ELIZABETH HANLY
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publicly anywhere else, they read on her "patio." If anyone locates some
extra food, they bring it here.
In her rattan rocking chair, fast-talking Reina rocks at a clip. Small,
slight, and hawk-eyed, she's given to sudden shyness. "There seem to be
short bursts of poetry in Cuba," she says. "One centered around Lezama
and his magazine
Origenes
in the forties and fifties. Something similar is
happening now."
At dusk, taciturn, round-shouldered Rogelio Saunders is often at
Reina's. Home from the war in Angola and working as a night watch–
man, he is fascinated by the postmodern style. His work is full of
Wittgenstein. "Perhaps we are not able to see God because we can't see
the light with which we see," he writes. Amelio Calderon Fornaris is
here too. Short and disheveled, the librarian and science-fiction fanatic is
too shy to say much in front of others, but his poetry is full of mad
somersaults. "In some way I need to bite a star . . . an aleph ... the
melody which accompanies cats when they think of hunting at night ...
In some way I'll need to bite myself. . . because food hasn't been
enough," he writes. Victor Fowler Calzada, a rather lordly ex-secondary
school-teacher, usually turns up. One of the most privileged of the
group, Fowler currently edits the occasional compilation of lectures
from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Havana-based Film Institute. Erotica is
what most fascinates this poet. "Bodies are only the pretext," Fowler
writes. "The real drama is the unease, anxiety trying to possess it all."
And silent Rito Ramon Aroche, another night watchman - his work is
a Zen of love.
And there's Sanchez Mejias, unemployed since the crown prince of
the cultural establishment became regarded by several important factions
as a black sheep. To support himself, Sanchez Mejias is selling flowers in
the streets of Havana. Tall and bearded, articulate as he is, the writer and
educator has a stammer, sometimes so severe that it costs him to speak.
More of the work of this group is dedicated to him even than to Reina.
"The dignity of the world," he writes, "may consist in conserving some
small bit of its ruin."
W omen are here as well. Their work tends to be less abstract and
philosophical, more immediate and closely observed. The group's
youngest member, languid twenty-four year-old Alessandra Molina works
at a municipal arts center and describes herself as a student of the Japanese
writer Yukio Mishimo, without perhaps realizing how closely her medi–
ations resemble the work of Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector. And
twenty-seven year-old Damaris Calderon Perez works occasionally with
