life in cuba, as a writer

[Ken Gargett]

i found this a really interesting piece. hope others also enjoy it.

Tarzan in the 21st century: the trials of being a writer in Cuba

By Can Xue for The Writing Life Around the World from Electric Literature, part of the Guardian Books Network

Street in Havana, Cuba. Photograph: Micha Krakowiak/Getty Images

Yoss in Havana

Thursday 26 November 2015

I walk on a lava desert, sweat runs down my forehead, my shoulders, my back, beneath my feet the blanket burns with boiling flames.

Eh … the blanket?

I suddenly come out of my dream in a bad mood and stretch. Did they cut the power again?! I look sideways at my alarm clock on the night desk. Holy ****, and it’s only eight in the morning? This is terrible. So much for my plans of sleeping late: without the fan at maximum speed, no one can stand more than ten minutes of this barbecue, even I, who live on the third floor of a building without any other buildings surrounding it, which means I get the breeze … when there is one.

The Cuban summer is no game … and they say that this is the hottest one since 1880. And then they say that global warming is a fallacy. The worst part is that when they cut the power so early, it usually lasts until five in the afternoon, at the very least. We are not even in August and it already looks like the feature-length blackouts will be coming back. Will it be like the summer of ‘93, the worst in the Special Period, with eight hours of light for every eight hours without it … or will it be even worse?

We will cross that bridge when we come to it. In this country one can never know what will happen, so it is best not to make many plans. Or to worry too much, because you cannot fight the inevitable. The Cuban version of Saint Augustine’s famous prayer would go something like this: “Give me strength, Oh Lord, to change what I cannot change, to endure what I cannot change … but, above all, give me wisdom to know how to make out the difference.”

* * *

In this country one can never know what will happen, so it is best not to make many plans

Anyway, sleep is over for the time being. Resigned, I spring up with an enthusiasm suited for a day that will get better than its start. I put on some shorts and stomp downstairs to wash my face, shave, and have breakfast. We Cubans have learned in the flesh: one must cooperate with the inevitable and make a virtue out of necessity. At least I will go to the gym early and have more time later to check my emails and write something. As usual, with three or four projects at a time, I am a bit behind on all of them. To begin with, I was supposed to have finished the book A Hundred Questions About Weapons about a month ago, and I still have two questions about airplanes and ten about rockets. As long as there is electricity in my mother’s house…

Murphy’s Law: When my face is all wet, I hear the bugle of a cavalry charge – my phone. It is Vladimir, the carpenter, letting me know that he is leaving his house in Alamar to come install the window we are missing. Almost with tears in my eyes I tell him that we don’t have any power, so it will have to be another day, sorry. And we both take a dump on the Electric Company.

As I brush my teeth, I glance sideways at the cedar window on the entrance, with tinted glass, already placed and cemented. The other one is barely fastened by wedges. They are pretty, resistant … and above all hermetic. When they are finished, we will be able to finally stop worrying about downpours flooding the living room. It is true that six hundred convertible pesos for both is quite the price. But the workers have no mercy. Masons, carpenters, and plumbers all think that because one is a writer and sometimes shows up on TV or on the paper, then one carries gold around, or has an account in a Swiss bank. But you have to realize that you must bust your ass in order to make a peso writing…

Ever since we moved here a year ago, we have considered buying a landline at the street price – between six hundred and eight hundred convertible pesos – but there is so much to buy and do in a new house! Starting with the windows and ending with the windows … So for the moment we are postponing it in place of more pressing needs. After all, my mother lives a mere 120 meters away, across San Lázaro Street, and having to go there to check my email in my old room is the perfect excuse (if there were any lacking) of paying my old lady a daily visit and having lunch there, even though she is not as good at cooking as she thinks…

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Two women speak from their balconies in an old building in Old Havana. Photograph: Ramon Espinosa/AP

The worst part is that every time someone wants to locate me urgently and calls my house, my holy progenitor gives away my cellphone number without a second thought, and calls from a landline are always paid for by the cellphone that answers them … despite how expensive minutes are right now! I hope that these prices normalize with the end of the Yankee embargo.

