no.14 / bonus (bonus) / 08 Track Clavelito rolling Sanchez Mejia y la Cuban republic 
Rolando Sánchez Mejías (Holguin, 1959)
Clavelito and the Cuban Republic In the 1950 radio filled the space public in such a way that attracted the attention of politicians for the danger involved in this kind of "mass mobilization." Such was the case with popular Clavelito and program, shaman distance that received thousands of letters and calls from anywhere on the island, not counting the hundreds of processions to Havana to receive their advice "in person." The Cuban public-mix of "popular sentiment" and rumor induced from the media by politicians and businesspeople are divided into two: first, those who saw in such programs (not was only to Clavelito) a delay in modernizing the country, a stay in the "atavistic mental structures" of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and, on the other, a "natural way of living in everyday life, which did not have to hurt development nation en su dimensión económica y moral. Una “comisión de ética” dispuso, en 1952, que no se debía estimular a través de la radio “creencias en pugna con la civilización o cualquier otro tipo de superchería contraria a la moral o el orden social”. Hay que recordar que la radio no sólo servía para “dramatizaciones ficcionales” de este género: los políticos arengaban también desde la radio, y ya pertenece a la “mitología nacional” el disparo que se propinó en el estómago el político Chibás en plena sesión radial, como “advertencia de los males” que aquejaban a la nación y como “salvación de su propia moral conduct. "
The gestation process of modernity in Cuba during the twentieth century confronts us with two levels difficult to place in one homogenous movement, mental and public structures, on the one hand and the problems posed by the "capitalization" the country from within-rural and urban forms as "small businesses" and other primary-capitalist forms and from outside, "the definitive American influence. An example of "paradox" is the Chinese who came to Cuba during the twentieth century: many of them expelled from America, brought the bench and being a "money makers" while others, most had to join the "indiscriminate mass of whites, blacks and mulattos" who rode his laundry and tenduchas and dragging carts of fruits and meats in the streets of Havana. (It was created and the Barrio Chino in Havana. Of the 150,000 Chinese immigrants between 1847 and 1874, only 10% remained alive, according to a census conducted in 1899.)
Did you prepare the Cuban republic twentieth century totalitarianism come next? It is a question that some historians are now trying to respond and "scholars of the Cuban problem." For some, the Republic, the project did not materialize into a solid, gave way to totalitarianism, taking responsibility to the "weak and irresponsible Cuban bourgeoisie" of this "disorder." Others see the "Cuban republicanism" a process not yet mature, and in quest of evolution, which was cut short by circumstances more or less an accident of history. Even some see totalitarianism a necessary step to modernize the country in ways not just economic, but rather "spiritual, moral and political."
The Republic is a fact, and more than a fact, a process that makes sense in the story: instead of criticizing or denigrating it, maybe you wonder how, despite the harsh history of Cuba, despite the running over of violence, war, colonization and pseudo-colonization, a republic might emerge from the morass of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Republican succession of stages, unstable, yes, but which may, besides being a moral argument, extract a lesson in civility, not the absolute denial that the Republic asserts something little short of a disaster. Neither, either, put on a pedestal of successful modern, perfect, achieved national or rewarding as expeditious as such modern equipment. (Remember that the criticism made the white bourgeoisie in exile in Miami, in the republic was not part of the problem who had led the communist solution, or blamed the mulatto Batista's fault national disaster. The great Cuban ethnologist and short story writer Lydia Cabrera, went on to say, for example, that in Cuba there were cockroaches and they all wanted like brothers.)
Among the youngest, and among the oldest-rife both extremism. Both in exile and in Cuba, are both frequent and dangerous extremism, as it exaggerates not only the past but also the future. As well as exaggerate or lessen in a few years the "symbolic capital" of the period called Revolution, today it is with the Republic, and perhaps want to think the future as a possibility lessons drawn from both stages, which eventually tie into each other as the faces of the same coin, as a result of a colonial past and the confusion between utopia and destination.
