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PARTISAN REVIEW
Cuban radio and writes with skepticism of that most Latin American of
cliches - the intoxication of love - "women drunk with fear rush against
the light" - but with no skepticism of a parallel intoxication of the
spirit - "always at a well, I try to touch the water . .. I tell you this
with all the terror of a high-wire walker."
And Reina. Once she told me "Everything in Cuba is tom between
two poles. No other island may be more idealistic or more pragmatic,
more romantic or more obscene, more reverent or more blasphemous."
Likewise, no one in this group is more preoccupied with loneliness and
demons than Reina. No one is more apocalyptic. No one is more
hopeful. And in spite of herself, she's become a celebrity not only on her
island but throughout Latin America and Europe . Her poems have been
translated into six languages and published in over a dozen countries.
Much like politics, popular culture has also become suspect for many
of these young poets. Cuba is so noisy, and their own work is silent.
Cuba is full of wicked humor; much of their work is somber. Cubans are
still deeply connected to one another. Yet Rogelio Saunders claims that
"the world grows through loneliness."
"Many of us are more concerned with memory than popular cul–
ture," says Sanchez Mejias. "As a people we Cubans have had little re–
spect for memory - or history.
It
seems we might have something to
gain
fro~
developing that, no?" The language the young poets are after
"rarely existed in Cuba , even before the revolution." Sanchez Mejias is
referring to a "thinking language" in which poetry meets philosophy, es–
pecially metaphysics, in the tradition of Eliot, Pound, Borges, Paz,
Cortazar, and of course, Lezama Lima. As Lezama once put it, referring
to a character in his
Paradiso,
"He knows that a day has been assigned to
him in which he will be transfixed, and he will not see the fish inside the
current but the fish in the starry basket of eternity."
More than others, Antonio Ponte, a hydraulic engineer turned
screenwriter, respects the island's popular culture, particularly its Afro–
Cuban faith, and incorporates its contradictions in his work. He raises
unease to an art, stripping Cuban spirituality to the bone. His work is so
quiet than one can begin to hear the real dynamics, usually just out of
reach.
For Ponte, the divine is at hand on the island. He sees Cubans as
driven by energies, gods who can appear quite capricious, certainly be–
yond human comprehension. "Poor humankind," he writes, "trying to
remain clean of mud, dry of rains." He believes that "the real tragedy of
Cuba isn't so much politics or under-development. Rather, it's impossi–
ble to live with the gods so close. Cuba suffers from an over-abundance