This is why, whenever I see on my Blackberry screen (it’s an authentic Nokia, from the Ecuadorian Movistar company, a gift from a friend living near Guayaquil, which is already obsolete, but I keep it because its keyboard has all the letters, even the ñ! I always end up writing something I don’t mean with the newer phones and their hypersensitive tactile screens) an unknown number beginning with a seven – that is, a landline from Havana – I fill myself up with Oriental patience so that I answer without growling at the inconsiderate person willing to waste my minutes so carelessly and so early in the morning.

How little is needed to make a Cuban writer’s day, regardless of how twistedly it begins!

How lucky I am to be so kind; it was Lourdes de Armas, a writer and friend from the office of the Writers Association, in the UNEAC, calling to confirm I was finally going to be part of the jury of the David Science Fiction Prize. Yes, of course I will. Ah, great, can I call you later then? No, why? I’m confirming it now. Do I come by to pick up the books or do they deliver them to me? No, they prefer to wait for Elaine, the third member of the jury (the second will be my lifelong friend and fantasy-writing colleague Raúl Aguiar), to be home, so that they only have to make a single trip and can save gas delivering the books. Native economizing, our daily bread.

By the way, they pay you for being part of the jury in the David. Not much, three hundred pesos. But little by little you move forward … and right now those scant twelve convertible pesos represent an entire fortune to me.

So I hang up with a great smile. How little is needed to make a Cuban writer’s day, regardless of how twistedly it begins! The David, an award for the unpublished, is still one of the most prestigious competitions for young writers. Created in 1967 in honor of the anti-Batista fighter Frank País (David was his underground alias), it has had a science fiction division since 1979. Its first winner was Daína Chaviano, and the second was Agustín de Rojas. Two illustrious reference points for the sci-fi genre in Cuba, if there are any. From ‘79 to ‘84 the award was given annually, then it was downgraded to a biennial prize. I myself won it in ‘88, sharing it with María Felicia Vera and her amazing book of short stories El mago del futuro [The wizard of the future], with my collection Timshel, which I consider the true start of my writing career. Unfortunately, since Gina Picart won the prize in 1990 with another story collection, La poza del ángel [The angel’s pond], “our” David had been inactive for 25 years, with the usual excuses: lack of money for awards and publishing, lack of public interest, lack, lack, lack … the word Cubans have heard the most for the past half a century.

Of course, everyone always lays all the blame for that “lack” on the Yankee imperialist embargo. And Amen.

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People buy books from local street vendors in Havana. Photograph: Jorge Rey/Getty Images

One of the first measures that the new UNEAC directive undertook, with the magnificent black writer Alberto Guerra Naranjo as vice president and my brother Raúl as adjunct, was to establish the David for science fiction. They asked me to make the submission guidelines, and I used the opportunity to expand the competition to include heroic fantasy and horror also. In this manner, even though a last-minute mistake made only novels eligible for the prize, many friends have sent their manuscripts for review. There are eight texts in the competition, and this is only because many young luminaries of the fantasy genre – like Eric Flores, Erick Mota, and even Elaine Vilar – have already published books and therefore cannot enter.

I don’t see an opportunity to tell those interested in the competition that the matter still stands; many feared that something would go wrong at the last minute, as happened in 2013 with the planned and very much awaited Anticiparte, an annual fantasy publication of Cuban letters that died before it began, despite all my and Rinaldo Acosta’s efforts. Still, Fabricio has told me they are now assembling a sort of anthology of short stories and essays, with top-notch writers like China Miéville, Mike Resnick, Connie Willis, James Patrick Kelly … and yours truly. What an honor, to appear among such illustrious company!

* * *

I have for breakfast my regular pot of yogurt and a plate of mortadella with melted queso blanco [creamy white cheese]. Most Cubans, like my girlfriend, don’t have breakfast and barely drink a strong coffee, but I do need a good load of proteins to start my day. After all, I’ll be in the gym in a few minutes. For now, I’m comfortably watching another episode of 12 Monkeys on Dania’s computer, which we – Dania’s son and I – use above all.

This series is really good; with more time than Terry Gilliam in the great ‘95 movie starring Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis, the producers can
revel in the events of the post-apocalyptic future. While not very popular, I don’t think, among those who receive the weekly package (the cheap local Cuban alternative to downloading the series for free online), there is something that still remains a dream for most of the island’s citizens: in addition to phenomena like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead and the semi-infantile superhero series like Smallville, The Flash, and Daredevil, most of the public still prefers to follow endless and lachrymose Brazilian or Colombian soap operas, shows like Belleza Latina [Latin Beauty] or dancing to provocative and semi-pornographic reggaeton music videos.

