“When you see cartoons burning, put your constitution to soak.” Enrique del Risco’s warning falls heavily, due to his lucidity, in the country of revelry and nervous jokes. It is sad that it arrives late, more than 65 years after – as Jorge Brioso observes in his prologue to History and masochism (Sneaky) – Fidel Castro’s recently launched revolution will censor a cartoonist for ridiculing the Sierra Maestra rebels.

Del Risco’s most recent book puts its finger on the Cuban’s most painful sore: his tendency to suffer – with pleasure – pursuing utopias. The fervor for the voice of the tyrant, the speed with which intolerance is assumed, submission, the ability to humiliate, the cult of surveillance… the dark side of the Island has been as present in its history as the one carried and brought tropical humor.

Perhaps, in fact, both are symptoms of a deeper character defect that the word masochism only begins to express. Well, “totalitarianism,” as Del Risco assures, “more than a political regime, it is a culture, a civilization, a custom.”

It has also reached bookstores The penalty (InCubadora), the “monster book” by Jorge Luis Arcos that won the Franz Kafka Prize for Essay/Testimony. Carlos Aguilera has said of the volume, which has the purpose of reflecting or “(re)constructing” the Cuban canon, that it is “full of anecdotes and notes on Cuban intellectual life,” and that “it speaks out loud, but also in “low voice.”

Perhaps, in fact, both are symptoms of a deeper character defect that the word masochism only begins to express.

Incubator recently published a fragment of the book, which contains an exchange of letters between Arcos and Lorenzo García Vega about the events that led to the end of the magazine Meeting of Cuban Cultureand the resignation for “ethical reasons” of several members of its editorial team, in 2009.

The four Seasons by Leonardo Padura – the narrative tetralogy that inaugurates the adventures of detective Mario Conde – are studied in detail by Yam-Nick Menéndez in The fiction of reality and the police (Verbum). The book applies several academic categories to the work of the Havana novelist and offers a conclusion: Conde’s stories are an underground, but not ineffective, manifestation of the tension between literature and totalitarianism.

It is never cold in Havana (Almuzara), by Zoé Valdés, takes place in the 1970s on the Island. With a well-defined soundtrack – that of rock and the hippie movement –, it narrates from nostalgia the lives of several young people from Havana for whom freedom is a creed. , and who face the intolerance of a puritanical and oppressive tyranny.

To the same decade it refers Atlantis (Libros del fogonero), by the Cienfuegos writer Camilo Venegas. The formula that guides the narrative also defines the country: “The fight of the present against the past leaves many without a future.” For the author, a native of Paradero de Camarones, the coastal town has its perfect metaphor in the ancient kingdom sunk in the sea.

‘Maine’ aims to fill an important gap: almost no historian has dealt with Masó, forgotten by all sides after the victory of 1898

Published by the exiled journalist Juan Manuel Cao, The great madness (Universal) is a novel of “excesses, absurdities and abuses of power.” Defined by its editorial as a grotesque story, with not a little of Cao’s life experience, its characters are “a tormented official, an eminent beauty, a delusional scientist and a boss with absolute power.”

A story revealed (Universal), by José Ramón Fernández –who died in Coral Gables, Florida, in 2021–, investigates the figure of Juan Masó Parra. The controversial mambí, who left Havana five days before the battleship was blown up Maine –which determined the entry of the United States into the war–, after having proposed to the Spanish to organize a Cuban brigade against the “invaders from the north.” The book aims to fill an important gap: almost no historian has dealt with Masó, forgotten by all sides after the victory of 1898.

On October 15, when publishers around the world were honoring Italo Calvino for his centenary, the cultural commissioners of the Island – where Calvino was born in 1923 – offered forced “rehabilitation” to the writer. Financed by the Italian Embassy in Havana, which prepared an agenda for the anniversary, the trilogy Our ancestors It will be the only Calvino book to which Cubans have access. Yes, unlike other occasions, the copies reach bookstores.

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2023-10-29 14:33:59
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