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Our CaribbeanEditor: Thomas Glave The first book of its kind, Our Caribbean is an anthology of lesbian and gay writing from across the Antilles. The author and activist Thomas Glave has gathered outstanding fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and poetry by little-known writers along with selections by internationally celebrated figures such as Reinaldo Arenas, Audre Lorde, Achy Obejas, Assotto Saint, José Alcántara Almánzar, Michelle Cliff, and Dionne Brand. The result is an unprecedented literary conversation on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered experiences throughout the Caribbean and its far-flung diaspora. Many selections were originally published in Spanish, Dutch, or creole languages; some are translated into English here for the first time. The thirty-seven authors hail from the Bahamas, Barbados, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Panama, Puerto Rico, St. Vincent, St. Kitts, Suriname, and Trinidad. Many have lived outside the Caribbean, and their writing depicts histories of voluntary migration as well as exile from repressive governments, communities, and families. Many pieces have a political urgency that reflects their authors’ work as activists, teachers, community organizers, and performers. Desire commingles with ostracism and alienation throughout: in the evocative portrayals of same-sex love and longing, and in the selections addressing religion, family, race, and class. From the poem “Saturday Night in San Juan with the Right Sailors” to the poignant narrative “We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?” to an eloquent call for the embrace of difference that appeared in the Nassau Daily Tribune on the eve of an anti-gay protest, Our Caribbean is a brave and necessary book.
Contributors José Alcántara Almánzar “Our Caribbean is a superb anthology. Thomas Glave does not
exaggerate when he writes that this is ‘a book that I and others
have been waiting for and have wanted for all our lives.’ Here
we have a book that makes literal the ongoing necessity to write ‘against
silence.’” Thomas Glave is the author of Whose Song? and Other Stories; the essay collection Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent, winner of a Lambda Literary Award; and a forthcoming short fiction collection, The Torturer’s Wife. Born to Jamaican parents in the Bronx and raised there and in Jamaica, Glave is a founding member of the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays (J-FLAG). He teaches in the English department at the State University of New York, Binghamton.
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My Own Private CubaBy Achy ObejasThe Chicago
Tribune Editors note: Achy Obejas is the author of three books, most recently the novel, "Days of Awe." A Tribune staff reporter and native of Cuba, Obejas is writing an account -- in both English and Spanish -- of her most recent visit to Cuba. Havana is deserted. It’s all I can think about since I got here. I walk in the plaza in front of the Cathedral and my footsteps rattle and echo. There are, of course, still Cubans engaged in nearly every imaginable
endeavor along the city’s seawall, jammed hump-backed public
buses, open-air markets and What’s missing from the scene are the tourists. “Finally,” says Tania, my girlfriend, a Havana resident, “Cuba for Cubans.” Except that Cuba can’t survive with just Cubans. With the world still reeling from September 11, the global economic
slowdown is hitting Cuba especially hard. Some hotels have closed
for lack of business. In Cuba, I live in the capital’s historic district, equidistant
between the Cathedral and the newly renovated Museum of Fine Arts.
In other words, prime turf for Now there are scores of empty tables at the cafe in Cathedral
plaza, and bored and worried valets at the Seville Hotel, just
off the museum. For the first time in my Cuba for Cubans. Whenever I used to come to Cuba, I would bring most of my toiletries
with me. Friends of mine brought things too, sometimes even canned
meats and powdered Shopping here, though, isn’t like in Chicago. For starters,
there are peso stores and dollar stores. The peso stores are really
the bodega -- the place where you pick Then there are the dollar stores, or “shoppins.”
These cater to anyone with dollars. Some are very slick, like
the six-level Carlos III mall in Central Havana, where Recently, a new “shoppin” opened up around the corner,
and I trotted over to buy some local butter, which is outrageously
priced at $1.50 USD a stick. When I “That’s because they pocket the money, it’s a bookkeeping trick,” explained a friend. Looking at my overpriced little stick of Cuban butter, my friend warned me to stay away from domestic goods. “The clerks take the real items home, dilute them, and resell them in recycled containers,” she explained. “That’s another way they make their money.” The sad part is that they do it mostly to Cuban products, because expectations are already so low. “Next time,” says my friend, “buy the Australian butter.” The Pope’s visit to Cuba in 1998 gave Catholicism a boost and made it seem as if this had always been a Christian nation. But even when Cubans have professed Catholicism, practice has
always been a bit dubious. During the Inquisition, Cubans were
so lackadaisical that Spanish The truth is that most Cubans practice a cocktail of beliefs: a little Judeo-Christian piety, a lot of African animism. In Cuba, December offers a number of religious celebrations.
