a serial killer, and portrays a class-divided Cuba where the nomenklatura enjoys vacations in the Bahamas and wears gold Rolexes.
"Cuba's upper class is invisible for most people," Portela, 34, said via e-mail from Havana. "Official propaganda insists that in communist countries all citizens live under the same economic conditions, which is a huge lie."
Portela's brash, raw style landed her on the Bogota 39 — the Colombian International Book Fair's list of the 39 most important writers in Latin America under the age of 39 — but the prestige doesn't extend to her own country.
"For now, this tale in particular will only have readers outside Cuba," she said. "Here, it's unpublishable because of political censorship."
Obejas edited and translated into English most of the stories and wrote "Zenzizenzic," in which she sheds light on the tiny Cuban community in Hawaii.
Cuban noir is a distinctive genre in itself, she says. "It tends not to have a detective. It's never the lone guy out there, but the collective working for the better good. It's almost an antithesis of what we know noir to be."
Although she won't name them, she says many "very well-known Cuban authors" wrote stories for the book, but they were discarded because the genre "completely defied them."
Others just adapted to it. "[Noir] was something I never set myself to do in a conscious manner," said author Mabel Cuesta, "but which may be underlying in some of my previous stories."
Cuesta, who lives in North Bergen, N.J., writes in "Virgins of Regla" about a brutal rape in a Havana neighborhood infused with Afro-Cuban culture.
"I would live intermittently in a predominantly black neighborhood," she said. "I would be la blanquita (the whitey), but that didn't prevent me from going to listen to their drums and see women and men bursting into screams because the saints were 'passing through' them."
crodriguez@nydailynews.com

Next up will be another string of Scandinavian imports, one from Iceland (Yrsa Sigurdardottir's Last Rituals) and two from Sweden (Åke Edwardson's Frozen Tracks and Mari Jungstedt's Unspoken); but first, Havana Noir, the 17th in Akashic's Noir series, but the first based on a non-Anglo culture (anthologies from Ireland and the U.K. are the other non-U.S. books so far). Havana Noir, edited by Achy Obehas (who also translated most of the stories) deserves attention not only as noir and as a glimpse into a culture most of us have little access to--but also for the quality of the writing regardless of source or genre. In fact, a number of the stories are not conventional crime stories (though most qualify under Obejas's own definition of noir--see quotes from her introduction in my previous post). Few have police or detectives in central roles. But most are startling revelations of the darkness at the heart of not just the Cuban experience but modern life as a whole. The best of the stories (including Obejas's own "Zenzizenic") offer complex rather than simplistic appraisals of life in Cuba (and some, also including Obejas's story, employ considerable humor). Only one story, by Carolina García Aguilera (a prominent emigre writer) is disappointingly one-dimensional in its vision of Cuba. Among the rest, whether by emigres or writers living in Cuba, include many that are moving, evocative, and significant. Miguel Mejidas's "Nowhere Man" is surreal and nightmarish experience that made me think of the stories of the great Cuban poet Virgilio Piñera. Alex Abella's detective story is an exciting tale of revolution and escape (and the only "pulp noir" story in the collection), and the story that most clearly states the oppressive context for the revolution (Batista's dictatorial, corrupt-capitalist regime), as well as American support for that regime. Several stories deal with the Chinese legacy in Havana and several others with the influence of Santería. Several show a violent underworld from the point of view of the members of that world, and all the stories demonstrate the hollow claims of the government that there is no crime in Cuba's socialist state. One story, "La Coca-Cola del Olvido" by Lea Aschkenas, turns on violent politics in the emigre Cuban community of the U.S. This is a substantial collection, over 350 pages with 18 stories ranging from barely 3 pages to over 30. Altogether, the writing is excellent, the view of Cuba unparalleled, and the contribution to the literature of noir undeniable. Havana Noir will stretch in various ways readers' notions of noir, of Cuba, and of crime writing as a limited or limiting form.

--Glenn Harper

 

Edited by Achy Obejas. Akashic, $15.95 paper (300p) ISBN 978-1-933354-38-5

The 17th in Akashic’s acclaimed series of original noir anthologies is the first with a non-Anglo setting (the two earlier non-U.S. locales were London and Dublin). The choice to collect Cuban stories was a smart one: it will expose American noir fans to other cultures, and readers interested in those other cultures will get a taste of noir. The authors will be unknown to virtually all American readers, but by and large, they prove themselves as capable of crafting grim and gritty stories of despair and irony as their more familiar counterparts. The standout is Mylene Fernandez Pintado’s “The Scene,” a short but searing portrait of trapped lives. As the unnamed narrator nears the end of his rope, he simultaneously faces eviction from his apartment and the impending death of his elderly mother, for whom he is caring. Pintado succeeds in using the genre without resorting to violence or sex, and this story should send readers in search of her other work, though most of it is available only in Spanish. (Oct.)

 

Credit Cuban-born Achy Obejas (Days of Awe) with Havana Noir; she edited and introduced it, translated 12 of the 18 stories, and wrote the longest one, about an American "pet foreigner" in Havana who threatens to interfere in a local family's affairs. The cumulative work of these writers (half living in Cuba, most of the others born there) describes a country of (mostly) have-nots, struggling with the rationing imposed after the revolution and doing what they must to survive, usually outside the law. Most poignant are "The Dinner" by Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, with its O. Henry-like twist, and "The Scene" by Mylene Fernandez Pintado, featuring a woman caring for her dying mother; most chilling are Mariela Varona Roque's stylish "The Orchid," about a child murderer, and Ena Lucia Portela's "The Last Passenger," describing an anonymous woman's relationship with a serial killer. Noir at its darkest.

