"On the coffin of my grandfather / there are national flowers / that man fought in a war / more than sixty years ago," says a poem by Cuban writer Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, entitled 'Fecund Truce' and dedicated to his revolutionary grandfather.
"What did my grandfather expect of me?", He asks before the grave, "I already wrote things, grandfather / and that is the best revolution I will make."
Rodríguez Iglesias (Camagüey, 1984), author of books such as
My favorite girlfriend was a French bulldog
and
Miami Century Fox
, is one of a handful of grandchildren disillusioned with the revolution who try to transform the literary landscape of the island beyond that family fracture.
“You believe that it does not exist / that which we believe that does exist”, says Rodríguez in 'Chicle (now is when)', “because you believe that it cannot be / that which we believe that it can be”.
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These writers, born in the eighties, have novels or poems that reformulate the very concepts of exile or revolution with their literature, and introduce there global debates such as feminism, the environment and, above all, the enormous power of the internet. , which has been gradually breaking the curated official discourse within the island. The recent protests were evidence of that break that Cuban writers have been carving for some time.
"It is a literature that tells futuristic, technological, global or personal stories because it is produced from new connected and interchangeable communities, which are no longer thought of as isolated or exceptional," has written the Cuban historian Rafael Rojas.
“It seems to be a literature that seeks to place behind its temporality basic concepts of the cultural and political life of the last section of the Cuban twentieth century such as
revolution
,
socialism
or
transition
.
It is another country that narrates this literature because the country that produces it is another ”.
From left to right and top to bottom, Cuban writers Carlos Manuel Álvarez, Eudris Planche Savón, Dainerys Machado Vento, Yenys Laura Prieto Velasco, Osdany Morales and Jamila Medina.
This year the British magazine
Granta
promoted three of these promising young people on its list of the 25 best Latin American authors under 35 years of age and who illustrate this transformation well: Carlos Manuel Álvarez (Matanzas, 1989), Dainerys Machado Vento (Havana, 1986 ), and Eudris Planche Savón (Guantánamo, 1985). "They have me blocked on Instagram," says the protagonist of a story written by Machado, in which a woman narrates conversations with the Cuban diaspora in Miami using
hashtags
(# elcomunistamásgrandedeMiami when talking about a Democrat in Florida).
A digital prose that echoes the writer Osdany Morales (Nueva Paz, 1981) in
The past is a lonely town
, where each poem was titled with the questions that make logarithms to recover an
password
.
'What was the license plate number of your father's car?' Is titled one.
"I think what exasperated my father was that I assigned to each of the pieces of his world another meaning," responds the end of the poem, with his own family fracture.
Carlos Manuel Álvarez, also the son of the internet and director of the Cuban literary magazine
El Estornudo,
published this year a book on exile,
Falsa guerra,
with a very different angle from what a writer like Zoé Valdés would have done decades before: less nostalgic and with a more global than patriotic vision. “Today is not the same as in the sixties or in the seventies. You come out of real socialism and you no longer fall into the structured world of the Cold War, but into the neoliberal world, ”he recently told El PAÍS. “There are many people of my generation who are no longer paying these tolls or these sentimental debts to concepts such as homeland, country or home. You do not establish a membership with the place you come from. My generation has been working since they were 15 years old to leave Cuba ”. Poets such as Jamila Medina (Holguín, 1981), Yenys Laura Prieto Velasco (Sancti Spiritus, 1989) or Yanelys Encinosa Cabrera (Bejucal,1983) also bring fresh new perspectives to the processes that their island is going through with respect to other cities, lowering themselves from the Cuban exceptionality. "Any island can be a universe" and "any universe can be an island," Encinosa Cabrera writes in
Some definition many times repeated.
Disenchantment with the revolution had already become a protagonist with writers born in the seventies, with writers such as Ena Lucía Portela
(One Hundred Bottles)
or Wendy Guerra
(Everyone goes).
"Being born in Cuba has been to mimic myself in that absence of the world to which we submit," says the protagonist of Guerra en
Todos se van.
“I have not learned to use a credit card, the tellers do not answer me.
A change of plane from country to country can throw me out of control, dislocate me, take my breath away.
Outside I feel in danger, inside I feel comfortably imprisoned. "
A protagonist still far from the digital world.
"It is another country that narrates this literature because it is another country that produces it," says Rafael Rojas
Jorge Enrique Lage (Havana, 1979) in that sense could be considered a pioneer of what would come with those born in the eighties.
In 2012, the author published a famous dystopian novel called
Carbon 14,
in which a girl lands in a futuristic Havana after being expelled from a country called Cuba.
When someone asks her what Cuba was like, she speaks “of something like a sect, of dead idols, of prophecies.
Of signs that appear everywhere, of an artificial refuge ”.
A science fiction book trying to imagine a post-revolutionary future, more digital and bankrupt with the revolutionary prophecies of the grandparents.
A future that may not yet fully reach the island, but it does reach the imagination of any broadband reader and writer.
Recommended reading
'The tribe. Portraits of Cuba '. Carlos Manuel Álvarez.
'Exchange sisters'. Eudris Planche Savón.
'The ninety Habanas'. Dainerys Machado Vento.
'Miami Century Fox'. Legna Rodríguez Iglesias.
'The past is a lonely town'. Osdany Morales.
'Carbon-14'. Jorge Enrique Lage.
'The everyday nothing'. Zoé Valdes.
'One hundred bottles'. Ena Lucia Portela.
'The guarded party'. Antonio José Ponte.
'Everyone leaves'. Wendy Guerra
'Olive Red. A journey in the shadow of communism '. Ronaldo Menendez.
'Tombs without rest. Revolution, Dissidence and Exile of the Cuban Intellectual '. Rafael Rojas.
'Cubantropia'. Ivan de la Nuez.
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