One of the most popular -- and least touristic -- is the Feast
of St. Lazarus, better known as the Officially, his day is December 17 but the observation lasts
all month. The government sets up extra buses on the two-hour
route from Havana to just outside the Those making promises to Babalú-Ayé crawl on their
backs or knees all the way to the shrine. They wear sackcloth,
the color purple, and usually carry or push an The day we go to El Rincón, there’s a tarot reader
on the church grounds, next to all the disabled people looking
for miracles and asking for donations. He tells us Most tourists, I think, expect Cubans to drive classic Ford Fairlanes
or ‘56 Chevys. And indeed, those gems can be found here
-- but usually hidden away, waiting The U.S. made cars that take to the roads are jalopies, nothing
American about them except the shells, which hide auto parts from
former socialist allies -- as well as In Havana, American clunkers cruise right alongside shiny new
Daewoos, Toyotas, Daihatsus and Subarus. There’s a Fiat
dealership. Mercedes Benz provides for Of course -- but for the hearses -- the average Cuban doesn’t
get many opportunities to ride these. Day to day transportation
is provided by humped-back buses the Finally, there are taxis. But getting one is not as simple as
standing on the corner and flagging it down. For starters, there
are many different kinds of taxis, from the My favorites are the 10 pesos taxis (50 US cents), which are
on fixed routes. These are usually beat-up Russian Ladas or American
cars from the 40s. Hardly a “Prado,” I say when I need to get home, and the driver
either shakes hear head and pulls away or shrugs for me to climb
in. Along the way we might pick up as many At the end of the ride, I hand over my Cuban money and we both nod at each other in gratitude. There are times when Cuba is wonderful, when being here is as
natural as breathing. For me, that often happens when I stroll
up to the Plaza de Armas, a charming There are two things I love about this place. The first are the
book sellers -- scores of them, with their wooden shelves and
their yellowed treasures. Everything sold The other thing I love is the music. Because Plaza de Armas is
surrounded by little cafes, there’s a constant soundtrack
provided by small combos that take turns Most Cubans today don’t listen to this; it would be like
tuning into Benny Goodman in Chicago. They prefer contemporary
dance bands like Los Van Van, pop When Cubans my age get sentimental, they listen to Silvio Rodríguez,
Pablo Milanés and Sara González -- revolutionary
troubadours whose songs are still played But growing up in the U.S., I missed all that. (I was listening
to Lou Reed, Patti Smith and David Bowie instead.) So, for me,
Cuban music of the heart means In Havana on a mild and cloudy day, strolling through stacks
of poetry by José Lezama Lima and Dulce María Loynaz,
what makes me feel at home is, In recent years there’s been a resurgence of interest in
the island’s Jewish community. Month after month, there
are Jewish delegations visiting Cuba from New York, That there should be a link between the U.S. and Cuban Jewish
communities isn’t surprising: The first official Jewish
organization here, the United Hebrew But the first permanent synagogue is the one that really reflects
the island’s Jewish roots: Chevet Ahim, founded in 1914,
was established by Orthodox Turkish Jews. The very first Jews in Cuba came with Columbus fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. "Still today, most Cuban Jews are Sephardic," explains
Jose Levy Tur, head of Havana’s Centro Hebreo Sefaradi,
the only Sephardic congregation of three temples But more than 90 percent of the foreign Jewish delegations are from the U.S., and ethnically Ashkenazi. "So what gets played up is Cuban Ashkenazi history, because that’s what they want to hear about," says Levy with a shrug. At the Centro, they try to gently explain to the delegations
what the situation really is by presenting lectures and cultural
programs. Some of the visitors come well "It’s hard for me to believe -- with the Internet
and so many different sources of information -- that people could
be surprised that there are Jews in Cuba, or what Still, Levy considers the delegations, which began in the early 90s, as a positive trend. "For starters, we’re recognized," he says. "There’s
exchange, which is important. They’re also a big help with
kosher products, money for different projects, and At the beginning of each year, Cuba’s santeros and babalawos
-- the high priests of the Afro-Cuban religion of santería
-- get together and read the Letter of the Casa Yoruba’s Antonio Orestes Castaneda Marquez says his
group’s membership includes more than 500 of Cuba’s
most important santeros and babalawos, but Like the one about the cafeteria. Most santeros and babalawos
live in poverty; it’s almost a rule. Yet the cafeteria at