Most Cuban writers have another stable job, as editors, popularizers, teachers of writing techniques

Anything for the sake of not relying on the five channels of our national television, even though they also run the same series some time afterwards … and pirated as well. If the embargo comes to an end, our TV programming will get drastically mutilated. Does Obama know this and want to screw us anyway, as many suspect? Bah, it would be too Machiavellian on his part, I think.

Before leaving home, and just in case we get an unexpected summer downpour, I close all the windows and the two gates (the thieves are on the prowl these days), and I pick up the big five-liter bottle to fill up at my mother’s house. Alain, Dania’s ten-year-old son, has been having endless diarrhea for months, and even though we haven’t given him the troublesome biliary drainage to make sure, everything points to it being giardiasis. Giradia lambia, flagellated microorganisms, bothersome little animals that I reckon half the Cuban population has in their intestinal flora but has learned to live with. Seeing that Metronidazol, the super strong medicine that eradicates them, is scarce throughout the country and that in foreign exchange pharmacies the only substitute, Plantacel, costs pots of money, Dania has decided that Alain will not drink the water overflowing with calcareous sediments and other intrigues that come out of our plastic tanks in the heat, and before putting in the work of boiling the water she makes me bring, every other day, five liters of the much cleaner water from the cistern in my mother’s house.

If a woman asks you to do something for her son, you do it … or an argument with the woman is in sight. In all honesty, though, Alain and I get along very well. It makes me happy that he says that I am not his stepfather, but his friend. And carrying five liters of H₂O is no great effort for me, even if I have to carry them up three flights of stairs … but I don’t have a lot of faith that this will solve much.

I arrive in the author-of-my-life’s house around nine; she is still asleep, as usual. A former actress and dentist, owner of a proverbial amount of energy and good humor despite her seventy-eight years, my mother is an unrepentant night-owl who usually falls asleep sitting in the living room in front of the most improbable TV shows only to go to her bed at dawn. I don’t worry about being quiet; it would take a cannon to break her out of her doze.

I throw the big empty bottle on her patio, next to my old dumbbells, discs, and barbells with their native weights, plus other gym items, which now serve mostly as metal supports for maternal flowerpots. I go to the fridge for a drink of cold water, because at Dania’s house, the only thing that works properly in the Chinese Haier fridge is the freezer. Held under a New York souvenir magnet I find a note written in the nearly cryptic maternal calligraphy: “Dentists are also doctors, after all.”

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People are silhouetted as they walk along a street in Havana. Photograph: Enrique de la Osa/REUTERS

My mother is a pretty good secretary. Two messages for me: one from Carmita, at Gente Nueva, who called yesterday so that I could come today and sign some contracts … and another from Ediciones Cubanas de Artex, that I call them immediately.

I get a hold of the wireless phone in my room. I brought it last November from my first – and so far only – trip to the U.S. They have denied me the visa many times and even the ESTA to enter with my Spanish passport. This happened near the end of May for the annual LASA congress, which had approved a paper of mine on the post-Soviet fictional space in present-day Cuban fantasy writing. Clearly. Someone in the Department of State still considers me a possible immigrant and an alleged terrorist.

According to my hyper-optimist mother, the US deny me a visa once and give it to me the next time, so my next one is due

And what can you do? Put up with it and screw yourself. We’ll see if I get the visa this October, because I have an invitation for a panel at Brown University, in Providence … which is, apart from the capital of Rhode Island (one of the smallest Yankee states), also the cradle and setting of many stories by my beloved HP Lovecraft. According to my hyper-optimist mother, they deny me a visa once and give it to me the next time, so now my next one is due. Let’s hope that her words are sacred and that the U.S. Department of State finally understands.

* * *

As I dial Artex’s number, I hope with all my strength that it concerns picking up and cashing a check. I barely have five convertible pesos and fifty Cuban pesos … and the best part is that I don’t know until when.

At least Dania, secretary of the Belarusian embassy in Havana, has a good salary, a sure income at the end of each month. Carpenters are expensive, and I haven’t been doing anything but writing for the past twenty years. Or, as my mother has said half-seriously and half-jokingly, I live off fictions. Literally and literarily.

