ELIZABETH HANLY
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else - will have broken the state's monopoly on Cuban letters.
Not even someone born to Cuban bureaucracy could have imagined
the Kafkaesque circlings she's made over the last five years to bring this
project so far. Its brand-new standing may well be reversed as tensions
between vying political factions continue to be played out over the
group's status. An internationally recognized Cuban intellectual described
to me "a virtual terror on the part of hard-liners to allow any space for
a civil society to grow." Yet these days, considering Cuba's economy,
pragmatism is often replacing ideology.
Predictably it has been the young who have pushed the state this far.
Yet it would be rather ironic if the state were to lose its hold on Cuban
publishing to this group of young poets. It would be an eloquent
illustration of what, in less extreme circumstances, would be theorized as
art's own imperative. For curiously, the work of those gathered on
Reina's roof, even the work of those who put themselves most on the
line politically, very nearly ignores politics. This is a group described by
one member as "most taken with ideas which abolish space and time."
Theirs is a poetry after far bigger than political game. Surely that, in
addition to the idea of opened flood gates, is what hard-liners have
found intolerable.
"Cuba is breaking apart," the thirty-year-old poet and translator
Omar Perez tells me. "We're trying to find ground zero from which we
can begin again."
After decades of socialist didactic literature, ground zero now trans–
lates into work laden with symbols and obscure philosophical references.
One member of the group, Roberto Frinquiz, has nearly completed a
four-hundred-fifty-page anthology of the work of his generation. (It
does not matter that Frinquiz doesn't expect his work to be published
soon; he is prepared for posterity.) "For all the different voices,"
Frinquiz says, "this is one poetry, all of it wrestling with the idea of re–
demption."
"The best work of young poets in Cuba today isn't dissident poetry,
nor is it likely to be," says the thirty-five year- old poet and short story
writer Rolando Sanchez Mejias. He should know. Until his expulsion
from the party in the early 1990s, Mejias directed Cuba's extensive net–
work of
tal/eres
or writing workshops, a cultural network that enjoys in–
ternational recognition. Many of the island's young poets passed through
these workshops. According to Sanchez Mejias, "Fear doesn't begin to
explain the current direction of poetry among the young in Cuba."
Cultural repression certainly exists here. PEN estimates that as many
as thirty Cuban writers have been imprisoned since the revolution -