Casa Yoruba is charging in dollars, not Cuban "We don’t have permission to change pesos into dollars,
and we’re forced to buy supplies in dollars," explains
a frustrated Castaneda. "Plus, we pay a lot of taxes to The pressure -- even in their own headquarters -- to deal in dollars is causing some shamans to consider altering the rules of their faith. "I know it’s true -- a lot of people are adapting
ceremonies for foreigners who pay in dollars," says Castaneda
with a pained look. "But we’re against that, just like
Yet Castaneda recognizes the problem of trying to please foreigners isn’t just about making money. "We come from a culture of slaves, so sometimes we bend," he says. "We don’t always realize we’re a free people now, and we can say no." Finally, after more than an hour of practical explanations and
apologies to those gathered, Castaneda finally gets down to Letter
of the Year and the gods' message: It’s about 1 a.m. and Pedro, the Tribune’s Havana
bureau chauffeur, and I have been driving for hours on the backroads
of Oriente, Cuba’s mountainous and Then we spy the Hotel Guardalavaca through the darkness, the
only resort for miles, and we sigh, relieved that we’ll
get a decent night’s rest and, hopefully, a hot At the desk, the clerk looks at us warily. “You’re ... Cubans?” she asks cautiously. Cuban hotels -- except for the occasional flophouse in the provinces -- do not allow Cubans to lodge, even if they have the money to pay for a room. We produce our documents and my U.S. passport works its instant magic. The clerk pushes a sign-up form at me. “But he can’t stay here,” she says chagrined, returning Pedro’s I.D. passbook, work permits and driver’s license to him. “Look, it’s the middle of the night and the middle of nowhere,” I plead. “He’s our official driver -- I’m here working and I couldn’t do my work without him.” “But he’s Cuban,” she says, and Pedro -- who’s
a proud man -- reddens when he hears her words. “Look, if
it were up to me ..." And with that she goes to get the He turns out to be a nervous young bureaucrat who, initially, apologizes. “I’m just trying to make a living,” he says. But I insist. “Don’t you think it’s a bit ironic -- if not pathetic -- that I, who left, can stay here, and Pedro, who stayed and who’s a revolutionary, can’t?” The manager looks over our documents again. He goes outside and examines our SUV. Finally, he instructs the clerk to rent Pedro a room. But as he returns Pedro’s documents to him, he notices
his I.D. passbook is falling apart. “You should be ashamed,”
he says to Pedro. “Your passbook is how “My passbook?” Pedro finally explodes. “And what image are you projecting by denying lodging to Cubans?” I ask. “Look, in your country, I don’t question your laws -- don’t come here to question mine,” he shoots back. “What kind of law is that anyway?” Pedro asks, exasperated. “That’s it,” says the manager, ripping the sign up form from Pedro’s hands. “I was going to take a chance with you two but for what? Please leave!” We’re incredulous, as are the two Spanish tourists standing
behind us. The manager stomps off. As we leave, the security guard
shakes his head, averting his eyes in I’ve always dreamed of returning to Cuba with my father.
For me, he has always been the link back to the island. Unfortunately,
my father's politics keep him from So there was a little bittersweetness when the opportunity arose
on this most recent trip to Cuba to visit Oriente, the eastern
provinces where he grew up. This is a Oriente is more than lush geography, though. It’s the place
where all of the island’s revolutions have begun. It’s
where the son, the island’s signature rhythm, was Before going, I dropped my father a quick note, asking if there
was anything he wanted me to see in particular, anyone he wanted
me to visit. He responded with a Traveling through Oriente, I quickly grew used to both its blazing
beauty and its numbing poverty. So I was somewhat unprepared for
Banes, where I went searching The town is almost storybook in character: The houses are painted
pastel colors, the streets evenly paved and clean. There was an
air of gentle prosperity all about. After spending an hour of unsuccessful grave-hopping at the Banes
cemetery -- unlike Havana’s, well-preserved and not all
disturbed -- I had to get going back to And then, suddenly, my father’s intensity, his dreaminess, made sense after all. There is a deathwatch in Cuba. Out on the streets, the phenomenon is referred to obliquely.
"Después" -- later. "When the changes come
... " some will say. Others are more blunt, if perhaps a
bit Officially, Fidel Castro will be succeeded by his younger brother,
Raul, the head of the armed forces, though some think the future
rests with Felipe Perez Roque, But these are all the topics of conversation that flit on the surface of everybody’s real concern: Fidel’s death. Because the curious thing here is that, even those who oppose
him allow that, if nothing else, Fidel provides a strange stability.
