16 The New York Review
(^5) They are taking advantage of the
Trump administration’s activation of
a provision in a 1996 law that permits
them to sue the Cuban government.
(^6) The Fallen was published in the UK
by Fitzcarraldo last September; the US
edition, published by Graywolf, will be
released in June.
(^7) The title translates literally as “Turks
in the Fog,” but it is a variation on an
Argentine expression, “como turco
en la neblina,” meaning a disoriented
person.
(^8) El compañero que me atiende (The
Comrade Who Attends to Me) (Edito-
rial Hypermedia, 2017).
government has decided their public
statements about living conditions and
human rights violations in Cuba consti-
tute a threat to national security.
Cuban diaspora communities are
now dispersed across Europe, Canada,
and Latin America as well as numerous
cities i n the US that have ac cepted ref u-
gees since the 1980s—and more move-
ment to and from the island has made
those communities more porous. More
than 57,000 Cubans from the diaspora
have requested repatriation since 2013,
something that was unthinkable in my
youth. Not surprisingly, this increase
in mobility has generated suspicion
among exiles that some Cubans may
be requesting asylum in the US based
on false claims of persecution, in order
to gain access to American benefits—
like Social Security—that they then
spend during extended stays back on
the island; many exiles also resent that
island- based academics and entertain-
ers representing Cuban state interests
may enter the US freely. But diaspora
communities have become less politi-
cally and socially homogeneous than
they once were. The majority of Cu-
bans in the US emigrated since the
1990s, and they don’t look, think, or act
like the first-wave exiles of the 1960s
(many of whom are now trying to sue
the Cuban government over their fami-
lies’ confiscated properties).^5 While
they do not all express their political
will by voting in US elections, many do
make a political choice, returning to
the island (and sending billions of dol-
lars annually in remittances and invest-
ing in small businesses) despite their
dislike of the Cuban government.
Perhaps most important culturally is
the way new technologies have trans-
formed how Cubans communicate with
one another. Once upon a time, I had
to wait for an operator to place a call
for me in the middle of the night in
order to exchange a few guarded words
with friends in Cuba who sounded
like they were on the moon. Dissident
writers scrambled for ways to smuggle
their manuscripts out of the country.
Now, Cubans around the world chat on
Facebook, publish literature and jour-
nalism online that is highly critical of
the regime, exchange videos on You-
Tube, and form discussion groups on
WhatsApp. The island’s government
restricts access to the Internet and sur-
veys usage, but the growing presence of
smartphones and expanding Wi-Fi cov-
erage have completely changed the way
Cubans consume information.
Digital technology has also enabled
them—albeit illegally—to produce
alternative news programs, to tweet
aggressively at politicians, and to par-
ticipate in community-based activism.
None of this pleases Cuban authorities,
but the millions of dollars that the state
reaps from its telecommunications
monopoly, ETECSA, would vanish if
those services were withdrawn. Cuban
laws regarding enemy propaganda have
not yet fully evolved to address the
existence of online media. The state
boasts a cadre of pro-government blog-
gers and trolls, but their efforts are
easily detected and rhetorically weak.
Vice-Minister of Culture Fernando
Rojas, widely reviled for spearhead-
ing efforts to limit artistic expression,
recently made himself look foolish on
Twitter by challenging his critics to
fistfights.
Measures taken by the Trump ad-
ministration to intensify the economic
embargo against Cuba and limit travel
to the island may have put a damper
on the hopes of many for normalized
relations between our two countries—
and given hard-liners in the Cuban
government the perfect rationale for
stepping up their persecution of non-
conformists—but younger generations
of Cubans refuse to curb their boldness
on social media or in print. Two nov-
els published in the past year, Carlos
Manuel Álvarez’s The Fallen^6 and En-
rique Del Risco’s Turcos en la niebla^7
(The Disoriented Ones), exemplify
this resolve. The Fallen is translated
into English with great precision by
Frank Wynne. Del Risco’s novel has
not yet been translated, but it should
be, if for no other reason than to en-
courage Cuba-philes who don’t speak
Spanish to stop fantasizing about Che
Guevara and Fidel and pay attention
to how American and Cuban politics
shape Cubans’ lives. These writers are
not just critical of their elders and the
world they created; they are also quite
ironic about the sanctimonious atti-
tudes of the Cuban government’s oppo-
nents and the bewildering complacency
of their compatriots.