 

CUBAN SHADOWS
When Akashic Books put out ' "Miami Noir," an anthology about the heavily Latino town, local author Achy Obejas noticed something: there was only one Cuban writer. When she playfully suggested to the publishing company that they give Havana a shot, they—much to her surprise—said "go for it," leading to "Havana Noir," which she edited, featuring eighteen stories of sex, crime and Castro. "There are people on and off the island," Obejas says of her writers. "Some people are symphatetic to the revolution, some people are very unsympathetic to the revolution." Editing is one thing, but Obejas also had to translate thirteen of the stories into English, a difficult task even for the Cuban-born writer. "It's not only translating the actual words," she says, "it's also finding the context and making choices about how to define certain things." Obejas' favorite story of the bunch? Miguel Mejides' "Nowhere Man," which she says is an "absolute tragedy…and yet you're cracking up laughing." It's a busy month for Obejas, whose first book of poetry, "This is What Happens in Our Other Life" is due out in November. She discusses "Havana Noir" October 18 at The Book Cellar.

 

“To most outsiders, Havana is a tropical wreckage of sin, sex, and noise, a parallel world familiar but exotic -- and embargoed enough to serve as a release valve for whatever impulse has been repressed or denied.” -- Achy Obejas in "Introduction: A Feral Heart"
Havana Noir is an anthology of short stories -- grim, bleak, escapist, violent, sexually charged -- set in the collection’s namesake city. The compiled stories are organized into four parts -- I: Sleepless in Havana, II: Escape to Nowhere, III: Sudden Rage, IV: Drowning in Silence. Beside the title of each of the short stories is the name of the neighborhood in which the protagonists live, breathe, screw, die, kill and dream -- Chinatown, Centro Habana, Alamar, Malecón…
Interestingly, Havana Noir is part of a series of award winning anthologies set in various cities -- including Brooklyn, London, Chicago and New Orleans. Delhi Noir and Istanbul Noir are soon to follow. It would appear that compiling the anthology was a labor of love for its editor, Obejas; not only does the collection feature one of her stories, but a handful of them are translated from the original Spanish into English by her. The task Obejas undertakes is a difficult one because even as the stories are intended to reveal the darker criminal underbelly of Cuban life and thought, she is determined to dodge stereotypes and to offer breadth of perspectives and story telling. In part, Obejas is able to accomplish this simply by featuring an expansive array of writers who are, in her words:”…young and old, established and emerging, male and female, on and off the island, of clear and dubious sexualities, black and white, and -- because it’s Cuba -- everything in between.
The redemptive moments in the collection are negligible, fleeting but many of the stories are riveting in their portrayal of grief, rage, apathy and hopelessness. Michel Encinosa Fú’s “What for, This Burden,” opens with a particularly violent suicide and, as the narrative continues this act pales next to the brutality and amorality of the living. The story sickens and haunts me. The contours of Miguel Mejides “Nowhere Man,” the first of the collected stories, most closely echoes the archetypical narrative of the outsider and country bumpkin (in this instance, cross-eyed) who finds sanctuary in the city. Mejides’s writing veers somehow from gritty to magical realist.
Mylene Fernández Pintado’s “The Scene” and Carolina Garcia-Aguilera’s “The Dinner” are perhaps the most delicately nuanced of the stories -- bleached of the criminality and violence bubbling in others. The narrator of “The Scene” is nursing her dying mother in a crumbling, stately building marked for demolition and emptied of neighbors. Garcia-Aguilera’s “The Dinner” follows the highly anticipated decades-old, annual celebratory dinner of a group of boyhood friends in the Special Period.
To a relative neophyte to Cuban culture, Havana Noir might be a somewhat jarring, ambivalent introduction. Nonetheless, the collection of stories offer powerful, if deliberately stilted, insight into both the Cuban culture and psyche. Havana emerges as a ruthless, beautiful, searing, mystical city -- alternately repellant and seductive.

--Aysha Somasundaram

Havana Noir edited by Achy Obejas
Akashic Books
ISBN: 978-1-933354-38-5
355 pages

La Habana. Los exiliados la hemos visto adoptar los rostros más distintos. Postalita, vívida memoria o sorpresa descubierta en las más distantes latitudes. Nunca se sabe dónde asomará rincón que nos la devuelva de pronto, aunque haya sitios más predecibles que otros, como es natural.

Mis tres falsas Habanas más creíbles las he encontrado 1) en los lavabos de la estación de autobuses de Tetuán, Marruecos, 2) rodeado por unos gallos al pie del faro de Key West y 3) en larga noche sentado en incómoda silla azul en la Promenade des Anglais, en Niza, dándole la espalda al Negresco.

En Havana Noir (Akashic Books), aparecido hace un par de semanas, Achy Obejas ha recogido un largo puñado de relatos con una Habana envuelta en el misterio, la violencia y el susto. Una ciudad segmentada en barrios que adjudicó a cada uno de los escritores invitados, residentes de La Habana la mayor parte y seleccionados con criterio antojadizo.

A modo de aperitivo, aquí siguen la introducción de Achy Obejas, en inglés, y, en español, el relato de Yoss, a quien correspondió el barrio de Lawton. Havana Noir se presentará en Nueva York el próximo 8 de noviembre, y en Miami, el 7 de diciembre.

Agradezco a Achy Obejas, desde Chicago, y a Yoss, desde La Habana, la cortesía de ofrecer estos textos a los lectores de El Tono de la Voz. También a Ibrahim Ahmad, de Akashic Books, en Nueva York.