There’s no post-Fidel plan here, at To think that Cubans will simply rejoice is both simplistic and
wrong. Fidel has been here more than 40 years, for most Cubans,
their entire lives. He looms huge, not A friend in Havana tells me that it’s us in exile who think
about Fidel, that here, on the island, everybody’s beyond
that already. And while it’s true that talk about Fidel’s most famous speech is titled "History Will Absolve Me." But that, of course, depends entirely on who writes the story of my poor and proud and beautiful country. |
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The End of the AffairBy Achy ObejasThe Nation It's been a while since Cuba, that caiman-shaped Caribbean isle, ceased to be a place on the map. At some point, it came unhinged and floated away, transformed into a gilded reflecting pool, a repository of dreams. Those with hope or memory (true or false) called out: Here lies utopia, whether the socialist fantasy or the golden recollections of its exiles. Cuba is, or was, or could be, an exemplary nation, a veritable beacon, egalitarian and progressive. For a small country--about 68,000 square miles and a population of just over 11 million, the navel of the Americas--this is an awesome, crushing burden. Because if Cuba inspires, it also provokes despair. Alma Guillermoprieto's bittersweet memoir Dancing with Cuba is about falling in love with this mythic place or, more precisely, trying to. It is also about the tense relationship between realism and idealism, a sympathetic yet ultimately unsparing account of a personal odyssey that ends not triumphantly but nonetheless extraordinarily. Guillermoprieto is no stranger to Cuba or Latin America. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, she has covered the carnage between the drug cartels and Colombia's successively impotent governments, civil wars all over Central America, the assault on Grenada by US troops, urban life and poverty in Brazil, political corruption in her native Mexico and revolutionary victory in Nicaragua. Her report from Cuba during the Pope's 1998 historic visit unfolded as a wrenching portrait of an ever more isolated Comandante, his military fatigues put away for the week in exchange for a designer suit, trying desperately to keep his dignity as he compromised and compromised in order to survive--and, ultimately, to hold on to power. Through her two essay collections in the last decade, Looking for History and The Heart That Bleeds, she has argued that Latin America's politics--and indeed its political destiny--are eternally cloaked in illusion, its own identity unequivocally tied to its complex, paradoxical relationship to the United States. (Cuba's version of this, of course, is total resistance to the United States in spite of enduring cultural and emotional ties.) While Guillermoprieto has never attempted to disguise her affinity for the leftist ambitions of Latin America's revolutionaries, it is also true that she has never gone out of her way to massage or rationaliz! e their prejudices and failures (and not even those that can be traced back to US actions or policies). Dancing with Cuba is exquisitely detailed about the physicality of the place, the sensations, the conversations. Yet in the prologue Guillermoprieto is up front about the story's sources: "I've retained only fragmented memories and a few concrete souvenirs that help me prove to myself, when I have my doubts, that I really did go on that journey that so thoroughly unravelled my life." The book depends instead on documents, news reports and Guillermoprieto's re-created moments and conversations. Many of the characters are composites, though a number of historic figures flit in and out--most notably the late Manuel Piñeiro, the Cuban spymaster, whom she portrays with a measured sympathy. Still, the book never feels impressionistic; it's grounded in solid reporting, though the tone throughout is wistful. Dancing with Cuba covers six months in 1970, including what is for many the pivotal moment of the Cuban Revolution: not the Bay of Pigs, not the missile crisis, but the Harvest of 10 Million Tons, a wildly ambitious campaign to produce about 3 million more tons of sugar than the country ever had, even during the exploitative "Dance of the Millions" in the 1920s or the golden age of greed under Batista. The campaign's goal was to wipe out Cuba's considerable debt to the Soviet Union in one fell swoop. (At the time, the island had taken out a loan from the USSR larger than its entire existing liability, essentially turning the island into the Soviet Union's indentured servant.) But what was at stake was much more than just long-term economic independence. It was the very heart of all the revolution could be. After all, Cuban Communism, for all its orthodoxy and very un-tropical puritanism, was considerably different from the Soviet variant: much more personal, perhaps much more--let's just say it--Western. The Cubans wanted to loosen reliance on the Soviets because they wanted to do things their own way. Guillermoprieto went to Cuba as a 20-year-old to teach modern dance (in a classroom with no mirrors, to avoid counterrevolutionary vanity) but wound up as witness to the historic mass mobilization of the country for the 10 million tons. Months after the campaign's failure, the island was still feeling the depth of its wound; indeed, at the end of Guillermoprieto's stay, the harvest of the 10 million was still too painful to talk about except in the most oblique ways. That was a huge contrast to her arrival, when glassy-eyed, committed Cubans of all stripes talked feverishly about going to cut sugarcane in the countryside, or working double and triple shifts