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nearly all of them for political activities.
Castro's regime usually saved its punch for its real or imagined polit–
ical and terrorist foes. The ideological deviation of writers was most of–
ten answered with the loss of employment and restrictions pertaining to
travel and access to cultural networks, and most of Cuba's young poets
are already plenty marginalized.
"When politics have come too close for too long," Sanchez Mejias
says: "when they have encroached on the most intimate details of daily
life, and even on the body itself, small wonder we have this writing
which tries to shake itself free of politics."
Nearly every member of this new literary generation regards Jose
Lezama Lima as a spiritual father. One of Latin America's literary giants,
Lezama was Cuba's most enigmatic writer, the island's James Joyce. He
died in 1976, scorned by the revolution for his political apathy as well as
his homosexuality. He is an apt model for the poets of this generation
who are searching for what Lezama, in his monumental novel
Paradiso,
called "the thickening of the ectoplasm, the bone that will endure for
the Resurrection."
According to Antonio Ponte, "The task this generation has set for
itself is to try to pin down an island born out of so much imagination
that imagination can no longer describe, let alone contain it. That is our
dilemma," he says, "and perhaps, Cuba's tragedy."
Reina Mana Rodriquez never intended to become the center of any
group, much less the focus of the current watershed political decision.
While other writers of her generation were filling cultural posts in
leading institutions in Havana, Reina let officialdom go its way. She
wanted time to write. Supporting herself with some radio and television
work, she made that time. Reina set out to catch "the language of the
intimate," those small moments which she felt were already being lost to
ideology by the early 1970s.
It
would take Cuban culture nearly a decade to conclude the debate
on the worthiness of "the language of the intimate" fueled by her po–
etry. By then, Reina had left behind what Sanchez Mejias has described
as her "lyrical, highly accessible verse." In his opinion, "She's been one of
the very few of her generation able in her work to let go of the fiction
of Cuba's brave new world and flesh out her own symbols. The strength
to do so," he believes, "came from her association with the young."
One by one, the most committed and driven of the young began to
congregate on Reina's rooftop. Artists and writers shower here, when
there is no water at home. They study and write here when there is no
electricity at home. When writers like Omar Perez aren't able to read