Most Cuban writers have another stable job, as editors, popularizers, teachers of writing techniques, or something of the sort. And they do well, even if that job steals away their writing time; this is because a few hundred pesos each month, even if they are not much, do help out.

But my life as a total freelancer, although without schedules or bosses—that is, with lots and lots of writing—looks like the trailer for the upcoming Tarzan film. While the Lord of the Apes swings from one liana to the next on top of lions, leopards, and crocodiles that jump trying to bite him, always without success, I go from one royalty check to a payment for being part of a jury, and from a check for an article in a foreign magazine to a national or international award. However, oftentimes the fangs of the beast of poverty scratch my heels… and even higher upwards.

The only Cuban author who comes to mind who is truly well off thanks to what he writes and publishes is Leonardo Padura

Of course, if one wants to get rich as an artist, becoming a writer is not the best option. I don’t know about other countries, but in Cuba it could mean becoming a reggaeton singer or a painter. Like Micha or Kcho. The only Cuban author who comes to mind who is truly well off and relieved thanks to what he writes and publishes is Leonardo Padura, who even bought a car with his awards and royalties. He is a model for everyone, the author from the Mantilla neighborhood and creator of Mario Conde, the sentimental cop with literary pretensions; recently he was awarded the Princess of Asturias Prize in Spain and a couple of years ago the National Literature Award … He is already a sacred cow, and he hasn’t even turned sixty, so the rest of us still have hope…

According to my friend Raúl Aguiar, born in ’62, he will not be a candidate until 2035, when he is seventy-three. And I not until 2038, at sixty-nine years. If we don’t die first, that is.

True, there is another tiny group of Cuban writers who more or less live off their pen, or their keyboard. Like Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, author of El rey de La Habana [The King of Havana] and Trilogía sucia de La Habana [The Dirty Havana Trilogy]. And me too … without going that far, I’m not doing that bad lately. Besides a percentage of the new windows and shelves in Dania’s place, the flat-screen TV and the superb dresser I bought my mother a couple of years ago are proof that, even though there might be some months in between, from time to time I get some euros or dollars. Or rubles, or yen, or pounds, or Mexican pesos … We accept anything, because we cannot afford to pick and choose.

* * *

Ah, I was right; the thing from Ediciones Cubanas, the section in Artex dedicated to printing books by national authors in order to sell them in convertible pesos, concerns a check … for twenty-nine convertible pesos. And the irony is that I must go sign it today so that, some time later in the summer (surely not very soon), they call me to pick it up … in Miramar, that is, at the other end of the city.

Well, in Cuba half the writer’s job, above all if one doesn’t have an agent (and few have one), consists of this running from place to place. Hell with everything, because today will a check-hunting day. I organize myself mentally, considering all the details, almost like the Allies for the famous D-Day in World War II. And this is because in Cuba, for those who do not have their own car … that is, most of the population, myself included (and thank God, because the fuel, the mechanics, and the repair parts cost more than whatever benefit a car could bring), going anywhere beyond the distance of a non-suicidal pedestrian—because only a kamikaze would walk more than two kilometers under the summer sun—can become a logistical operation as complicated as that Allied landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944.

Therefore, I decide that after leaving the gym I will pick up an almendrón [one of the old American cars that charge ten pesos for a flat rate] to Miramar. Sign there, pick up another almendrón to Gente Nueva, sign again, and from there to my mother’s house, running just in time to shower, have lunch, check my email, and leave – hopefully walking now! – for the Dulce María Loynaz Center for Literary Promotion, in Vedado, where a sort of collective birthday party is being held for all the authors born in the year’s first semester. Abstemious and a non-smoker, I’m forty-six and still have a child’s soul. I love cake and black refreshments! From the ceremony, run to UNEAC, the Writer’s Union, which is fortunately only three blocks away, and where at five is the Peña de la Mazorca, the session of the Ariete Group. Today the theme is erotic literature, and I have been invited to read … I even wrote a short story especially for the occasion, which is not even in the fantasy genre: “Ana That Cares For Me,” about a twenty-something with mental retardation and the sensual teenager who bangs him when her mother leaves for work…

Well, the schedule is cramped, but if I don’t fall dead along the way, I think I will be able to do all of it. Or at least almost all of it. Which in Cuba is already enough.

• Translated from Spanish by Daniel Gavidia