to relieve others so they could go cut cane. For Guillermoprieto, this kind of dedication was unheard of, exotic and alluring. The island's media were filled with all sorts of happy-hued stories about the nation's superhuman effort and the certain success of the enterprise. Granma, the Cuban Communist Party newspaper, pictured a daily graph that measured the yield. The billboards exhorted: Diez Millones! ("Ten million!), A Cumplir! (Let's do our part!") and Comandante en Jefe, Ordene! ("Commander in chief, we're at your command!"). But then Murphy's Law went into effect: Nature was unkind; it soon became evident that urban volunteers, no matter how devoted, did more harm than good with their machetes; the sugar mills, many fallow since the revolution, didn't grind well; machinery arrived late, or not at all, or missing vital parts. The planning had been, to put it mildly, overoptimistic. Money that could have been used toward the revolution's more essential needs--food, transportation, medicine, education--had instead been diverted to cover the vast, unexpected costs of the disaster. In the end, Cuba was burdened with a much greater, more binding debt to the Soviets than it had ever had before. Guillermoprieto touched down in Havana on May 1, 1970, just twenty days before Castro first acknowledged the dimensions of the catastrophe in a masterful, hourslong speech before hundreds of thousands at the Plaza de la Revolución. It was then that he first uttered what is perhaps the revolution's most chilling slogan: Convertir el revés en victoria! ("We must turn defeat into victory!"), a cry for mass rationalization. The young Guillermoprieto, woefully ignorant not just of Cuba but of geopolitics, was thus thrust into a situation to which she could only respond emotionally. She immediately found herself as enchanted as the cultish masses by Castro's vigor, his audacity, his rage, his unapologetic apology, his shameless display of shame. "There had never existed a more lucid, heroic man," writes Guillermoprieto. "His physical beauty itself was the confirmation of his extraordinary spiritual energy." She understood too that her rapture was more the result of cadence, heat, the masses, but it didn't matter, not then: She'd heard the siren call to revolution, trying from then on to find a way to fit the artist she was into the mold of revolutionary life and expectation. What Castro had tapped in her that day--and in so many others in his more than half a century of public life--was the desire for a meaningful life. Like many people of her generation, Guillermoprieto wanted to rebel against the status quo in those tumultuous times but was desperate for order, naïve but anxious for purpose. In the Cuban revolution, she found a paradoxical key to her dilemma: "To become a rebel was to train yourself in the discipline of absolute obedience," particularly to Castro and, to a lesser extent, Che Guevara. And even though she was in Cuba at the request of the revolution, doing work that it had specifically requested, she soon began to question the utility of that work, and by extension, of art. What good was any of it if it didn't feed anyone, if it didn't clothe anyone? By the memoir's end, however, her questions had become as blunt as they were shattering. Looking back over a debate from those days that appeared in the magazine published by Casa de las Américas, probably Cuba's most important cultural institution, Guillermoprieto interprets the messages between the lines and poses the questions the Cuban intellectuals dared not articulate: "Why do I have such a strong desire to say what I think?... Why can the proletarians say what they think, while I have the revolutionary obligation to shut up?... Why is the fieldworker's purpose accomplished when he cuts cane, and the mechanic's purpose accomplished when he repairs the motor, while I, after having written, or painted, or criticized, have to go out and cut cane in order to fulfill my commitment to the Revolution?" Her half-year in Cuba in 1970 is startling more than anything for the way it serves as a template of Cuban life after the revolution. Yes, there were deprivations, most directly linked to the US economic embargo, just like now. There were outrageous bureaucratic bunglings, clumsy and scandalous abuses of power (at one point, the art school director places a gun on a table to start a self-criticism meeting), condescending acts of puritanism (guards at the hotel where she stays patrol the halls to keep away her suitors, regardless of the fact that everyone is over 21, not unlike hotel security today). Back then, everyday life in Havana crept along at a snail's pace, with all entertainment venues but the Cuban art of conversation exhausted in a matter of days--exactly like now. "To me, what seems most bizarre about the Cuba that Fidel will leave behind," writes Guillermoprieto in her final pages, "is its current status as a curio. The revolution that was supposed to modernize the world is now treasured as a timeless relic by tourists from a world all too horrifyingly modern." Time stopped in Cuba, it's true, but it's hard to know exactly when. And that creates a constant gush of nostalgia that is no longer the sole province of Cuban exiles. The left has its own dream of what Cuba was or should be, as enduring as the memory of falling in love for the first time. No matter how poorly it ages, you just don't forget your first revolution. This article can be found on the web at: |
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From Havana with LoveBy Achy ObejasThe Village
Voice 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. |
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