ELIZABETH HANLY
Cuba's Young Poets
Nearly every evening at dusk a group of young· poets gathers together to
talk and work in the living room of a small house built on a flat
rooftop in Havana. From here you ean see much of the broken filigree
of what may still be the most graceful city in the world. Havana was
made for pleasure, first as an R
&
R capital for the treasure ships of the
Spanish Empire, then later as a tropical Paris during the sugar boom
delirium at the tum of the century.
From here you can see the food lines that criss-cross the neighbor–
hood as hunger becomes real on the island and the revolution wrestles
with its claims of "socialist legality." Ordinarily at dusk everybody in
Havana reaches out for one another. These days the chatter and romance
continue. But that effervescence now verges on hysteria. There's talk of
civil war. One of the young poets on the roof turns from the scene be–
low. "If at this juncture," he observes, "we don't try to find out what it
really means to be Cuban, we're lost."
It
is another poet, who seems only a few years olr;ier than the rest,
who brought this group together. It is her white-washed cottage, which
she and her lover managed to build for themselves on that Havana
rooftop, breaking just about all of the city's housing laws, that every–
body calls home. That home has become a legend on the isle.
Perhaps not surprisingly, considering how difficult it is for American
scholars and critics to travel to Cuba, let alone get past its official cul–
ture, Reina Maria Rodriquez is hardly a well-known figure in the
United States. Those who do know her work and her rooftop, John
Beverly of the University of Pittsburgh for instance, describe her as "a key
figure in the emerging post-Soviet Cuba."
After nearly twenty-five years of a national literature so compromised
that much important Cuban writing has been done in exile - the work
of Reinaldo Arenas, for example - Reina Maria Rodriquez and the
young poets on her .rooftop may finally be turning that around. Several
of this group have won important prizes in Spain and Mexico, others
have been published in journals as prestigious as Octavio Paz's
Vuella.
And now, arguably the most authentic movement in letters seen on this
island in decades is forging the way for the first legally autonomous
cultural association since the revolution. A small publishing imprint will
be included within its mandate. Reina - nobody ever calls her anything