Although they both convey the sense
that the revolution failed, they don’t
dwell on the causes of its implosion or
on blaming its leadership, but rather
on the travails and self-delusions of
ordinary Cubans. Álvarez refers to
his characters as casualties of a battle,
whereas Del Risco’s are befuddled
outsiders. Both writers suggest that
after six decades of upheaval, abjection
defines Cuban existence more than
resistance to adversity. As one of Álva-
rez’s characters puts it, “I also realized
that there was nothing better than not
knowing, than not naming, not speak-
ing, not explaining, not being able to.
I slept peacefully at night, sheltered by
the sickness.”
The authors concentrate on different
groups—Álvarez on island residents
and Del Risco on émigrés. They also
hail from different postrevolutionary
generations. Álvarez just turned thirty-
one, and he shuttles back and forth
between Havana and Mexico City. In
2016 he cofounded a startlingly tren-
chant online magazine of new journal-
ism about Cuba called El Estornudo
(The Sneeze). He also wrote an award-
winning book of short stories and a
collection of essays before finishing
The Fallen, and has been named one of
Latin America’s most promising young
writers by the Guadalajara Book Fair
and Colombia’s Bogotá39.
Del Risco emigrated to Spain in 1995
at the age of twenty-eight. In 1997 he
relocated to West New York, New Jer-
sey, also known as Havana on the Hud-
son for its large community of émigrés,
and now teaches Spanish at NYU and
maintains a vibrant presence on social
media as a witty blogger about Cuban
affairs. He is a political humorist who
has published a short story collection,
two volumes of satirical essays, and a
memoir about his years in Spain, in
addition to having edited an impres-
sive compendium of texts by Cubans
about their unsavory exchanges with
state security agents.^8 He was awarded
the 2019 Fernando Quiñones Unicaja
Prize for Turcos en la niebla in Spain,
a notable achievement for a novel set in
an immigrant community outside the
Iberian sphere.
Intriguingly, the two novels mirror
each other in their structure, both being
divided into four interior monologues.
In both books, the characters’ stories
occasionally intertwine to create some-
thing of a Rashomon effect, as new
details about events emerge from dif-
ferent perspectives. But the books dif-
fer greatly in tone and scale. Álvarez’s
The Fallen is a relatively short novel
whose story spans a brief period in the
life of a small family in a small town
near a sprawling tourist complex: an
impertinent teenage son who is about
to finish his military service; a dull-
ard of a father who clings to his faith
in the revolution and is on the verge of
losing his job; a resigned mother who
was once a dedicated teacher and now
suffers from epileptic seizures brought
on by chemotherapy; and a pragmatic
daughter who supports the family
by stealing from the hotel where she
works. Their memories are rooted in
the Special Period of the 1990s, when
Soviet subsidies disappeared, the is-
land’s economy tanked, and the revolu-
tion lost its ideological direction.
Although Álvarez’s characters deal
with their poverty without wallowing
in sorrow, he doesn’t attempt to ro-
manticize them by suggesting that their
hardships dignify them. When the son
complains that he was deprived of toys
and a TV as a child, for example, he
wonders why his mother didn’t just di-
vorce his father for being such a lousy
provider. When the father denies to his
superiors that his daughter is part of a
ring of thieves at the very hotel that he
manages, it is because he is blinded by
his idealism about the revolution, not
because he wants to shield her from
punishment. Álvarez’s prose is terse,
which is uncharacteristic of Cuban fic-
tion, and often bleak. He casts a rather
cold eye on the parents’ decline and the
children’s moral failings. The mother
describes her husband, for example,
as being “so slow that his every action
already contains within it its own rep-
etition.” And in a blistering dissection
of the revolution’s practice of award-
ing coveted commodities on the basis
of exemplary conduct, the daughter
recounts how the prospect of owning
a television causes neighbors to at-
tack one another and invent histories
of hardship in order to seem more
deserving.
Del Risco’s Turcos en la niebla, on the
other hand, is a satirical epic that runs
James Turrell
Gard, 1989–
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