I don’t recall when I began to distrust the Cuban government. It may have been a Saturday near the end of the 90s, during a hot month like August, when I first heard about a series of forced labor camps that existed in Cuba.
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My life seems meaningless if I don’t write every day. I write in order to express the feelings of those who want to be heard.” The father of two children, he doesn’t read what others write about him or his books. He only fears being unable to speak his mind.
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I still can’t believe it: Novelist Pedro Juan Gutierrez reading excerpts from La linea oscura (“The Dark Line”), a poetry anthology recently published by Ediciones Verbum. I wasn’t surprised by the possibility – increasingly slimmer, to be sure – of meeting him face to face. What I find hard to believe is that a mere eleven people (including one or two undercover security agents, no doubt) gathered at the Cuban Writers and Artists Association (UNEAC).
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I want to interview Cuban writer Angel Santiesteban. It’s not a new idea. I’ve wanted to for a long time, ever since reading that great short story, La Puerca (“The Pig”), set in a penitentiary-like system, which earned him the Cesar Galeano Award in 1999. I sent him a text message.
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More than one friend of mine has been taken aback by my decision to retire at 38 years old, when the logical thing to do would be to work more or less this same amount of time before retiring. Even my friend Jorge asked me if my stay in Venezuela (working in cultural promotion) for two years had filled my pockets with enough money to leave my job at Havana’s Centro Provincial del Libro and to live indefinitely off this money.
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