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exiles: lunar images Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of an Artist as a Young ends his diary and the novel with two notes: first, his mother says "to be able learn, to live my own life and away from home ... which is the heart ", the second is only a short supplication:" Ancestor of mine, a former architect, now and forever ampárame with your help. " Stephen must go to "discover a way of life and art" in which his soul could express itself in unfettered freedom. " To Dedalus, the world has ceased to have little concrete meaning to erect a symbol of universality. When you look in the eyes of the Jesuit dean who argue about the truth of the words, Dedalus rebuke not so much the lack of divine cunning as the freezing of cunning in his lower degradation: lack of enthusiasm. And I do not know if assigning it to a simple "spiritual lethargy" or a "darkness ... charged with intellection and capable of the dark depths of God."
"Silence exile and cunning "are the only weapons that have Dedalus from now on, if you want to impose their plans of life and art. For that, you say home, homeland and religion: No Serviam. You can believe that such battles are fought only in adolescence, when guile and enthusiasm seem to come from the same passion. But in exile the battle is the hint of eternity that gives new life.
Plato called "reminiscence" to a peculiar form of immortality, it is not known, following the Platonic reasoning, if a hard life learning from the equality and difference between things, or simply a tactic to endure more beyond death: remember that always existed before "come in human form", which nullifies death. The exile, following the stealthy footsteps of Plato, it may be an elementary form of immortality. We know we have moved to "other party" our body more or less intact, and yet "something" has been forgotten on the road.
The silence, the noise and "strange arts" are tactics that the Cuban exile faces: the silence, led to serious consequences, can lead to the asylum, as happened to Guillermo Cabrera Infante circumspect in London, or suicide, as happened to Casey Calvert in Rome. The din is an interesting quality when applied sparingly, when alternating with silence, as did Virgilio Piñera in his fourteen years of exile in Argentina. In describing the boardinghouse where he lived in Buenos Aires, Virgilio lists a bunch of Peruvians, consumptive, Romanian, queers, Yugoslavs and whores that fill the place with their coughs, mattresses, crisp and discussions about the price of sugar and coffee. There is also a "Duchess" who tries to convince the father Virgilio her husband had been Viceroy of India. Meanwhile, the Cuban gives his pension breaks and dinner with the best of the intelligentsia Buenos Aires, Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo and Pepe Bianco, boxing any translation. O Gombrowicz military against the same clique, while translating Ferdydurke aloud.
Joseph Brodsky, in his essay This condition is called exile, exiled contemporary writer makes a man "a little corrupt, almost by definition, because despite better living conditions" before ", despite living in a world freer, misses the significance and lives in the restlessness of a new metaphysical condition: the struggle for recognition. If we move the observation Brosdsky the general world of exiles, we see that although a number of reasons for restlessness, does not change the intensity. Moreover, the unrest, in an exile you can not find meaning in the public sphere, is in danger of being trapped in a more metaphysical level speculate less spectacular. An exile is not only strives to be the same or different from others but also strives to be identical or different from itself, or both at once. The impression one gets exiled to "recognize" an inhabitant of ancient space reconstruction has much fantasy: their activity, from one perspective, is similar to "dream jobs" that Freud spoke. You have to split hairs, to weave the appearance not only to the past from which it emerges, without zafarla all of this.
You have to split hairs, and yet the reality is leaking everywhere, it is impossible to weigh two or more fragments of different types at once without resorting to a third party who will serve as a support. Thus, one must understand, although it may lead to ridicule, to the exiles who practice the "aesthetics" of the fetish, fill their houses with small objects and rituals of the country of origin not only persevere in nostalgia, but mainly featuring artifacts Platonic to help you build the new reality. The exile, by nature, is reminiscent, contemplative, and if he dies, such is their surprise at the event, he does not know in what sense placed on its "history personnel. "
In the story The Return, Casey Calvert has a trip from New York to Cuba on his return, the narrator changes the scenery of the New York apartment: Eastern eliminates screens to allow air to pass "and in the balconies and galleries of distant country and unlikely "replaces the abstract paintings of paintings and lithographs of his" patriotic landscape, "and instead of" sounding discs and plaintive jazz dances of the Israelites from Yemen, puts old boleros and Creole dances. Finally he comes back and is swallowed by the country's violence. At death, as in a bad reminiscence, the narrator stutters, like Casey, just remember details "Isolated and insignificant" in his life.
