On May 11th we commemorate the 150th anniversary of the death of Ignacio Agramonte. Also that day, the painter Joel Jover refuted the veracity of the fact due to the undeniable presence of the hero through his exhibition at the Casa Natal de El Mayor. Today we speak to a writer from Camaguey who keeps the historical figure alive as the main character in his work.
CAMAGÜEY.- A single term does not always describe the person and the trade, but in Víctor Hugo Pérez Gallo (Nuevitas, 1979) we are embraced by the happiness of those who find the natural pearl in a sea of oysters without inheritance. Fantastic. He’s awesome. We have known since the summer of 2015 at the literary café La Comarca, when he read a fragment of Los demoniados de Yaguaramas, in which Camagüey was declared the capital of the country and Ignacio Agramonte did not die. He took part in the literary crusade of the Hermanos Saíz Association (AHS) in this city with an urban boom from medieval Spain.
“Ignacio Agramonte came from Navarre and Aragon. His surname is linked to the most important houses of Navarre, this is a heraldic study that Cuban historiography has yet to carry out. For me, Ignacio Agramonte is part of my fantasy: he is a demigod on the level of Achilles, ahead of his time. In Los demoniados… he’s a minor character, but I’ve had a draft novel with him as the main character for years. Agramonte’s novel has yet to be written. His character is already mythical,” he says, referring to the conference on historical novels that took place a few days ago at the Cuba Pavilion, the national headquarters of AHS in Havana.
With this text, Víctor Hugo, or Solo Víctor Hache as he is known in the literary field, won the Hidra science fiction story contest organized by Juventud Técnica magazine in 2013; later published by Casa Editora Abril. Authors like him, Yoss and Elaine Vilar Madruga are cementing the national profile of science fiction literature in Cuba.
Along with a group of young Cuban writers including Elaine Vilar Madruga.
─You invent worlds, what does that not mean to bring forth others?
─I believe that the writer is a kind of demigod, a being who creates new worlds and new life, and I invent the worlds to justify this world of mud in which we all live; I believe that writing is a lifeline that we can always use when sad everyday life surrounds us.
Literary criticism sees in Victor Hugo a reinvention of magical realism and dares to recognize in his writings the birth of Caribbean Neo-Surrealism. For Los demoniados… he consulted the archives of Camagüey, Bayamo, Havana and Madrid. His intellectual stature was a recommendation for collaboration with the book When the Light of the World Grows. Bicentenary of the Assembly of Guáimaro (1869-2019) (Ediciones El Lugareño, 2019) He contributed a different point of view to the Confluent Voices section, relating the mysteries of our nation’s origin to the rites of Eleusis, a city ancient Greece.
On his way through the Cuban capital, he met the writer Yunier Riquenes and recalled his student days at the Universidad de Oriente in Santiago de Cuba.
─In a world where the past doesn’t seem to matter, what purpose do you find in exploring and teaching the stories of writing?
─In my creative writing courses, I always tell my students that written literature is superior to audiovisual media, but that it must be well written. The very other project I’m working on is titled “Medieval History of Aragon for Ababoles”. “Ababol” is a word in Aragonese that literally means “fools”, innocent, but the catch is in the title itself: we are fools, we are innocent, who do not read, who do not know history, although today this ignorance is greater widespread from what we believe.
A stranger would single out the charismatic big guy as one of the most witty of the generation, indeed he has Cronos’ ability to follow a serpentine path with periods and characters at will; On the other hand, given the traps of looking with stereotypes, I would not suspect that he has established himself as an outstanding professor: Doctor of Sociology at the Universidad de Oriente, visiting professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela and Zaragoza and Chercheur agrégé Université de la Sorbonne . In 2015 he was awarded the prize of the Academy of Sciences in Cuba for Holguín. Although he specializes in the sociology of conflict, a field for explaining the internal workings of conflict, protest, and social movements, he recognizes writing as his true calling.
“Currently I teach creative writing at the National Distance Learning University (UNED) which, as you know, is the largest public university in Spain, both in terms of the number of students and academic offer, as well as the largest campus in Europe , and has been dedicated to universalizing quality higher education through an online and blended learning model for 50 years and is a leader in its sector,” he adds.
The author of La Escritura Demential (Egarbook Editorial, 2017) usually asks students where their first and last names come from. In Zaragoza he became acquainted with other languages such as Catalan, Galician and even Aragonese. He assures that they have their own literature, which in many cases is as rich as that written in Spanish.
“Now I’m involved in two projects: a historical essay on the Zaragoza figures who were in Camagüey in the 19th century, such as Ramón y Cajal; and a historical novel trilogy, Grimdark, based on the context of 12th-century Aragon. Inventor men and women of modern Aragon. This is what the trilogy is about, the first part of which, Confabulados con Dios (Edhasa, 2023), I would like to publish for myself, too, from Editorial Ácana, because I believe that my natural reader is Cuban.”
This lust for adventure and the construction of imaginable environments is based on sediment and travel experiences. A look at the social networks is enough to come across the great gallery. He spent a year in Cambodia. He was in Vietnam. He rode an elephant in Laos, where he worked as a literacy promoter. It appears alongside Parisian landmarks like the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. The photo with the Acropolis of Athens in the background illustrates the encounter with a reference point in his approach. In fact, any good fantasy knows how to put the mirror into the future and also into the past in order to understand, interpret and reconstruct the cultural present.
Pérez Gallo from Camagüey is a respected voice in European academia.
─Even if you are drawing a future Other, bring the roots to the work in a very creative way. I think about The sea in the backgroundYour book on Nuevitas…
─The region of Santa María del Puerto del Príncipe is always in my experimental and literary imagination; in particular the northern region of the region, particularly the village of San Miguel del Bagá and its estuary, where a mint operated and through which flowed the Trocha del Este, the vain attempt to stop the Mambi guerrillas in the 19th century; is the city of San Fernando de Nuevitas, a city besieged by three islands that mythologically resemble petrified calves at the entrance of the bay. An always wet villa on the Caribbean Sea. This region is constantly in my imagination.
“I’ll tell you a secret: I want to grow old on the Nuevitas coast, I want to have a wooden house overlooking the sea, with my library there, and wake up every day of my life to the smell of saltpetre and food cooked crab batter with something spices for breakfast. and accompanied by a sip of coffee; Although I’ve lived in Rome, Barcelona and Caracas, Camagüey is always on my mind and everywhere I go I find similarities to my homeland, that’s the truth. For example: Zaragoza, the current city, is very similar to Camagüey, its main street resembles Cisneros Street; As you already know, there, on Manifestación Street, lived José Martí, our Apostle. I often visit the house where he lived and it’s always a celebration for me because I think: The greatest man that politics and literature have produced in history went here. Cuba, here he studied law and here he fell in love with these narrow medieval streets, barely lit by the sun and humid due to the proximity to the great Ebro river that flows into the Mediterranean Sea. Getting lost in the main arteries of the historic center of Zaragoza is like being in the maze of streets of my Camagüey; In fact, I have an unpublished novel that takes place between Zaragoza and Camagüey and begins with the conquest of the town of Santa María del Puerto del Príncipe by the pirate Morgan.
This is one of the most epic chapters that happened in legendary Camagüey and it’s unfortunate that the new generations don’t know about it. The historical research I’ve done on this is enough for an entire novel.”
Remembering his experiences in Asian countries.
On the Seine, in Paris, when the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar (1914-1984)
In Laos he was a promoter of reading.
As for the new generations, he insists that “writing is a lifeline.”
It is Chercheur of the Université de la Sorbonne.
In Santiago de Compostela.