14 The New York Review
The Fallen
by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, translated
from the Spanish by Frank Wynne.
Graywolf, 143 pp., $16.00 (paper)
Turcos en la niebla
[The Disoriented Ones]
by Enrique Del Risco.
Madrid: Alianza, 451 pp., $29.99 (paper)
I read the books Armando gave
me, the book of stories about
Che Guevara that tells how Che
refused the gift of a bicycle for his
daughter, because bicycles belong
to the State, to the People, not to
any particular individual.
I asked Armando why, if bi-
cycles were for everyone and not
for individuals, they made bicycles
for individuals to ride? Why didn’t
they make a gigantic bicycle that
we could all get on and pedal to-
gether, millions of pedals moving
at the same time, all riding in the
same direction?
—Carlos Manuel Álvarez,
The FallenEmigrating doesn’t just offer you
the chance to find a better future—
it also allows you to choose the past
that you like the most.
—Enrique Del Risco, Turcos en la
niebla (The Disoriented Ones)Anyone who lives under the sign of
things Cuban—as a national on the is-
land, an exile in the diaspora, or (like
me) an American-born descendant of
Cubans—knows what it’s like to con-
tend with the persistent scrutiny of
one’s political views by both Cubans
and non-Cubans. On the far side of the
Florida Strait, there is an authoritarian
state from which thousands have fled
and that punishes any expression of
nonconformity; a recent article in The
New York Times noted that the Cuban
judiciary convicts nearly four thousand
people annually on the charge of “so-
cial dangerousness,” the catch-all term
used to imprison political opponents
who have not committed any crimes
but are considered a threat to the re-
gime. But the peculiarly psychologi-
cal character of Cuba’s state violence
(which is quite different from the mass
disappearances and genocidal cam-
paigns that have scarred other Latin
American countries) coupled with the
island’s celebrated subsidy of health
services and education make for a so-
cial reality that is often difficult for out-
siders to comprehend.
Cuba is a land marked by poverty but
devoid of squalor, with a state that acts
in the name of its people while strip-
ping them of their civil rights. (I’ll leave
to tenured Marxists the tired debate
over whether meager food rations and
declining medical and education ser-
vices are more important than freedom
of speech and assembly.) In my three
decades of research on Cuba, I have en-
countered many foreigners who ques-
tion whether a poor country that boasts
such an abundance of erudite people
can be truly repressive, as if wealth and
civil liberties were required for intelli-
gence to thrive. They are equally per-
plexed to find that Cuba’s citizens can
be both demonstrative and guarded,
and they often fail to realize that flam-
boyant cultural spectacle is less a sign
of freedom than a cleverly orchestrated
masking of material scarcity.
A fetishized version of the Cuban
Revolution as a triumphant counter-
point to global capitalism—the state’s
most powerful intangible commod-
ity—continues to cast its spell on out-
siders, while few Cubans would risk
ascribing this attraction to political
naiveté. The fixation of many around
the world on Fidel Castro as a third-
world hero, their morbid fascination
with once-splendid Havana’s current
state of ruin, the stubborn desire of
some intellectuals to hold onto their vi-
sions of a tropical socialist utopia, the
lurid attraction of sex tourism, and the
tantalizing promise of a new territory
for speculators all tend to make serious
conversation about Cuban culture and
experience challenging, to say the least.
Even the more knowledgeable for-
eigners who engage regularly with
Cuba—as arts professionals, philan-
thropists, professors, and journal-
ists—like our opinions to be measured
and our cultural expressions to be ex-
otic. Meanwhile, hardline Republicans
seeking to nail down electoral votes
in Florida court well-heeled Cuban-
exile politicians and businessmen, and
distance themselves from the fact that
some of the bomb-wielding extremists
of yore were trained and financed by the
CIA. Wily street hustlers from Cuba,
octogenarian musical virtuosos, part-
time sex workers with college degrees,
hipster artists peddling arcane political
metaphors, and cultural orphans long-
ing for a lost paradise—these have all
done well as cultural exports, but their
success suggests that Cubans must pro-
duce otherness in order to be seen on
the world stage.
The Cuban milieu offers no respite
from this prison-house of identity: therevolutionary state’s notorious capac-
ity to exact demonstrations of loyalty is
often mirrored by exile pundits in the
US who demand that any Cuban who
sets foot on American soil publicly re-
ject the Cuban government in exchange
for social acceptability.^1 Nowadays
they resort to social media shaming of
those suspected of kowtowing to the
Castros, but during my childhood, émi-
grés who favored rapprochement were
targeted for assassination.^2 Even in
the 1980s, when I first published jour-
nalistic reports about Cuban cultural
events, my mother received menacing
phone calls from exiles purporting to
be linked to Alpha 66,^3 telling her that
I should spend some time in Cuban
jails to get a better handle on reality,
while I amassed hate mail from die-
hard Cuba supporters claiming that my
criticisms of the system would imperil
the revolution.In the past twenty years the makeup
of Cuban society and the ways Cubans
reflect on it have changed greatly. The
historic generation of those who made
the revolution and those who foughtagainst it is dying out. Their combat-
ive and isolationist worldview is ut-
terly foreign to most Cubans raised in
the post-Soviet era, as are the roman-
tic accounts of revolutionary struggles
and martyrs that once dominated of-
ficial culture. The Cuban government
continues to levy wild accusations at
its more outspoken citizens, accusing
them of having ties to the CIA if they
receive money from abroad or main-
tain relations with foreigners, but none-
theless hundreds of thousands of island
residents line up at Western Union of-
fices these days to pick up their remit-
tances from family and friends abroad,
and choose to watch pirated American
TV shows over Cuban state television.
Scores of independent artists and writ-
ers circumvent state control of culture
by launching crowdfunding campaigns
and distributing their banned works
online.
Whereas a tiny minority of the chil-
dren of exiles dared to defy their par-
ents and visit the island by joining the
militant Antonio Maceo Brigade in the
1970s,^4 a surprising number of Cuban-
Americans now turn to nonprofits that
specialize in packaging sentiment,
jetting off to “home-stays” in search
of their roots. The draconian restric-
tions on travel that islanders once en-
dured were relaxed in 2013, allowing
thousands of Cubans to spend time
abroad without emigrating, provided
they could secure visas and financing.
Meanwhile, more than 270 dissident
intellectuals and activists have been
grounded in the past year because theWorkers repairing a colonial palace in Old Havana, 2007DarioDe^ Dominicis/LUZ/Redux(^1) While many public figures in Miami
have demanded this kind of loyalty, the
best-known influencer is the musician
Alex Otaola, who has attacked Cuban
musicians he claims are loyal to the
regime. He hosts a daily program on
YouTube.
(^2) Ann Louise Bardach provides an
excellent account of these hostilities
in Cuba Confidential: Love and Ven-
geance in Miami and Havana (Random
House, 2002).
(^3) Alpha 66 is an anti-Castro paramili-
tary operation based in the southern
United States, especially Florida; it was
most active in the 1970s and 1980s.
(^4) For more information, see Cincent-
aicinco Hermanos (55 Brothers, 1978),
a documentary by Jesus Diaz about the
Antonio Maceo Brigade, a group of
militant young Cuban exiles who re-
turned to Cuba in 1977.
Love Among the Ruins
Coco Fusco