is curious that the five most important baroque prose not Cuba in the twentieth century, Lino Novas Calvo, Casey Calvert, Virgilio Piñera, Cabrera Infante and Reinaldo Arenas practiced exile, or combined with another embodiment of no less peculiar flight : exile inside the island. Arenas Piñera and provincial particles were hardly found in Havana, a location more or less stable: exile Havana is rich in abrupt swings between pensions, rented rooms and "Solar." Calvert was born and raised in America, and Linus was not Cuban, but Galician. The "sentimental education" of these men, and consequently the formation of his prose is marked by wandering: they are city dwellers or cosmopolitan as the city derived by fatum or carambola. But in truth, his prose, though the rhythms and urban fabric, is a prose "provincial" in the best sense of the meaning: a prose "lower" than calculated, cold or viscerally, their lack of place in the world The mark has no country or has been expelled from the country, or more precisely, the terroir. Exile Cuban intellectual
nineteenth century (Figures as Varela, Martí, Heredia and Villaverde) despite its high probability of uncertainty grips was patriotic, moral and emotional. The exile, like any exiles, it was painful, but the sense of "mission" fit the pins of identity as far as epic time allowed. Marti's prose never betrays the impatience of the exiles in muted, but rather serves, prose, to amplify, by a speaker modernist, the foundational task of "elected." Only in the second half of the twentieth century, since 1959, a portion of the Cuban exile reconciles pain and fervor. Founded Miami Cubans, they drew from the swamps, not as an act of vindication of history but to wrest back to nature in the city that has been denied. The impossibility of founding Cuba is anxiety that runs through almost naturalistic psychology Cuban: known anchored in history, but sensed that civility is dramatic, ultimately unresolved. That the Cuban talk up a storm or fall into trance is a symptom of its constitution tragicomic. There is no individual more honest than a liar and the Cuban. Lies for the same reasons that lead him to tell the truth, lie even when telling the truth, because it lacks merit. And if silent, possibly not even thinking. It is a delusional act or in potency, and if it reaches the status of exile, believes his delusion is as old as nature, and as modern as a history that never gives the reason. Unlike Lezama
and Carpentier, that consolidated solid colors from the Castilian as the lingua mater, those five outcasts of writing-Piñera, Novas, Infante, Arenas, Casey, had to "aerate" the language of their poor luggage, catching up with Havana. The din of tencenes of the buses, the bodegas, the gossip of the neighbors, the discussions in one family houses innumerable riotous, the teaching of barbering; minor transactions with merchants and travelers, the radio loudly as a keynote address, the park, the baseball stadium, or better said "ball" -, the Chinese fund and Galicia, the cabaret, the "local" port, the comatose nephew who gave the St. Vitus dance and began to mutter "in tongues," the spin "of politicians, the mockery, the bachata, the knife at the carnival ... But Havana was a quiet back no less lunatic: the bank clerk or pharmacy that believes in Navarre or English ancestry and covers her mouth with a handkerchief, not to mention, the dull, sad, sitting in a chair and hammock looking celajes; The suicide bomber who weighs his veins or stretch their necks to see if the rope gives, the siesta goofy, the film chewing candy, the neighborhood philosopher with poorly translated copy of Kant in the armpit is softly repeating things that are not understood; the widow, the abandoned, the maid, making exits through the forum of life or go to séances to find conversation or soliloquy ...
Another outcast: Guillermo Rosales, who wrote Boarding home in Miami. When Miami family receives it, rather than a project of homo economicus, which has entered the airport is an eyesore crazed, gaunt, toothless. Almost seamlessly, goes to a boarding, house and borderlines schizos reproducing somehow not so strange alliance that would be Cuba and Miami in the mind of a third delusional. There is only one character, "beautiful", and bridal beauty produces fear, because his language he gives to repeat, without persistence, as if the "prose of the world" had changed into ice, "My Heaven."
Unlike earlier, this outcast, Rosales, writes with a slight awkwardness, as if the meaning and the orality of the world is escaping. As Stephen, for Rosales things have lost meaning, but lack, the reverse of Dedalus, the ability to restore the sense of a higher abstraction either calculated or sentimental. The boarding Boobies do not speak: drool. And who can speak, as the terrible Arsenio mulatto, and the old burquesa crying expropriated properties in Cuba, act, each in its own way, at best exile who have been chosen by chance: I'll give continuity to their lives .
Up close, this may be a blunder. Seen from a distance, the image that exiles may offer no difference in the bottom and surface, which offer their fellows on earth.
