Cuba. The opponent’s position. (Photo Matías Arbotto)
Every year the Buenos Aires Book Fair chooses one guest city from another country to pay homage to him. In honor of the 500th anniversary of its creation, the chosen one for the current issue Havana, Cuban capital. This city has a huge stand in the Yellow Pavilion where you can find a hundred books celebrating Cuban literature, its culture and its history at a very good price.
However, at the other end of the fair, in the Blue Pavilion, there is another booth, much smaller and more modest, designed to fill a gap the official doesn’t seem willing to fill. with the motto “Home and Life” (an inversion of Fidel Castro’s mythical expression “home or death”), the organization “Democratic Culture” aims to “open a door to the immense cultural production that is being cast aside by official culture in Cuba,” according to the exhibition catalogue.
In contrast to the almost absolute majority of the trade fair participants, no books are sold in the 16 square meter stand of Patria y Vida. Luis Alberto Mariño, a Cuban exile who coordinated the exhibition, said: “First the idea arose to open a physical space, no matter how small, where all Cubans who have no territory within Cuba could come together, a place for a culture of Cuba , which measures itself more against autonomous creations than against ready-made and repeated speeches ad nauseam.
home and life. A statement on Cuba. (Photo Matias Arbotto)
With more than a hundred books banned in Cuba for a variety of reasons, such as opposition to the government or sexual diversity, this post fills a handful of absences that its official counterpart leaves out. Perhaps the most obvious is that of Reinaldo Arenas, a gay writer who, despite his international success, is still banned in Cuba today. But the Patria y Vida exhibition is not limited to internationally renowned personalities such as Arenas or Virgilio Piñera. Most of the books on display are by living writers, many under 40, who have come from exile or are still resisting in Cuba and continue to produce works heavily influenced by the Cuban experience.
“The Cubans, in order to be free, have become several islands, some inwards, quite discreetly, out of the intimate space, others outwards (exiles), on a journey without territory,” reads the exhibition catalogue. According to Mariño, its coordinator, the idea of Patria y Vida is to “generate horizontality and inclusion from the will to unite and propose more than from the will to be in opposition or dispute. We are interested in having a place where other realities of Cuba are seen and where people can see and imagine how much there is beyond what they don’t know.”
books and politics. The other Cuban stand at the book fair. (Photo Matias Arbotto)
Although Mariño knows most of the books in the catalog perfectly (he knows many of the authors personally, with some he has exchanged letters over the years, with some he has helped design and with another he admires the distance), he admits that he discovered most of these books outside of Cuba.
In the catalog you will find historical books, essays, poems, novels, catalogues, art books and hybrid books, among others. “Many can even be downloaded for free!” adds Mariño for those who cannot visit the exhibition or who cannot read as much as they would like on site.
“For the banned authors still living in Cubawho suffer from reality and resist oppression, it is a drop of water in the desert to know that their books are somewhere, that their testimonies are being read in other countries where they have a place, an audience,” says the coordinator the small post of Patria y Vida, in which another Cuba, closer to an archipelago than an island, is possible.
democratic culture. A way of talking about Cuba. (Photo Matias Arbotto)
Below, the poem “Afuera” by the Cuban writer Alessandra Molina, whose book is part of the Patria y Vida exhibition:
When the tree was said
had to be cut
his silence was filled.
a few more days
its broad and dark trunk,
so sick and so full
from this slender death,
stood further.
the leaves were shiny
on the nimbus of the shadow of their backs,
on the sharp heart
the bark,
and in the middle of the afternoon
It was the house again with the whole terrace,
the house from which he himself would stay
branches outside,
overgrown and lost branches
in the house so big at night.
when it was no more
its broad and dark trunk,
so sick and so full of this slender death
stood further.
Of stormy wind and water,
the bias and brightness meridians
they went out again
its silent branches.
CONTINUE READING:
Book Fair 2022: How and when free entry?” He turned on his computer. A corpse”: the shocking thriller presented by John Katzenbach at the 2022 Book Fair 2022